A 10 pound explosive buried in the ground will direct most of its energy upwards like a crude shaped charge. The underside of most armored vehicles is where the armor tends to be thin. While I don't have the specs, I'll willing to bet that even the factory produced hardened Humvees don't have much armor on the bottom, making them about as vulnerable to that type of attack at vehicles with no armor at all. A basic antitank rocket like the old M72 LAW or the newer M136 AT4 typically has a pound or so of explosives and can punch through several inches of hardened armor. The AT4 can penetrate 400 mm of rolled homogenous armor. While an IED won't be as effective a shaped charge, even a pound of explosives placed properly can cut through an inch or more of steel.
The basic Humvee wasn't intended to be an armored vehicle because, when it was designed over 20 years ago, they never thought it'd be used in conditions like we're seeing in Iraq. Adding hundreds to thousands of pounds of weight to a vehicle has an impact on other operational characteristics, like the ability to maneuver and accelerate. Those characteristics come into play when driving in narrow streets that are too small for most other armored vehicles like the Bradley. There is no free lunch. Adding armor smartly involves weighing the tradeoffs and making good engineering judgments.
The armor is much more effective against blasts from the side and small arms fire, and as the battles in Mogadishu (sp) (see "Blackhawk Down") proved, sending unarmored vehicles into a firefight isn't a good idea. We learned that lesson in 1993. Why didn't anyone do something about this vulnerability sooner?
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Basic physics
The whole thread (59 posts)
- Rumsfeld makes excuses for administration's incompetence
- Rumsfeld makes invalid excuses for administration's incompetence
- So is the armour adequate or not?
- Once again you prove your ignorance of military history
- Looking like another MSM soundbite attack.
- Meanwhile: 1,276