Link: Punisher Gives Enemy No Place to HideA new Army weapon designed to target the enemy hiding behind barriers is being affectionately called "The Punisher" by Soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
And by all accounts, the futuristic XM-25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System has been quite a rude surprise for the bad guys.
"I don't know what we're eventually going to call this product, but it seems to be game changing," said the commander of the Army's Program Executive Office Soldier, Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, during a Feb. 2 briefing with reporters at the Pentagon. "You no longer can shoot at American forces and hide behind something. We're going to reach out and touch you."
After years of XM-25 development, last fall the 101st Airborne submitted an urgent request to field the weapon for troops on patrol in Afghanistan. In response the Army took the five weapons it had been testing at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md., added 1,000 hand-made explosive rounds and shipped them to the war zone in October of 2010.
On arrival the XM-25 gave infantry squads the capability to precisely target bad guys hiding behind walls, in irrigation ditches, or among rocky escarpments. The Heckler & Koch-made XM-25 pairs a barrel-mounted targeting computer and a 25mm programmable air-bursting round that's fed precise range information just before being fired. A Soldier can simply push a button to range an enemy firing position, dial in one more meter, and the round will explode precisely where the bad guy is sitting.
"I had one lieutenant tell me that normally these engagements take us 15 or 20 minutes to get through, [but it's] several minutes when the XM-25 is involved. It's that quick," said the Army's top weapons buyer, Col. Doug Tamilio. "One major told me every time the XM-25 was involved in engaging enemy positions, firing stopped immediately."
So far the still-experimental XM-25 has stood up to the harsh combat environment of Afghanistan with "no maintenance issues," Tamilio said.
"To me that means we've got the ruggedness part of it right," he said.
It seems OICW program has finally paid off, at least partially. One of the issues I predict would be the limitation of the 25mm grenade round. It certainly seems to perform well against Taliban insurgents. However, militants in A-Stan are not known to wear protective gears as regular armies. I suspect they might need to increase the size of the warhead to make it more effective against armored targets. Of course, that brings the problem of added weight.
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