US Army will choose between Rafael Trophy and Rheinmetall ADS

Miniaturized missile defenses work well on heavy tanks, but efforts to fit such Active Protection Systems on light vehicles like Stryker have failed – so far. Now the Army will test two lightweight options: Rafael’s Trophy VPS and Rheinmetall’s ADS.

Rheinmetall Active Defense System destroys an incoming threat at the last instant, by design

This year, the Army will fire live anti-tank warheads at two rival Active Protection Systems to assess how best to protect lightweight armored vehicles like its 8×8 Stryker. The contenders in this “live fire characterization activity” – it isn’t officially a test – will be the German Rheinmetall Active Defense System (ADS) and the Israeli Rafael Trophy Vehicle Protection System (VPS). Not participating, our sources tell us, is the American Artis Iron Curtain, which was the Army’s original pick to protect the Stryker but was subsequently rejected after Army testers found it wanting.

Now, the Rheinmetall ADS and the Rafael Trophy VPS won’t be installed on actual Stryker vehicles. Instead, they’ll be set up on specially designed armored targets. That will allow the Army to measure precisely what damage, if any, gets through the active protection systems from different kinds of attacks.

“The Army intends to conduct live fire characterization activities with the two hard-kill active protection systems on platform agnostic test rigs,” said Ashley John, spokesperson for the Program Executive Officer – Ground Combat Systems (PEO-GCS).

A “hard kill” system, like ADS and VPS, is one that physically shoots down incoming anti-tank missiles and rockets. “Soft kill” decoys and jamming, by contrast, just  make the enemy miss. Hard-kill has worked well on heavy tanks. Israel, Russia and the US all use it. But, as the Army has painfully discovered, it’s much harder to get it to work on lighter vehicles – which need protection the most. For the Stryker in particular, while the reliable, affordable vehicle has become an Army workhorse around the world — with variants carrying everything from infantry to anti-aircraft missiles, 30mm cannon, jammers, and even lasers — the service has struggled for years to make it more survivable in high-intensity combat.

What’s the hold-up? Historically, hard-kill Active Protection Systems are heavy and bulky; they need a lot of electrical power to run radars and targeting computers; and when they intercept incoming warheads, they may cause them to prematurely detonate or burst into shrapnel – “residual penetration” that a heavily armored tank can shrug off, but which a Stryker or other lightly armored vehicle cannot.

The Germans and Israelis have taken different approaches to solving this problem. Rheinmetall’s ADS uses a large number of small explosive charges distributed around the vehicle, computer-controlled to detonate at the precise millisecond to cut apart incoming warheads just before they detonate. Rafael’s Trophy uses a compact missile launcher, which lobs mini-missiles at incoming anti-tank missiles and rockets to intercept them further out. There’s a big debate over which of the two approaches is safer, both for the vehicle being protected and for foot troops or nearby civilians.

For continue the reading follow the link - Army Tries (Again) To Protect Stryker: Rafael or Rheinmetall?