Still, the infrared guided Javelin has proven itself in combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Syria and has reliable shtick that should work on virtually any tank out there—it hits them on the
weak top armor.
It’s also exposes its crew to less danger than the typical guided missile system.
Because it’s such a lightweight system, it may end up being a first responder on the ground
to emergencies that could be described as “massive, unexpected tank invasions”.
The Javelin is so effective that who the United States sells or gives Javelins to has become a
political issue on more than one occasion. Within the U.S. military, the Javelin also
looks set to transition from being purely an infantry system to being mounted on vehicles.
The Javelin doesn’t look as sleek and deadly as its name would have you think—it
resembles a clunky dumbbell slightly over one meter in length.
Fortunately, you don’t need good looks to blow up a tank.
The Javelin’s Command Launch Unit, or CLU, has a sophisticated infrared sensor
with multiple viewing modes, including 4x optical zoom, a 4x green-lit thermal view,
and a 12x narrow-vision zoom activated for targeting.
The seeker in the missile even provides a fourth 9x thermal viewing mode.
The CLU can therefore serve as a handy scanning device for the infantry. The thermal viewers on
the Javelin needs to be cooled off to function well, which theoretically takes 30 seconds,
but might take a bit longer if you’re in Baghdad and it’s a breezy 120 degrees at noon.
The system also incorporates multiple safeguards to avert or abort accidental launch.
After launch, a Javelin shoots forward horizontally for a second before its rocket motor
ignites and it climbs up 150 meters into the air, known as a “curveball” shot.
It’s quite a sight.
One common defense which sometimes does reinforce top armor is explosive-reactive
armor or (ERA), a layer of explosive bricks covering a
tank intended to prematurely detonate the shaped charges used by missiles.
However, the Javelin has a tandem charge warhead designed to defeat ERA
using a ‘precursor’ charge at the front of the warhead to take out the local ERA brick,
blasting open a gap through which the main warhead can hit the tank’s conventional armor.
The Javelin can also be fired in direct attack mode, useful for hitting targets that are too
close for the top attack, or that benefit from top cover, like a bunker or cave entrance.
The direct-fire mode could also be effective against low flying helicopters.
One of the Javelin’s few limitations is its range—2.5 kilometers. Though adequate for most
combat situations, older missiles like the TOW or Kornet boast ranges of 5 kilometers or more.
Russia is also aware of the Javelin’s capabilities—and their latest tanks feature
several countermeasures intended to defeat them. New Relikt and Mechanit E R A systems feature dual
layers of radar-triggered E R A plates designed to defeat tandem charge warheads.
The Shtora and the
newer Afganit Active Protection Systems can also deploy ‘soft kill’ multi-spectral grenades and
flares designed to obscure the tank from infrared seekers or divert them to other heat sources.
However, the latest infrared sensors have also improved in their ability to see through
obscuring haze and distinguish flares from the original target. And “hard-kill” active defenses
designed to shoot incoming missiles down would need to be able to shoot vertically above the
tank to tackle a top-attack Javelin—which the new Afganit system on the T-14 tank,
with launch tubes nestled at a horizontal angle under the turret, doesn’t seem capable of doing.
So would Relikt-style ERA and soft-kill infrared defenses work against the Javelin?
There’s simply no way to know for sure, unless Moscow were suddenly
to invite Washington to test its anti-tank missiles against its best tanks in a friendly
competition. But given that relations are too frosty for the United States
to participate in Russia’s annual tank biathlon, don’t count on that happening.
The Javelin was designed in the 70s and 80s, when the leaders of the U.S. military
had nightmares about being overrun by endless hordes of Soviet tanks—a
fear worsened by the generally poor performance of the M47 Dragon missile in use at the time.
However, the Javelin finally entered service with the U.S. military in 1996 after the Cold
War had ended, and first saw action in 2003 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
At the time, the United States was not able to deploy troops in Northern Iraq by land,
so it instead air dropped Special Forces and paratroopers that fought
alongside Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
In the Battle of Debecka Pass, a force of a
few dozen Special Forces operators and a larger peshmerga contingent engaged
and destroyed an Iraqi mechanized company of over a hundred soldiers.
The U.S. force had just 4 Javelin launch units.
Nineteen Javelins missiles were fired, seventeen of which hit, destroying two
T-55 tanks, eight MT-LB armored personnel carriers, and several trucks.
Reportedly,
all of the Javelins shots were made at 2,200 meters range or further—close to or exceeding
the official maximum range of the weapon—and one hit was even reported at 4,200 meters.
The irony of using Javelins to destroy pickup trucks and machine guns is that the roughly
$80,000 Javelin missiles cost considerably more than the weapon systems they are destroying.
This
has reportedly has led U.S. forces to at times hold back on using the weapon in Afghanistan.
Though considered a ‘lighter’ weapon than the vehicle-mounted TOW missile,
significantly larger numbers of TOW missiles have been expended since 2003.
However, given that the United States spends dozens or hundreds
of thousands of dollars operating expensive jet fighters dropping pricy smart missiles,
or deploying large numbers of ground troops just in order to take out a few insurgents at a time,
the relative costs of using Javelins as a sort of heavy sniping weapon may not be that absurd.
It’s less likely to cause collateral damage than calling in an artillery
strike or dropping a large, laser-guided bomb. And if that strike eliminates in a
timely manner an active threat endangering the lives of friendly troops, it could save lives.
One last note of caution when evaluating the Javelin:
though it may be a top-tier anti-tank weapon, it has not yet been used in
combat against a modern tank, which is not true of the TOW or Kornet missile.
The Javelin has undergone quite a few upgrades since initial deployment in 1996—let’s
take a look at three of the most important ones.
Given that the Javelin has been used primarily to hit soft targets and structures,
a new version of the Javelin warhead with a deadlier blast fragmentation has been introduced,
designated the FGM-148F. This new warhead is supposedly just as effective against tanks,
and no costlier than its predecessors.
The Army has also been funding the development of a Lightweight Command Launch Unit.
The new launch system would supposedly be 70% smaller,
weigh almost half as much, and feature upgrades including modernized electronics, a new laser
pointer, a high-definition color camera, and IR sensors with improved range and resolution.
Finally, a new extended range Javelin has been recently tested capable of
hitting targets up to 4.5 kilometers away. This is significant, as one of the chief
rationales for keeping the TOW missile as the standard vehicle-mounted anti-tank weapon was
its longer range of nearly 5 kilometers. A long-range Javelin would seem to be superior.
