Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1064315
The birth of the Javelin J avelin ATGMs origins date back to the cold war era, where one of the threats was hordes of Soviet tanks – not only coming in greater numbers than those of NATO, but also – a thing much forgotten today – usually better from their Western equivalents in terms of their basic parameters. In 1978, United States come to one obvious conclu- sion – their Dragon M47 "is not effective enough". It's an understatement, to put it lightly. The anti-tank defense system was composed then of: the "heavy" TOWs at the battalion level and M47 Dragons at the com- pany level. The M47, developed in 1966 (and introduced into service in 1972), offered a range of up to 1 km, featured SACLOS guidance, and could penetrate 450 mm RHA. The time to reach the maximum range was 10 s. Such type of guidance and head were already no match for the resistance of the front of the turret and the hull of T-64A, T-64B, T-80/80B, and T-72A tanks, which meant one thing – poor performance. Indeed, already in 1977 CIA estimated that M47 would be able to destroy only 18% of the hit T-72s at most... Such a forecast was certainly far from optimistic because the other an- ti-tank weapon available at the company level (the disposable M72 LAW grenade launcher) was even less effective. The improvements made to the TOW, becoming a refined weapon since the 1980s, became a light of hope, but no effective anti-tank solutions at lower levels than battal- ion was still a fact. In 1983, the US Army defined the requirements for aAdvanced Anti-Tank Weapon System-Medium (AAWS-M). Four differ- ent solutions were taken into consideration at first. The 'base' was an extensively modified Dragon with a tandem warhead and a new guid- ance system. Ford Aerospace came up with a beam rider missile called TopKick: laser beam guided, offering overfly top attack and striking the target using two EFP charges. Hughes offered a missile guided using a thermal imager and controlled by the operator using a fiber optical solution. Texas Instruments, in turn, put forward a "shoot-and-forget", IR guided missile. In the period 1988–1989, the solution found to meet the requirements best turned out to be the last of those mentioned above. Eventually, becoming a joint project of Texas Instruments and Martin Marietta (now Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin), it was named the FGM- 148 Javelin. The initial stage of tests and development of its design took place in December 1993. 1996 marked the start of the trial operation of the Javelin, which was finally adopted by US Army in 1997. In 2006, the system was put into operation after its first major upgrade – Block I. Over 35,000 missiles were manufactured by 2013, with 26,000 of them bought by the US Army. By 2018, the Javelin has become a part of the military equipment of about 21 countries, with over 70 launchers purchased by (excluding the US): Ä Australia – 92 Ä Estonia – 120 Ä France – 76 Ä Georgia – 72 Ä Great Britain – over 140 Ä Lithuania – planned: 114 Ä Jordan – 192 Ä Norway – 100 Ä Taiwan – 380. This gives a total of ten major operators of the system. The Javelin was used in combat Iraq in 2003, and later in COIN operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been also used in Syria. According to British reports from Afghanistan, FGM-148's reliability is 94%. Paradoxically, over 95% of launched missiles were aimed at non-armored targets, with 2,100 such targets hit by 2013. Javelins are manufactured only in the USA. Only UK was granted the permission to assemble some pats locally. Americans are very strict in terms of transferring the manufacturing and know-how. On the one hand, there are clear advantages to such an approach (e.g. no Chinese copies), and on the other, this approach has resulted in some lucrative deals – with Germany and India, for instance – coming to noth- ing. Speaking of the Javelin, we need to bear in mind that it is ATGM system developed not to replace but to support TOW, and a short-range successor to the Dragon. Placing the Javelin as a platoon/company-ti- er weapon instead of the M47 already at the design stage turned to be a guarantee of having a user-friendly weapon of a reasonable size and weight. The Javelin was widely adopted by the US Army thanks to the simplicity of single-channel guidance and an affordable price at a limited www.fragoutmag.com