Infantry "AT" weapons

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It is probably by now widely known that anti-tank missiles were used to shoot at Argentinian bunkers at Port Stanley in '82, Hezbollah used anti-tank guided missiles to shoot at buildings occupied by Israeli troops during the 2006 Lebanon war, American troops have used TOW and Javelin anti-tank missiles against buildings et cetera.

This re-purposing extends to unguided anti-tank weapons; the utility of RPG-7s in occasional shots at helicopters and as near-universal anti-infantry weapon are well-known. M72s were almost never fired at tanks either, but plenty were expended at infantry.

World War 2's Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck series were produced as follows (rounded to thousands):

1943: 350,000 and 173,000 rounds

1944: 5,662,000 and 1,806,000 rounds

1945: 3,314,000 and 120,000 rounds (up to February '45 only)

Most were expended, but almost none of them against tanks.

Now what the infantry really needed was apparently a means to project a hand grenade or a small demolition charge beyond throwing distance. It received shaped charge projectors instead and used them as hand grenade and demolition charge projector equivalents. The employment of the munitions against tanks was a rare occasion (still, several thousand tanks were destroyed with these munitions).

Peacetime procurement kept focusing on the shaped charge warhead's penetration performance nevertheless.
Post-1990 plenty high explosive and wall-penetrating warheads for bazookas and Panzerfaust-type weapons have been developed and delivered for Western armies. After all, the tank armies of the Warsaw Pact finally lost their fascination - about a decade after they lost their pact. The Soviets Russians are even declared fans of using thermobaric warheads on anti-tank guided missiles and have this warhead on offer for about every ATGM design of theirs. Which is strange, as thermobaric munitions are said to be weather-dependent in their effect.

Infantry anti-tank weapons have also a hard time keeping up with their notional prey. The German Cold War Panzerfaust munitions badly lagged behind Soviet/Russian developments, for example (very late response to T-72, which then was already obsolete in face of ERA tiles and the anti-ERA warhead type matured later than active protection systems). 

The passive and active protection of main battle tanks and several other armoured vehicle types appears to de-value the majority of infantry anti-tank weapons and munitions. This is to be expected, after all said vehicles' crews are also facing weapons and munitions of much greater weight and bulk and the vehicle suppliers need to be able to justify their contracts even in face of these more capable threats. So-called infantry AT weapons are widely useful against infantry opposition, but usually useful or even reliable against modern tanks under favourable conditions only.
 

We should stop calling infantry weapons and munitions "anti-tank" or "AT". Let's prepare the appropriate mindset: These weapons and munitions project fragmentation, blast, illumination and smoke warheads and very rarely do they penetrate AFVs with shaped charge warheads. They're about warhead projection, not much about tanks.
We don't call military barbed wire (S-Draht) "anti-tank" either, even though it's relevant as obstacle and can entangle so badly as to stop a tank.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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