Wikipedia states a Challenger II sustained 70 RPG hits in Basra, 2003. All crew survived.
Their reference is a BBC news article where a defence consultant repeats the claim (trustworthy?).
Is this true or not?
The article does have a cite for it.
It’s possible the actual number was exagerrated by witnesses - combat reports tend to be like that - but it certainly would not be anything unusual for a Challenger II to take RPG hits without any substantial damage. Challengers are covered in Chobham armor, which is famously robust. A hand-held RPG will mess up your Hummer pretty bad, but should not be able to seriously damage the armor of a modern tank like a Challenger.
Former M-1 Abrams Tanker here ('86 - '91)
I’d been told (by senior NCOs) that the Challenger had thicker armor than the Abrams, and that the Chobham (sp?) armor the Brits shared with her Allies wasn’t the really good stuff.
270 RPG hits? To frontal armor, I’d believe it on almost any modern MBT (Leopard series, LeClerc series, etc). Flank? Eh. Rear? Doubtful.
Armor can’t be “battle thick” everywhere.
Wait, it’s 270 now?
Does this story involve fish?
Ex, it says 70, not 270.
Here’s the quote which the Wiki assertion is based on:
There was a show on the Military Channel about Chobham [armor] which reported this story, but slightly differently - it said that the tank was hit by 70 rounds, including some RPGs. I presume that the rest were small-arms fire.
I’m a bit skeptical purely because I seriously doubt any of the insurrectionist groups operating in Iraq would ever have had 70 RPG rounds in one place. That’s a lot of materiel to be carrying around.
Don’t RPG’s have to hit at a nearly direct angle to do any damage, owing to the geometry of the shaped charge? With that being the case, wouldn’t even a modestly armored vehicle be able to take any number of RPG hits from shallow angles?
270 sounds better.
Seriously, I don’t know where that extra “2” came from.
Cosmic: yeah, “angularity” does matter to some degree, but metallurgy counts even more, and I don’t think light armored vehicles have the really good stuff (composite armors).
Could you take one of those out with an A10?
I’m flashing back to an incident from the Gulf in the last decade where we (Yanks) screwed up and hit some British forces
I’m just envisioning the driver brewing up some tea while getting hit by 70 RPGs in a row…
The armor atop a tank isn’t as thick as the frontal and side armor. An A-10’s gun could probably defeat the top and rear armor of any tank.
A-10s also carry Maverick missiles, a direct hit from which will blow a tank apart from any angle.
The RPG-7 has been widely produced in many countries for many years, and the types of warheads available range from barely-WWII-vintage shaped charges to ultramodern Russian dual stage to thermobaric warheads which don’t need to penetrate anything to kill the crew. You would need to define what type of warhead is being used.
I agree it could damage or incapacitate most tanks easily especiall particular tanks like most old t varients etc with old style compartmentalisation. There are more modern tanks that head on would more or less shrug it off depending where i was hit until it let off a 65 maverick. Which it would probably plan to do instead. Not sure this will matter for long as they are be retired. To low and slow for modern war tech now. Sad to see them go though. What an amazing amd effective machine of its day.
Aren’t there also a fairly wide variety of munitions that fall into the general category of “RPG”, with different purposes? Pretty much any tank is going to basically ignore any weapon that isn’t designed to be an anti-armor weapon.
(resisting the urge to pun about a tank getting hit by Pathfinder vs. GURPS)
Strictly speaking the RPG series are all primarily designed to defeat armored targets but fragmentation warheads for them exist, but any rocket or rocket like weapon can get called an RPG the same sort of way any random small arms fire gets called sniper fire. The RPG family has been around for a long time and includes many varieties, but if the Challenger II was actually hit by 70 RPGs and they were the most common and pretty old RPG-7s I’d believe it could take the hits where it is best protected; the Chobham armor was designed to defeat unitary HEAT warheads like the old RPG-7. Wiki says a Challenger II was knocked out in Aug 2006 by an RPG-26 with a tandem HEAT warhead:
August 2006: An RPG-29 capable of firing a tandem-charge penetrated the frontal lower underbelly armour of a Challenger 2 commanded by Captain Thomas Williams of The Queens’s Royal Hussars south east of al-Amarah, southern Iraq. Its driver, Trooper Sean Chance, lost part of his foot in the blast; two more of the crew were slightly injured. Chance was able to reverse the vehicle 1.5 mi (2.4 km) to the regimental aid post despite his injuries.[60] The incident was not made public until May 2007; in response to accusations that crews had been told the tank was impervious to the insurgents’ weapons, the MoD said “We have never claimed that the Challenger 2 is impenetrable.”
Nonetheless I’m somewhat skeptical about the complete truthfulness of the report about 70 RPG hits. Everywhere it is mentioned online links back to the same cite of BBC online talking to Francis Tusa, Editor, Defence Review. The context in which he is making the claim is a bit of a head shaker, it occurred at a time when the Royal Army was deciding to retire a sizable portion of its Challenger II fleet:
Apaches are not heavily armoured and it takes just one rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) to bring one down. Compare that with one British Challenger near Basra which survived being hit by 70 RPGs.
It’s a bit of a bizarre and inappropriate comparison to make. Shocker, attack helicopters aren’t as heavily armored as tanks because they have to be able to do things like you know, fly.