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07 Mar 19. WCSP goes to the next stage. In an upbeat briefing at The Bovington Tank Museum yesterday, Lockheed Martin, supported by DE&S, gave an upbeat brief on the progress of the Warrior WCSP contract. Lee Felllows, WCSP Director at Lockheed Martin said that the Reliability and Growth Trials (RGT) had commenced for both the vehicle and the turret. Live firings on static and moving targets had been started and the Battlefield trials were also underway. The turret redesign was certainly impressive giving extra room for the crew with new hatch covers supplied by Plasan. In the crew compartment, the crew can now track all activities outside using 6 Local Situation Awareness (LSAS) cameras which give the crew the ability to pick and locate targets and then have them displayed on the display in the crew compartment to prevent disorientation on embarkation which can last about 10 seconds. Lee Fellows, supported by Marcus Bruton CBE head of the DE&S WCSP Team made a strong statement supporting the progress of WCSP and quite rightly said that they would ensure that the vehicle was totally battle-ready for the British Army by the end of trails in July 2020. They were tight lipped on numbers but with the reduction in the British Army’s strike Brigades, a number of 220 vehicles was bandied about. That would give about 600 Warriors which could be converted to the ABSV requirement and replace the existing ageing FV432 range.
At the moment the variants on trial are Section, Command, Repair and Recovery and Observation. WCSP has been the target of a great deal of comment and discussion as to whether it will be cut and the role taken over by MIV. However, a brief by the Museum director on the evolution of the APC to the IFV suggested that tracks are a key part of the brigade deployment process as the infantry has to be able to deploy at the same speed and cross country ability as the Main Battle Tank. Currently wheeled vehicles have certain imitations in this area. Lockheed also confirmed, confounding remarks made by this publication, was that the extra weight of the vehicle due to the turret weighing 5.4 tonnes, a difference from the existing turret’s 3.2 tonnes, thus effecting Mean Time Between failures (MTBF) had been addressed and the extra weight of the vehicle was now only 1 tonne more that the current Warrior. Thus, in contrast to other observers, we now see that the careful engineering development changes made by Lockheed Martin and DE&S will achieve a production contract for upwards of 220 vehicles, possibly placed in December this year. BATTLESPACE will be running a feature on WCSP in the next weeks.
07 Mar 19. Rheinmetall submits Land 400 Phase 3 bid. Rheinmetall has submitted its bid in response to the Australian Army’s Land 400 Phase 3 – Mounted Close Combat Capability Request For Tender (RfT), the company announced on 1 March. Under the tender, the company is offering the Australian Army its Lynx infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) with the Lance turret, Lynx Manouevre Support Vehicle (MSV), a network of suppliers across Australia, continued use of the Military Vehicle Centre of Excellence in Queensland, and a comprehensive support and training system. Rheinmetall’s system requires only two Lynx base vehicle configurations to achieve the nine roles sought under the Australian Army’s RfT. The Lynx’s modular system architecture also covers the four additional roles sought, including a mortar variant, a logistics variant, and a protected amphibious Lynx. Lynx provides protection against blast, improvised explosive devices, direct and indirect fire, cluster munitions and anti-tank guided missiles. The digital Lance turret provides the crew with sensor systems, advanced automatic tracking and targeting capabilities and weapon integrated battle management in a connected and digitally enabled platform.
Rheinmetall is also constructing the Military Vehicle Centre of Excellence (MILVEHCOE) near Brisbane. By the time the Land 400 Phase 3 is contracted, the MILVEHCOE is expected to be qualified for all of the common systems and components required for the Rheinmetall Lynx and Lance solution. (Source: Shephard)
07 Mar 19. BAE Systems Offers Combat-Proven CV90 for LAND 400 Phase 3 Bid. BAE Systems today confirmed it is offering the CV90, a combat-proven Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV), to the Commonwealth of Australia in response to the LAND 400 Phase 3 Mounted Close Combat Capability Request for Tender. The project team will be led by BAE Systems’ Sweden-based combat vehicles business and supported by BAE Systems Australia. Advanced and highly-versatile, the CV90 uses the latest technology to keep soldiers safe. BAE Systems has continuously developed the CV90 to meet new customer requirements and future operational threats.
A total of 1280 CV90s are in service with seven nations – including four NATO members – and the vehicle is available in 15 variants, designed to deliver the best capability for the Australian Army. CV90s are already operational with militaries in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Most recently, BAE Systems successfully completed the latest delivery of 144 CV90s to the Norwegian Army on time in 2018.
“The CV90 has a combat-proven track record, established customer base, and future growth potential that will more than satisfy the Commonwealth’s requirements for years to come,” said Tommy Gustafsson-Rask, vice president and general manager for BAE Systems Hägglunds, the designer and manufacturer of the vehicle. “We look forward to demonstrating the vehicle’s unparalleled capabilities and our breadth of operational experience as the Australian Commonwealth considers the LAND 400 Phase 3 competition.”
“We’re proud to continue our support of the Australian Defence Force with a commitment to the largest land vehicle upgrade in the Army’s history,” said Gabby Costigan, CEO of BAE Systems Australia. “We look forward to working closely with businesses across the country to increase sovereign Australian Industry Capability as important national projects like this develop.”
05 Mar 19. UK MoD opts for high-risk robot acquisition strategy. Autonomous kit will be deployed by the UK MoD in Iraq, Afghanistan and during Operation Cabrit in Estonia before the end of 2019, heralding a new era of prototype warfare which will see a much faster, but higher level of risk, acquisition and deployment strategy.
On 5 March, Gavin Williamson, UK Defence Secretary, announced that £31m ($40.8m) will be spent on nano unmanned air surveillance systems, such as Black Hornet 3 and Puma 2, with a further £12m spent on robotic combat vehicles. He added that £23m will be invested on the Theseus system, the name given to the four autonomous resupply vehicles tested by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) alongside the Autonomous Warrior Land 2018 (AW(L)18) in 2018.
The platforms that will form the Theseus project include Stork, an autonomous paraglider from Animal Dynamics, a UAV from Barnard Microsystems, Fleetonomy’s Project Workhorse. Two UGVs will also be used, Horiba’s Mira and Titan from Qinetiq and Milrem.
The term ‘prototype warfare’ has been coined by Autonomous Warrior Organiser Brig Kevin Copsey to describe for the move towards faster acquisition and deployment of technology.
Williamson outlined this was necessary as a response to the fast-evolving technological capabilities by other nations and terrorist groups.
This may result in higher level of risk that the systems would be redundant but that it was necessary or else ‘we are going to find ourselves behind our adversaries,’ noted Williamson.
‘Some technologies that we bring in may lead to a dead end…but you will extrapolate opportunities elsewhere’ said Copsey.
Copsey further spoke of his hope that the deployment of this kit will feed back into a change in the way the UK military operates on a tactical level as ‘different ratio of troops are required to conduct an attack because we can operate at faster speed, more dispersed, to have innovative ways of doing resupply’.
‘We can increase our lethality by having unmanned ground vehicles around the battlefield that [can] deliver a lethal blow as well, by having a lethal platform installed,’ he added.
Despite the announcement, Copsey stated he would like to see more movement towards information-space and electronic warfare spectrum domination but he did acknowledge that the MoD are already working towards this. AW(L) 2018 exercise took place on Salisbury Plain for four weeks and ending on 5 December 2018. (Source: Shephard)
05 Mar 19. Ukraine details latest T-80 upgrades, announces plans to produce T-84s this year. The Ukrainian armed forces have received upgraded T-80BV main battle tanks, according to a 1 March press release from state-owned company UkrOboronProm. The new vehicles have been delivered to Ukraine’s Airborne Assault Force as well as its Marine Corps; the former received T-80UDs while deployed against separatist forces in the Donbass in 2015. The press release also states that the Kharkov Armour Plant is scheduled to begin work this year to upgrade some of the T-80UDs in service with Ukrainian forces to the T-84 standard.
No quantities were provided for the number of tanks involved in these upgrades, but the release stated that the T-80BVs were upgraded to the same standard as the T-64 2017-standard tanks reported on by Jane’s in February. It is understood that the upgrade includes thermal imaging capabilities for the gunner and the commander, as well as a digital navigation system, encrypted radios, and improved protection in the form of explosive reactive armour (ERA). (Source: IHS Jane’s)
03 Mar 19. Russian system uses infantry to spot for robots. Beneath the guitars and arena-rock ready beat, the latest video from Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation is, at its robotic heart, about a platform slightly more capable than we’ve seen before. A new video of unmanned ground vehicles and drone swarms promises cutting-edge machines. If the technology isn’t there yet, it at least points to where Russia wants its war robots to go.
The Marker robot is a platform for exploring other robotics technologies, though official releases said it may also see use with Russian Special Forces. The Advanced Research Foundation, Russia’s equivalent of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), opened a National Center for the Development of Technology and Basic Elements of Robotics in 2015, and this vehicle is one way it’s figuring out how to make payloads work for future armed robots.
Marker is built to be modular, with open information architecture. One configuration for the testbed arms it with a Kalashnikov-produced machine gun and a part of anti-tank grenade launchers. We can safely expect to see it test a range of weapons, beyond this configuration. What stands out in the video, at least initially, is the way the turret on the robot tracks with the rifle carried by the infantryman.
In an official statement from ARF, the agency said the Marker is designed to work “a pair with a fighter, receiving target designation from the sight of his weapon,” or be controlled remotely. This is a novel twist on the another form of robotic targeting, where AI-powered sensors take aim and the human checks in before firing. It turns infantry into spotters for robots.
The Marker, and presumably the robots that will be based on it, can also be guided remotely, which makes the human spotter a bonus and not a limitation.
ARF clearly sees the Marker as a learning tool, saying “the evolution of combat robots is on the path of increasing the ability to perform tasks in autonomous mode with a gradual reduction in the role of the operator.”
“This sentiment and development path is in line with recent Russian statement that the country’s military is developing AI-powered weapons with the ability to identify and engage targets,” said Samuel Bendett, an adviser at the Center for Naval Analyses.
Marker isn’t even the star of its own video. There’s also a swarm of five quadcopters, joined by two more swarms of five quadcopters each, all supposedly working together as a single 15-member unit. ARF has already tested smaller drone groups and demonstrated small swarms before to students at the ERA technopolis. The drone swarm might be assisting the Marker in targeting, or, at least, the video is edited in such a way to suggest that the flying swarm and the ground robot are linked. Russian forces have tested robots and fought against drones in Syria, and so the Marker-and-swarm combo might be another instance of battlefield inspiration leading to state-sponsored imitations.
“We should be objective when trying to discern robotics capabilities form PR videos like that one, no matter how realistic it may look,” said Bendett. “After all, Uran-9 UGV PR videos also looked very cool — and then that military robot ran into a number of serious issues while testing in Syria, issues that may not have been apparent in the YouTube promo. Still — many Russian statements from the unmanned systems developers pointed to Russia pursuing a swarm strategy for its UAVs and even UGVs — looks like they are finally delivering on that promise.”
(Source: C4ISR & Networks)
02 Mar 19. Most problems found in Joint Light Tactical Vehicle have been fixed, officials say. Most of the deficiencies found with the military’s newest ground combat machine, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, have been addressed, officials said after a recent report found the vehicle “not operationally suitable.”
A number of problems were identified in testing last year before the vehicle began fielding recently. The report by the Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation noted all versions of the vehicle at the time were “not operationally suitable because of deficiencies in reliability, maintainability, training, manuals, crew situational awareness, and safety.”
Officials with the company that builds the truck, and the Marine Corps program representative, said most of those issues have been fixed. The report’s findings were from May 2018 and work done to fix problems found during testing was not included in the final report, said Oshkosh Defense President John Bryant and Andy Rodgers, Marine program manager for light tactical vehicles,
“It’s kind of like reading a report from September now that’s an assessment of whether the New England Patriots are going to do well in the playoffs,” Bryant said. “It turns out they did pretty well.”
The vehicle is set to replace many vehicles of the aging Humvee fleet. It is a faster and more ruggedized vehicle built to better protect troops as priorities shift to a more competitive, near-peer battlefield.
Its protection, extreme off-road mobility, modularity and network capabilities far exceed the Humvee and provide a suite of capabilities in a smaller, faster package than the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected, or MRAP, vehicles developed to counter roadside bombs that shredded many Humvees. Nearly all issues mentioned in the report have been addressed and applied to the current vehicles headed to the fleet, the officials said. Some minor adjustments are being evaluated by the services and will require slight modifications to the fleet at a later date, Bryant said.
Missile issues
The most striking problem was the close-combat version “provides less capability to engage threats with the (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) missiles” over the Humvee.
“The missile reload process is slow and difficult for crews,” according to the report, and the close-combat version has “less storage space than other JLTV variants and accessing mission-essential equipment from the cargo area is a challenge.”
For those reasons, testers at the time deemed the close-combat JLTV “not operationally effective,” a term used to determine if the system can accomplish its intended mission, in as realistic an environment as possible.
“Operationally suitable” means whether the system can be placed in the field, remain reliable and be sustained within the unit and support available.
Rodgers told reporters that working with the TOW system on the JLTV will require improved tactics, techniques and procedures by troops getting familiar with the vehicle.
The company also made changes to the storage and accessibility of missiles and added shielding to cables that allowed for better accessibility and a greater field of fire, Bryant said. Those changes have been incorporated already on the vehicles being fielded, he said.
But can you get out?
The vehicle comes in two- and four-seat versions with four basic configurations — general purpose, utility vehicle, heavy guns carrier and close-combat weapons carrier.
The report also found problems for users exiting the vehicle, noting, “numerous reliability failures of doors not opening impeded the ability of the soldiers and marines to safely ingress and egress the JLTV.”
Rodgers said there had been minor changes made to the doors. The armored door system is slightly more complex than the Humvee and takes some experience to learn.
Crews also had “poor visibility due to blind spots around the vehicle,” according to the report.
Testers are looking to add an additional hatch to the versions that do not have turrets so that the vehicle will have another egress, or exit, option in case of a vehicle rollover, Rodgers said.
Bryant said the hatch will be added to the variants that don’t already have turrets, which double as escape hatches.
As far as visibility issues, Rodgers said Army officials began looking at ways to modify elements of the vehicle in December to resolve those problems.
“A decision was made back in December for the Army to pursue expanding the visibility of the vehicle, improving size of rear windows, putting a front camera on the JLTV,” Rodgers said.
Bryant added that once there is a decision on those items, they can be included in future JLTV production and modified on those already with soldiers and Marines, a common practice when improvements are made to any piece of gear, from radios to vehicles to rifles.
Maintenance and transport
Report authors cited a lack of maintenance capabilities and over-reliance on contractor support to provide maintenance.
“Units cannot maintain the JLTV without support from the contractor field service representatives due to vehicle complexity, ineffective training, poor manuals, and challenges with troubleshooting the vehicle,” according to the report.
The reliability problems included engine wiring, flat and damaged tires and brake system faults. In testing, one unit had a number of flat tires while another unit running over the same terrain did not have tire problems, Bryant noted.
He added that the vehicle has undergone more than 100,000 miles of testing and the JLTV was assessed as meeting double the reliability requirement set for it.
A short line in the report noted that JLTVs would need more maintenance due to some of their complexity. Rodgers went a little deeper by explaining that while Humvees can hit operational failures at around the 500- to 600-mile mark, JLTVs’ lowest mileage estimates in testing to those types of failures was 2,400 miles.
So, while actually working on and fixing the JLTV may be more time intensive and complex, Rodgers said that the vehicle will likely work longer with less regular maintenance than the Humvee.
Once operators and maintainers are more familiar with the JLTV, “the reliability of the vehicle will go up, which means there will be less maintenance on the vehicles,” he said.
Compared to the Humvee, the JLTV already needs less maintenance, he said.
Another concern arose in testing when existing Humvee trailers didn’t work properly with JLTVs. The Marines will continue with research and development into next year to find a solution, Rodgers said.
For air transport, soldiers will have to remove the B-kit armor because with that layer the vehicle is too heavy for the CH-47F helicopter.
Fielding the vehicle
The Army fielded its first JLTVs in mid-January to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Originally, the Army said the 10th Mountain Division would be the first to receive the vehicle, followed by 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in Vicenza, Italy, and then a brigade in Hawaii — likely with the 25th Infantry Division.
The combined Army and Marine Corps program calls for the Army to eventually field 49,099 vehicles and the Marines adding a total of 9,091. The Air Force has plans to field 80 vehicles, according to the report.
So far, more than 11,000 JLTVs have been delivered to the services, Bryant said.
The totals won’t be complete until the 2020s for the Marines and the 2030s for the Army. And that still won’t entirely replace the Humvee, which is the majority light vehicle in an Army fleet of an estimated 117,000, according to Military.com. That means about 40 percent of Army vehicles will eventually be JLTVs. (Source: Army Times)
01 Mar 19. US Military Changing ‘Killing Machine’ Robo-tank Program After Controversy. It was a frightening and dramatic headline: “The US Army Wants to Turn Tanks Into AI-Powered Killing Machines.” The story, published this week in Quartz, details the new Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System, or ATLAS, which seeks to give ground combat vehicles the ability to “acquire, identify, and engage targets at least 3X faster than the current
The response seems to have spooked the Army, which is now changing its request for information to better emphasize that the program will follow Defense Department policy on human control of lethal robots. They are also drafting talking points to further the new emphasis.
The robot’s ability to identify, target, and engage doesn’t mean “we’re putting the machine in a position to kill anybody,” one Army official told Defense One.
A second Army official said the changes had been “suggested” by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the AI task force of the Army’s Futures Command. The official didn’t know whether the changes had been made, but said they’d likely be made before the program’s March 12 industry day.
A Defense Department official said the language change might be followed by other unspecified ones.
The ATLAS program shows how much has changed since 2014 when the idea of armed ground robots was anathema to the U.S. military. The idea has seen ups and downs. In 2003, the Defense Department began to experiment with a small, machine-gun tank robot called SWORDS. In 2007, it was sent to Iraq. But the military ended the program after the robot began to behave unpredictably, moving its gun chaotically.
The military abandoned research on armed ground robots for years. A half-decade later, there had been more progress on doctrine governing battlefield robots than the machines themselves. In 2012, the Defense Department issued directive 3000.09, which says humans must have veto power over the actions of armed robots. (There can be special, limited exceptions.) That directive remains in force.
In 2014, there was still “no focused, near-term dialogue on this type of topic,” said Chris Jones, then director of strategic technology for iRobot, the company behind the famous PackBotA particular technical sticking point was the difficulty of building targeting systems for ground robots.
But technology progressed. By 2017, the military was more comfortable with the idea, and integrated some armed ground robots into some training exercises.
“The controversy over ATLAS demonstrates that there are continuing technological and ethical issues surrounding the integration of autonomy into weapon systems,” said Michael C. Horowitz, associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for New American Security.
“Lack of clarity concerning what would truly constitute an autonomous weapon system, even under the existing DoD directive, means it is not entirely clear the ATLAS program would be fully autonomous.”
Horowitz said the wording change sounded like a good step. “It is critical that any revisions to the ATLAS program not only clarify the degree of autonomy and the level of human involvement in the use of force, but also ensure that any incorporation of AI occurs in a way that ensures safety and reliability,” he said.
The incident comes after a separate controversy involving the Army’s relationship with Microsoft. On Feb. 22, a group of employees sent a letter to Microsoft leaders protesting the work that the company was doing with the Army on the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVUS, a helmet display technology based on the Microsoft HoloLens video game headset.
“While the company has previously licensed tech to the U.S.Military, it has never crossed the line into weapons development,” the letter says.
Since IVUS was to be the signature product of the Army’s new Futures Command, and since the protest involved a major, name-brand company, the protest scored ink.
But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was quick to squashspeculation that the protest would affect on the company’s partnership with the military.
On Tuesday, Army Undersecretary Ryan D. McCarthy noted that the IVUS is a training aid, not a weapon. “If you have a system where you can pipe in synthetic training, you could wear this same piece of equipment into combat. You could train with it at home and you could also collect data. So if you’re coming in to do the room clear, what’s the individual [meaning the wearer’s] heart rate? The marksmanship of the shots they took? So you can get performance data on the individual.”
A key area of controversy is over what is sometimes called Rapid Target Acquisition, or RTA — a method of finding targets, putting little red digital boxes around them on a screen, and putting a bullet, missile, or bomb into that box. It’s an emerging capability fraught with difficult ethical considerations and complexity: Is the data that goes into the process of box-drawing correct? Is the intelligence collection behind that data good or was it gleaned from unreliable sources? Where was human supervision during the process? It’s not clear what role RTA plays in either IVUSor ATLAS.
What these two incidents illustrate is the public concern about military use of AI is so high that it will occasionally manifest in protests or statements of objection that are based more in speculation about what the military is doing than actual fact. The incident with Microsoft, in particular, shows that the opinion of the mainstream tech community is sometimes unfairly rooted against the military community.
How leaders of companies like Microsoft and Amazon navigate that space is an open question.
On its face, the ATLAS controversy represents a public relations setback in the military’s efforts to reach out to the tech community. But the Army’s final response might also show that military leaders are sensitive to the issue and are capable of responding quickly to criticism.
“While outside groups will undoubtedly have concerns about the ATLAS program, even if the requirements are altered, the U.S.military is attempting to take the challenge of AI seriously across several dimensions,” said Horowitz.
As military adoption of AI moves from the air domain to land, from drones and fighter jets to helmets and tanks, it will also enter a foggier phase. It’s one thing to apply artificial intelligence to aerial surveillance and very much another to put it alongside troops, soldiers tasked with bursting through the door with limited understanding of what’s on the other side, especially in confusing urban-warfare scenarios.
Directive 3000.09 is a poor guide for what to do all of those instances. The Department knows this and has begun a process of drafting its own list of ethical principles for the use of artificial intelligence in war in the future.
“Between the efforts of the Defensive Innovation Board, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the new National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and others, now is the time to have these important conversations,” said Horowitz.
Artificial intelligence in the hands of ground troops has the potential to make the task of charging through the door not only safer for the soldier but potentially for the people on the other side of the M4, if, in fact, soldiers can use it to rapidly differentiate real threats from fake ones in confusing, high-energy situations. But questions about design and implementation will persist. Some will be more valid than others.
Military leaders, in explaining their perspective on arming and equipping soldiers, are fond of saying that they never want their troops to face a fair fight. Translation: achieving overmatch is not optional. But as new capabilities come online, capabilities like those outlined in the ATLAS proposal, commanders and officials will have to make hard choices about how much speed, firepower, and lethality, how much unfairness, are they willing to part with. However much, it will likely be more than the adversaries they are facing. (Source: Defense News Early Bird/Defense One)
01 Mar 19. Russian T-90M MBT expected to finish trials in 2019. Russia’s new T-90M Proryv-3 (Breakthrough-3) main battle tank (MBT) may finish its state trials this year, Jane’s has learned.
“Having confirmed the main specifications drafted in its technical terms of reference, the [T-90M] vehicle is now completing its state trials,” a Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) source said on 24 February.
Additional information regarding the T-90M has been released by Russian local media, in particular on Telekanal Zvezda. The platform is provided with an entirely new turret, which has been fitted with a digital electronic architecture, allowing the integration of new mission systems, as well as a new digital fire-control system (FCS). This turret is mounted on a T-72 chassis, as with previous T-90 models. The T-90M retains the 2A46M-5 gun of the T-90 family, but this gun is now fitted with a muzzle reference system to allow the FCS to compensate for barrel deviations from the boresighted position after firing.
The MBT was expected to feature improvements to gun stabilisation, but it is unconfirmed if these have been implemented. The T-90M retains the coaxial PKT 7.62mm machine gun as the gunner’s secondary armament, as well as the capability to launch the 9M119M anti-tank guided missile (ATGM), which has a 5km range and has a tandem high explosive anti-tank warhead. It is also capable of launching the 3VOF128 Tel’nik air-bursting projectile with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead.
The requirement for launching an air-bursting projectile was in response to Russian operational experience in Syria, and enables MBTs to defeat small dismounted weapon teams. The round is designed to explode in front of the target, unleashing shrapnel in a cone pattern forward of the projectile. This set-up is useful for defeating infantry in open ground or in enfilade, but is less effective for dealing with infantry in defilade than a round that explodes in all directions or in a ring-shaped pattern. (Source: IHS Jane’s)
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Millbrook, based in Bedfordshire, UK, makes a significant contribution to the quality and performance of military vehicles worldwide. Its specialist expertise is focussed in two distinct areas: test programmes to help armed services and their suppliers ensure that their vehicles and systems work as the specification requires; and design and build work to upgrade new or existing vehicles, evaluate vehicle capability and investigate in-service failures. Complementing these is driver and service training and a hospitality business that allows customers to use selected areas of Millbrook’s remarkable facilities for demonstrations and exhibitions.
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