Army Beats Insurgent Grenades

The U.S. military may still be having a major problem with improvised bombs in Iraq. But another major killer -- rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs -- has been largely neutralized, Defense News reports.

Since the Iraq invasion in 2003, about 122 American troops have died from RPGs: 84 from March, 2003 through December, 2004 -- and only 38 since. Why the big change? U.S. Army officials tell Defense News it's because so many vehicles have been given reactive armor, sticky, small packs of explosives, [attached] to a vehicle’s outer shell, [which]
detonate when hit by incoming fire, blowing the round away from the vehicle."

In 2004, they decided to put reactive armor tiles on all of the service’s Abrams tanks, Bradley armored personnel carriers and Stryker fighting vehicles... Today, all of the roughly 1,000 Bradley vehicles in Iraq have received the armor, he said. General Dynamics... also is making 500 sets of tank-armor tiles... The first 100 tank sets have been delivered to the Anniston Depot, Ala., and will soon be shipped to Iraq...

*Each tile only protects against a single hit.
An enemy good or lucky enough to hit the same spot twice may find it vulnerable. So insurgent teams have attempted to defeat the armor by firing multiple RPGs at once, industry sources say. *But U.S. forces have learned to break up such groups with M-16 rifles and turret-mounted .50-caliber machine guns, the industry source said. Sorensen said these countertactics have also cut RPG casualties.