Bonus 155

Roberta grumbles about an ad, which prompts me to do a little digging, and I fall down the rabbit hole into Terminator-smart weapons land. The ad uses a clip of an attack on a military vehicle using some new kind of bomb. Evidently this new bomb is replacing the IED's (Improvised Explosive Device - the road side bombs being employed by the insurgents/jackasses/criminals in Iraq against US troops). I saw the ad before, but I didn't think much about it, but then I have my own hot buttons. But hearing from Roberta prompted me to find out just what this guy is talking about: all I heard was mumble. So. EFP: Explosively Formed Projectile, a nasty anti-armor munition. Poking around I found this video about a really fancy, really complicated anti-tank howitzer shell.


Your tax dollars at work. Each shell costs $40,000. I suppose if you are facing a tank, that might be considered a good deal. If you are a hardened bean counter, it's also pretty good economics. A new US Abrams tanks goes for about $4 million, a good used Russian tank can be had for a mere $100 grand.

But would it really be effective? I can see several possible problems:

• Can you hit a moving target? The Bonus 155 can scan a circular area 200 yards in diameter, (i.e. a target area of 32,000 square meters). The cannon that fires this shell has a range of 20 miles. Gunners have artillery down to a science, so I imagine they could probably put a shell within a hundred yards of their target if it wasn't moving. 20 miles is a long way, and even a bullet is going to take a couple of seconds (36 according to the video) to get there. If the tank is moving, you are going to have to predict it's new location or the shell is not going to be able to "see" it.
• Target identification. The Bonus will only fire it it identifies a target. What if it doesn't identify a target? Does it just fall to the ground and wait for the enemy to come pick it up and shoot it back at us?
• The Zulu war quartermaster problem: will they be able to deploy these shells in time to use them? I mean, they cost $40,000 a piece. I can just imagine the guy in charge of the armory being real persnickety about letting just any gunner pull a hundred shells from stock.
• The junkie stockroom clerk. Normally you need a BIG gun to shoot one of these shells, but each shell contains two mines that could be removed from the shell and triggered manually. I just see a stockroom clerk slipping these out the back door one at a time in order to get another fix.

As a bonus, I saw the camera they used to take a picture of the MOAB drop (right at the 3:33).