Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1086092
kills or serious injuries in another 7 vehicles show the reality of the effectiveness of the hunt for Abrams tanks. Even though the manu- ally operated anti-tank weaponry was used in optimal conditions, its effectiveness wasn't high. Actually, Abrams tanks proved to be ex- ceptionally resistant, even if some of them had their armor pierced. The American M1s happened to be destroyed in sporadic cases – few- er than 3% of attacks were effective, i.e. involved hits in sensitive elements of the vehicle. The numbers for the losses on the side of the Syrian army in the still ongoing conflict are quite surprising too. Despite the mass use of TOWs and the frequent videos showing SAA tanks being hit, it appeared that before the Russian intervention, only 52% of the actually hitting anti-tank guided missiles fired turned out to be "fatal" for old T-55s, T-62s, and T-72s. If we compare this data to the number of missiles fired in total, the rate will be even lower. The Russian intervention, changing the battle tactics, better trained crews, and equipping some vehicles with thermal vision cameras and Sarab1/2 jamming systems resulted in an incredible improvement of the machine's performance – the effectiveness of the fired anti-tank guided missiles dropped over two times, to the level of ~18–22%. This means that only one out of five missiles fired at a tank was able to destroy it. The attempts to fight the Israeli Merkavas Mk.4M equipped with Trophy active protection system, able to detect the incoming threats and neutralize them by firing miniature Multi EFPs gave even poorer results – even though there were over 20 such attacks (involving the use of both anti-tank guided missiles and grenade launchers), no sin- gle tank was even hit (!). www.fragoutmag.com