The M1A1 Abrams tank was built to withstand a heavy onslaught. But at the end of August, an Abrams tank on patrol in Baghdad was disabled by a mysterious projectile that has left the Army eagerly searching for an answer as to why one of its most invincible pieces of machinery was stopped by something that created only a pencil-size hole.
The incident, first reported by the Army Times newspaper in late October, is of interest on Arsenal Island because an Arsenal-based technician working in Iraq examined the tank and wrote an unclassified report detailing the incident, which confessed, frankly, that officials were mystified as to how it happened.
“The unit is very anxious to have this ‘SOMETHING’ identified. It seems clear that a penetrator of a yellow molten metal is what caused the damage, but what weapon fires such a round, and precisely what sort of round is it? The bad guys are using something unknown and the guys facing it want very much to know what it is and how they can defend themselves,” Terry Hughes said in his report, according to the Army Times.
Don Jarosz, an official in Warren, Mich., where Hughes’ command is headquartered, said Friday that the report, while unclassified, was not available. In addition, a tight lid is being kept on the command’s investigation into the incident for security reasons.
Hughes is a logistics assistance representative, a troubleshooter who works in the field connecting combat units with the commands that supply their weapons. He works for the Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, which is based in Michigan but whose logistics assistance representatives are controlled out of the tank command’s office on Arsenal Island.
The incident has not received a lot of attention in the news media, but reports have suggested the Army is keenly interested in solving the mystery. There were no serious injuries as a result of the incident.
A military analyst with the Globalsecurity.org think tank says that, as of a week ago, there still was not an answer.
Speculation has been that a specially designed rocket-propelled grenade may have been the culprit or that terrorists got their hands on a special armor-piercing round, analyst Patrick Garrett said. “There’s also been speculation this was some insanely lucky shot,” he said Friday.
It is not unheard of for one of the 67-ton Abrams to be disabled, he said. An M1 Abrams tank was destroyed and two soldiers were killed by a mine in Iraq at the end of October.
Still, it is unusual for the tanks to be felled, and the fact that it would happen with such an apparent precision-type strike is troubling. The Abrams was designed for Cold War combat.
“They were designed to deal with the Soviet juggernaut,” Garrett said. They are not supposed to be stopped by a pencil-thin projectile. “That’s what’s very confusing about it,” he added.
How long the military’s investigation will take and whether it will be something the public ever knows about is also unclear. Garrett said the Abrams tank is one of the military’s most sensitive pieces of equipment, and the Army probably will not be eager to share information about how one of them was crippled.
.50 caliber, hot load, baked-on 2nd-Generation Teflon. The yellow was a “dip” to mislead any examination.
So, if you don’t like my idea, what’s yours? 😉
IMHO – Perhaps a Directed Energy Weapon, prolly of Soviet origin. Thank Tesla.
IMHO, A hot 50 would leave a larger footprint than a pencil. Someone may be testing a new weapon.
A directed energy weapon would require some significant electrical power to energize. The closest development so far (the ancient “Brahma Weapon” disregarded for the purpose of discussion here) is probably the laser beam, the closest thing that could perform as a directed energy weapon. So far the ones that can penetrate or de-materialize objects are too large to load on a flatbed truck and need to be hooked directly to a massive power supply. Of course, who knows what some remote private lab has come up with. “Wish I’d A Invented IT, Whatever “IT” is!!!!!”
A .50 calibre, saboted down to “pencil” diameter, and loaded hot could achieve velocities that are considerably higher than the 3,900fps that i load for my long-range piece. Who knows what such a projectile, hardened, made of monel or some other dense material and coated with 2nd-gen teflon, perhaps even saboted with an outer layer of teflon that falls away leaving the lighter coating might achieve in penetration. Just a thought, in the absense of anything definitive from the field…. Of course, the hotter the round, the longer it takes to make it stabilize (“go to sleep”) so it may have come from several hundred yards.
Your comment regarding the Ruskies is not all that far out; the Reds are famous for investigating wierd edges of science, considered whacky by “legitimate” science.
We will be very interested to know if any results are available from the Abrams examination.
I agree with some of the sub posts… could be something new. Let’s face it, some of our less friendly nations might want to test some equipment out in Iraq as we pretty much decimated Sov hardware in 91.
Sure ‘Nuff… and the Israelis, all by themselves, did the same thing in ’67. One thing is for sure; every opponent on earth would like to develop a brand new weapon that could defeat our armored. Whatever it was, travelling fast enough to penetrate an Abrams with a pencil-sized hole… that SOB was really moving. if we knew how thick the armor was at that point, the angle of attack, the actual diameter of the projectile, and what it weighed, we could SWAG the velocity. Bet it’d amaze ya!
Then, on the other hand, maybe that particular piece of the armor was made out of foreign steel and it had a fatal defect.