-echo-> Да хоть 2 мм .-echo-> Вопрос то не в этом Совсем не в этом .
генерал-майор Джефф Фойгт из ТАСОМ устроит?
""The biggest Iraqi threat to U.S. armored vehicles was not Saddam Hussein's fleet of Soviet-made T-72 tanks, which failed to damage a single U.S. Abrams tank or Bradley fighting vehicle during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but rather the ubiquitous rocket-propelled grenade.
As a result, officials at the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command in Warren, Mich., are considering modifications to the Abrams to give it greater protection from RPGs in an urban fight.
"The preponderance of damage to our tanks and Bradleys was done by RPGs," said Maj. Jeff Voigt, assistant project manager for the M-1A1 tank. Voigt visited Iraq to research and write TACOM's official battle damage assessment report on all the Army tanks and Bradleys that suffered combat damage.
Overall, though, considering that the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) - to which almost all the Army's armored vehicles that fought in Iraq belonged - was in combat for 21 consecutive days, the number of its damaged combat vehicles was very low.
The numbers seem to bear out the claim made by 3rd Infantry Division commander Maj. Gen. Buford Blount III to the Pentagon press corps May 15. "We're very, very pleased with the performance of our equipment," he said. "It clearly showed that the heavy force has a place in an urban fight."
Only 23 Army M-1A1 Abrams tanks and M-2/M-3 Bradley fighting vehicles were "penetrated or perforated" by fire during the war, Voigt said. "The numbers were actually quite small."
No Abrams tank crewman was killed or wounded by enemy (or friendly) fire in the war, Voigt said. In the more thinly armored Bradleys, only four soldiers were wounded and none killed. In one of the few instances in which Iraqi armored vehicles scored any hits on U.S. vehicles, three of four tanks in a platoon of 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, were hit by 30 mm fire from one or more BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles. "Those really didn't bother the tanks," Voigt said. "They created a few dimples on the front of the tanks."
Most of the damaged vehicles were not knocked out, Voigt added. "The vast majority of those are still out there with the 3rd ID fighting," he said."They've got a hole of some sort in them, but otherwise they're still fighting. There were just a couple of them that were mobility-kills by enemy fire."
Fifteen of the 23 damaged tanks and Bradleys were hit by RPGs, he said. Nine of the 15 were tanks, and six were Bradleys. Two of the Bradleys were hit by three RPG rounds each, and one tank was hit by two RPG rounds.
In only one case did RPG-wielding Iraqi fighters score a mobility kill against an Abrams, meaning that they managed to immobilize the tank but not destroy it, Voigt said.
He was keen to dispel one rumor. Contrary to reports, he found no evidence that the Iraqis fired any Russian Kornet missiles at U.S. armored vehicles. Weapons that did damage Abrams and Bradleys included 57 mm anti-aircraft cannons mounted on tank hulls and, in at least one case, a medium-caliber automatic weapons system such as a 12.7 mm DShK heavy machine gun.
In the former instance, a 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment Bradley "was penetrated in the troop compartment by what the troops were saying was a T-72, but based on the ballistics and what we think actually hit it was probably an anti-aircraft round," Voigt said.
In the latter case, the machine-gun rounds ignited some oil or petroleum products packed in the bustle rack, or storage area outside a tank's turret, of an Abrams on the western edge of Baghdad, Voigt said. The fire spread to the external auxiliary power unit, then to the engine.
Asked if a lesson learned from that incident was not to store petroleum products in the bustle rack, Voigt answered, "Probably."
"That's something to take away," he said. "Now the question is where else do you put it? That's something the Army has to wrestle with."
The RPG shots that damaged the Abrams tanks were aimed at their sides, Voigt said. No Iraqi rounds penetrated the Abrams' engine or rear grill, he added.
The pattern of penetration is causing some at TACOM to consider improving the Abrams' armor side-skirts. The Abrams was designed in the 1970s to confront Soviet tanks on the plains of Germany. Designers at the time thought the greatest threat to the tank would come from enemy tank rounds and missiles aimed at the Abrams' front. That's where the designers concentrated the thickest layers of the Abrams' secret armor package, which since has been upgraded.
"We have the heavy armor up front, we don't have the heavy armor panels in the sides, and that's where the RPGs were penetrating," Voigt said.
But he said it was too early to conclude what changes, if any, need to be made. "We're going to re-evaluate the side armor, because in a city environment a lot of the RPGs are hitting us on the flanks, as opposed to on the front," he said.
However, he said, any addition to the armor would also increase the weight of the tank, which already tips the scales at 70 tons.
"Do we build a special package that we apply when we go into a city, or do we put this on permanently? Or did the tank do well enough - the fact that we only had two mobility hits - that we want to just keep fighting it the way it is?"