Mortar in the information age
The US Army awarded 5 million to a contract with Alliant Techsystems for the first stage of the development of the Army’s Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative (APMI) high-precision mortar with GPS.
Technology technology has fallen in price so that now it can be used even in ammunition. Given that the United States "sat down" in Afghanistan for a long time, a new mine will be useful.
Whatever miracles technology gives us, the most versatile weapons still, an ordinary soldier remains - “the holy gray-skinned beast,” according to General Dragomirov, and the most versatile unit is infantry, rifle. Most of the shooters' weapons can strike the enemy only along the line of sight, with direct fire, as politicians exclaim pathetically. This is how automata and sniper rifles, machine guns with grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and infantry combat vehicle guns work. But this is not very good.
No, not from a moral point of view, but from a purely technological point of view. The enemy can hide behind the barrier and get away from our fire. So, you need a weapon that can act hinged fire. Historically, such weapons were mortars. Shooting, not bad to get away from enemy fire. So, in the Russian-Japanese war, in the battle of Jinzhou, shooting was born from closed positions. Captain Gobyato hid his guns behind the relief, passing target indications to them from afar. And the same Leonid Vasilyevich Gobyato in the siege days of Port Arthur invented the mine over-caliber. It allowed the use of 47-millimeter guns available in abundance, taken from the ships of the First Squadron, for mounted fire. Born a new type of weapon - mortar.
A further stage of improving mortar falls on the First World War. The cavalier of St. George, General Gobyato, fell near Peremyshl, leading the infantry to attack. Machine-gun fire drove the army into the trenches. The need for infantry weapons mounted fire increased. And then the British engineer Wilfrid Stokes, in the civilian life of the designer of cranes from Ipswich, creates a very effective model of a portable mortar. Barrel pipe ending base plate. Two legs are supports. The barrel is smooth, loading from the barrel, like a mortar of a half thousand year old. Mina is thrown out of the expelling charge, packed in a sleeve of an 12 caliber. The same is exactly what millions and millions were made for a highly civilized hunting weapon. Prickling under the action of gravity on a drummer at the end of the barrel with the same capsule with which the grouse was shot.
Thanks to the false triangle pattern (the slab and the two supports closed, giving stability, mother wet earth), the mortar was light, allowing for fighters to be carried at the caliber in 81,4 mm. This is because the recoil transferred the recoil energy to the ground, eliminating the need for a heavy carriage and complicated retracting brakes. At first, the mine was tumbling and intended to disperse asphyxiating gases. Then she got stabilizers shifted back relative to the center of gravity. Stokes became a knight of the Order of the British Empire and, last but not least, received a pound sterling from the royal treasury for each mine ...
In this form, the mortar during the period between the world wars spread throughout the world, becoming one of the most effective types of weapons of rifle subunits and units in World War II. The Red Army used 50-mm company, 82-mm battalion and 120-millimeter regimental mortars. The latter, designed by Boris Ivanovich Shavyrin, was so good that the Wehrmacht, capturing its technological documentation in Kharkov, started up its production with its mortar - 12-centimeter Gr.W.42. Such recognition of the most advanced power of the technological era speaks volumes.
After the war with the transformation of infantry into motorized infantry, the caliber of the battalion mortar of the Soviet army became 120-millimeter. Pood mines (on the ridge they are not very much dragged down) are capable of destroying a significant part of the structures in which the enemy can hide, and, being subordinate to the battalion commander, simplify the fire interaction. (No need to mess with a battery that has a boss ...)
Mortars, of course, changed. We acquired loading from the treasury, this facilitated work with large-caliber mines, eliminating the need to lift heavy ammunition to the height of the muzzle. Received the second system of stabilization of mines on the trajectory - a rifled barrel. The rotation of the mines attached to them allows reducing the impact on the asymmetry accuracy of the hull mines: the deflecting moments caused by them act not in one direction, but accumulate, but in different ways, largely compensating. But at high elevation angles, rifled mines can tip over due to the fact that the gyroscopic effect overcomes the aerodynamic effect of the stabilizer, which then causes the tail to fly forward and somersaults, like a knocked down duck, and not ammunition ... Mortars mounted on combat vehicles, wheeled and tracked. An excellent example was the domestic 120-millimeter "Nona", relying on the states of the end of the USSR to each battalion. But all these technologies are industrial, and now it has come to informational.
Managed ammunition mortar acquired a quarter of a century ago. In Afghanistan, Soviet troops used a laser guided 240 millimeter mine, a laser-guided XNUMX mine (aimed at the bunny reflected from the target), covering a well-concealed target from the first shot.
US troops, which the inexorable imperial logic led after the British Empire and the USSR into the Afghan ravines, have a XM-mm XM-120 X-mm mine controlled by a laser beam.
But laser guidance with all its accuracy does not remove all the problems. The target must be highlighted with a laser, and the spotter is on the line of sight, which makes him vulnerable to enemy fire. Let us put this task on the drone, and the cunning "spirit" will be driven into a narrow gorge, into which no flying baby will fit. That's why it took the development of guided mines with GPS-guided. The spotter needs only once to determine the coordinates of the target and transfer them to the control of the mortar battery. Then they are introduced into the ammunition with the help of the Lightweight Handheld Mortar Ballistic Computer - a handheld mortar ballistic computer - and that hits the target. The Raytheon, General Dynamics and Alliant Techsystems (ATK) firms that took part in an exciting competition for the Pentagon's money were required to get 50% min into the circle with the diameter 5 m at a distance of 7 km
The controlled mine is obtained from the conventional X-NUMX-millimeter mine M-120 by screwing a GPS pointing device, a global positioning system receiver, an onboard computer and rudders, which work according to the Duck aerodynamic scheme, in front of the main wing, which is the stabilizer. Comparing the measured GPS coordinates with the desired trajectory of the mines, the computer generates correction signals, working out which the rudders bring the ammunition to the target. While ATK has achieved accuracy 394 m at a distance of 10 km. At this stage, it satisfied the customer, and money was given to continue the work.
The US borrowed tactics to use mortars in the mountain war from the experience of our troops in the Caucasus in the Great Patriotic War and in Afghanistan. GPS receivers are so cheap that they can be embedded in each mine, the Yankees have due to the fact that their original defense navigation system has become the global standard for which chips are massively manufactured. Dialectic spiral of conversion and reverse call for mass production for military service.
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