The US Army final month launched its first new deadly hand grenade since the Vietnam War, a plastic weapon that uses shock waves quite than shrapnel to kill enemies.
The new grenade, known as the M111, turns into the Army’s selection for city fight, when troops should clear indoor areas to take and maintain territory, as a result of there’s much less threat of collateral injury.
It’s the first new grenade launched for US forces since 1968, when the MK3A2 entered fight throughout the Vietnam War. That munition was withdrawn in the Seventies as a result of it accommodates asbestos, tiny fibers of which might develop into lodged in the lungs main to deadly ailments together with most cancers.
Its withdrawal left troopers with the present major grenade, the M67, which sends shrapnel in all instructions when it explodes, doubtlessly killing or injuring bystanders or pleasant forces when it deflects off stable objects of steel or concrete or penetrates mild partitions, for instance.
The use of shock waves, or blast overpressure (BOP), kills or disables enemies with the pressure of the explosion, vaporizing the weapon’s plastic outer shell.
Troops exterior an enclosed space can throw the new grenade into that space, and enemies can’t take cowl behind inside partitions, furnishings or home equipment that shrapnel might not be in a position pierce, the army stated.
“A grenade utilizing BOP can clear a room of enemy combatants quickly leaving nowhere to hide while ensuring the safety of friendly forces,” Col. Vince Morris, a undertaking supervisor for the program at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, stated in an Army information launch.
“When the high-pressure wave encounters someone, it violently compresses and decompresses tissue,” an Army truth sheet explains.
“The eardrums, lungs, eyes and gastrointestinal tract are most at risk of rupture and serious damage from smaller blasts.”
Larger blast waves can injury the mind and even amputate limbs, it provides.
The grenade is powered by RDX, an explosive materials used extensively by the US army for many years.
The army developed the new palm-sized, cylindrical munition after expertise in earlier Middle East wars, Morris stated in the Army assertion.
“One of the key lessons learned from the door-to-door urban fighting in Iraq was the M67 grenade wasn’t always the right tool for the job. The risk of fratricide on the other side of the wall was too high,” he stated.
The M67 fragmentation grenade isn’t going away. Troops will nonetheless carry it to be used in open terrain “to maximize lethal fragment effects,” the assertion stated. They’ll simply have the M111 to be used indoors.
The baseball-sized M67 was launched alongside the MK3A2 in 1968. It adopted the M26, launched in the early Nineteen Fifties and the iconic Mk 2 – known as the “pineapple” grenade due to its look – that was launched in World War I and used by way of World War II and past.
Meanwhile, the US Marine Corps can also be buying one other BOP grenade, the M21, from Norwegian producer Nammo, in accordance to US authorities contracting information.
The US and different militaries have the same weapon, a thermobaric grenade, also referred to as a fuel-air munition. It releases a gasoline mist into the air after which ignites it, giving off a shock wave and fireball that create a vacuum impact, sucking the oxygen out of the blast space.