Anti-Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) Technologies

Since the Vietnam War, military forces of the United States have had to contend with a highly effective and lethal weapon originally developed by the Russians as a shoulder-mounted rocket propelled grenade designated the RPG-7. The weapon was licensed for manufacture to allies and clients of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the RPG-7 became the weapon of choice by insurgents and terrorists around the world. A family of warheads now exists to engage a variety of targets. Few countermeasures have met with success. One method that achieved some success in Vietnam was placing metal mesh fencing as a skirt around U.S. military vehicles to intercept incoming RPGs providing stand-off detonation or causing the grenade's metal ogive to bend contacting the warhead's inner cone, shorting the arming signal and causing the grenade to dud. The active defense system proposed borrows conceptually from that countermeasure. Following launch detection, the approach is to intercept the RPG with a net mounted on an umbrella-like frame fired from a canister on the vehicle. The objective of the net is to ensnare the RPG's fins, disrupting their flight stabilizing effect and deflecting the RPG's trajectory, turning its shaped charge away from the target.