Defense Focus: MLRS in fashion -- Part 1

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- Multi-launch rocket mortars are an old artillery system that goes back 65 years, and the United States has never been interested in them, so why are they more important than ever now?

The modern military Multiple Launch Rocket System mortar was born in 1936 when Nazi Germany developed the six-barreled Nebelwerfer. GIs fighting in Sicily in 1943 got to know the ugly, ungainly squat little Nebelwerfer 41 very well. They called it the "Screaming Mimi." The Nebelwerfer 41 fired six 75 pound 150mm rockets just over four miles. It was no good against tanks or even armored personnel carriers, but against infantry formations caught in the open, it was deadly.

The MLRS reached maturity, however, in the far more famous Soviet versions of the weapon, the BM-13 and BM-31, universally known -- as are their descendants today -- as the Katyusha, or "Little Katie." Soviet industry built more than 10,000 of them during World War II, known by Russians as the Great Patriotic War, and they were the backbone of the Red Army‘s artillery in all its great victories from Stalingrad and Kursk all the way to Berlin.

Today, the MLRS, long ignored by the U.S. Army and American defense contractors, is back in fashion. One of the biggest sticking points in the long arms-sales deadlock between Russia and China is the Kremlin's continued refusal to sell China its latest MLRS. It is remarkable -- and revealing -- that the Russians should see this essentially old-fashioned land weapon, which has zero electronics and extremely poor accuracy, as strategically vital to preserving its military superiority over neighboring China far into the 21st century.

On the other side of the Eurasian land mass, Israel is feverishly trying to develop, in cooperation with U.S. defense contractors, a chemical laser weapons system that could shoot down rocket salvos from the MLRS batteries. It was no surprise that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Party of God, had equipped itself with Katyusha batteries. But what did come as a nasty surprise to the Israelis in their brief min-war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon last summer was how effective those Katyushas were in paralyzing life in northern Israel in the face of the Israeli air force, one of the best equipped and most superbly trained and effective forces of its kind in the world.

In fact, the more than 4,000 Katyushas that Hezbollah fired -- 95 percent of them 122mm rockets with warheads weighing up to 66 pounds each -- were not that effective. They could not be accurate. They inflicted no important damage on key installations, and the casualties caused by them were very low indeed in proportion to the numbers Hezbollah fired. And Hezbollah did not have remotely enough of them, nor were they competent enough, to use them in massed battery formations as tactical battle winners the way the Red Army did through World War II.

Had Hezbollah even been capable of that, the massed MLRS batteries would have made a dream target for the Israeli air force and for accurate counter-fire by Israel's massive heavy artillery force, which, since the Matmon C arms purchase masterminded by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from the United States in 1975, has been by far the largest and best artillery force in the Middle East.

There were, however, many elements that made the Katyusha potentially dangerous and certainly disruptive to Israel and that keep it relevant to modern conventional war.

First, the MLRS is cheap. It can be easily mass produced. When used individually the way Hezbollah used it, it can be moved quickly and easily hidden. As such, it neutralizes many of the advantages that sophisticated airstrikes have against conventional deployments of massed heavy artillery -- or of MLRSs too, for that matter. Yet it still provides the potential for massed firepower against clearly identifiable, densely grouped targets.

But despite the relatively little damage that Hezbollah’s MLRS or Katyushas caused last year in the Lebanon War, they had a profound and widespread psychological and thereby strategic effect. And they also gave notice that in greater numbers, and handled more skillfully, they could be a significantly greater threat if not prepared against.

Until the 2006 mini-war, the Israeli army did not take the Katyusha threat seriously. This was a bit strange as in the past previous generations of Israeli generals thought much more highly of them. So many of them were captured during the 1967 Six Day War Israel used them itself during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Lebanon war and even developed their own MAR-240 launcher for them.

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(Next: Lessons for the U.S. Army)