Will the Real Milan 2 Please Stand Up?

By Jim Naughton

WILL THE REAL MILAN 2 PLEASE STAND UP?

A regrettable Team Yankee tendency to hand-wave the difficulty of introducing new systems in the middle of a come-as-you-are war has been reinforced by NATO FORCES, the latest offering in the World War III-Team Yankee universe.  The source of this is apparently customer pressure to jump into ‘90s technology to counter the appearance of Soviet ERA.  Where once tanks immune to defensive fire were the sole province of NATO players, now the Soviets had them too.

So Battlefront has introduced several upgraded missiles as retrofits to the existing lists.  The problem is that some of these missiles were the output of several years of research only made possible by the compromise of Soviet KONTAKT-1 technology following the end of the Cold War.  Others would require retrofit of surviving combat vehicles with new launchers, and the last would require missiles to be sent back to the United States to return a couple of months later – missiles that already were in critically short supply.

I want to clarify what actually existed in 1985, and show how unlikely these changes were.  Players with a historical bent can choose to have ‘mutual and balanced forces’ based on actual 1985 technology.

Team Yankee is a fun game (emphasis: game, not simulation) that touches the high points of combat in the 1980s without getting overly complicated.  It started as a clash between the Soviet army and the US Army and frankly produced a balanced game that represented 1985 fairly.  Three Abrams M1 tanks could square off against six T72s and a coin-flip would decide the issue.  The Improved TOW missile fired off the M901 TOW variant of the M113 came in two-packs and was vulnerable to tank cannon so were not overwhelming.

Then Iron Maiden introduced the MILAN missile, and the game took a new direction.  UK infantry units got the ability to repel tank assaults thanks to Carl Gustav, and could be augmented with MILAN missile teams that could dig in.  A T72 firing at a MILAN mounted on a FV432 was roughly equal with an encounter with an M901.  But dug-in MILANs essentially were invulnerable.  Why?  First, the Mistaken Target Rule allows a two-thirds chance of shifting a hit to another team.

Then that pesky infantry save allows a two-thirds chance of surviving a hit.  The Brutal rule reduces that save to a net of 45%, still substantial.  And I must roll firepower if the unit is dug in.  Even a 10-tank unit is unlikely to kill a MILAN team – it will average four hits on dug-in infantry.  Plenty of room to false target to other infantry teams in the big Irish Guards units until the other teams are dead.  The odds of killing a MILAN team with a brutal tank cannon are 4% per shot.  Using the heavy machine gun while stationary at close range is 3.5% (about 1.2% per ROF).

With an essentially invulnerable AT=21 platform on the table, it’s a small wonder the Red Horde ran to BMP swarms.  Personally, I went with T55AM2.

Here’s the thing about MILAN.  The MILAN was tested and resoundingly rejected by the US Army in the late ‘70s.  According to Picatinny and Redstone, it was too heavy to replace DRAGON (which was going out of production) with no compensating advantage in armor penetration and too anemic after penetration to replace ground-mount TOWs.  The only advantage over DRAGON was more wire.

DRAGON is AT=18 in the game and basic TOW is AT=18 in FOAN.  Smelling something fishy I went looking.  Sure enough, I found that MILAN had copied the ‘probe’ from the ITOW and started production late in 1984.  By August 1985, approximately 1 missile existed for each launcher.  Of course, most of the deliveries by the TY campaign start date of August 4, 1985, were to French Army units, so BF ‘anticipated’ the deployment of the new MILAN 2 missile to BAOR and Bundeswehr by a couple of years.  This fuzzy thinking has been coloring the game since; just because a thing existed as a prototype or was in low-rate initial production does not equate to a capability.

Giving BF the benefit of the doubt, my belief is that they called the new NATO missile ‘just MILAN’ to avoid confusing their customers.

Now along comes ‘MILAN-2’ in NATO Forces.  Really?  The new missile outperforms TOW-2.  Say again?  Yet BF’s write-up confidently declares (pg 150) that the new missile has a whopping 550mm of penetration.  The unclassified parameter for TOW-2 penetration is approximately 900mm.

The declassified ITOW penetration is 650mm.  MILAN 2 has no technology tricks beyond a probe, just like ITOW.  The probe takes advantage of the fact, discovered by improved high-speed framing cameras in the late ’60s and early ‘70s, that both the shaped charge jet and the shaped charge slug contributed to penetration.  Increasing standoff increased overall penetration by about 50 percent.

What BF has done (again) is anticipate the deployment of MILAN 2T or even MILAN 3.  MILAN 2T (1993) and MILAN 3 (1996) use tandem shape charges to (only) defeat reactive armor.  Tandem shape charges evoke an image of the Army’s LACROSSE missile, with two enormous shape charges designed to penetrate submarine pressure hulls and battleship armor in the ‘50s…the last hurrah of the coastal artillery.  But on missiles like the MILAN and TOW, the reality is a small precursor shape charge that adds little to penetration of actual armor.  The precursor charge ideally burns out the explosive in the ERA without starting a detonation, allowing the main charge to rip through the ERA with being countered by the explosion.

BF did the same with HOT missiles, BF labeling the 1985 edition just ‘HOT’ and now using a time machine to summon the HOT-3 from 1998 and labeling it HOT-2.  The basic HOT missile (now HOT-1) always had a large shape charge so even the basic version would rate AT=22 or 23.

BF has unfortunately painted itself into a corner with the way it treats ERA.  An ERA is SA=16 and the larger of FA=16 or whatever the tank would normally rate, except for KONTAKT-5 second generation ERA which apparently gives the T80U a whopping +1 to its FA rating (my calculations and R&D experience tell me that the T80B was approximately FA=19 in the BF system.  Only BF knows for sure).

A better way would have been to call ERA =+8 to all armor vs. HEAT and say tandem warheads neutralized it.  That way we would not have the ridiculous spectacle of a MILAN 2T with no greater penetration vs basic armor than the real MILAN 2 burning through the front armor of an Abrams M1A1 HC (600mm armor equivalent vs APFSDS plus a bonus for ‘heavy armor’ – 1300mm vs HEAT.  A long way from 550mm).

Unlike MILAN 2T, the TOW-2 took a different approach.  The warhead is bigger with more explosives and a longer probe than ITOW.   The main reasons that the Army adopted TOW-2 were the evaluation of the calculated effect of the ‘Super Dolly Parton” composite armor package appearing on T72B (which the CIA called M1983) and the observation of the development of the Shtora countermeasure system.  NOT ERA.  The resulting dual-lamp tracking system with coded signaling could not be fired from existing launchers. There were differences in hardware, software, and firmware.

An entirely new launcher, the M220, was required, replacing the M151 launcher.  The first 3,300 M2/M3 Bradleys built could not fire the TOW-2 until they were retrofitted.  The latest FY85 Bradley production (delivered starting late in 1986) was the first M2A1/M3A1 with the capability.  The M901 TOW vehicle went through the same upgrade problem.  So while TOW-2 missiles were available in 1984, the only units that could fire them were the 82^nd Airborne and 101^st Airmobile Division’s ground-mount TOW launchers, and then only in selected units (that had received the new launchers during Operational Test and Evaluation).  A retrofit program for M901 TOW vehicles and M2/M3 Bradley absorbed all the launcher production for at least 18 months.

In the 1980s US missile production was 12,000 TOWs per year.  A Corps with three heavy divisions had a BASIC LOAD requirement of 9,000.  The XVIII Airborne Corps and I Corps had similar requirements, and the PACOM divisions somewhat less.  Then there are reserves and National Guard, not to mention the USMC.  The USAEUR requirement for TOW-2 was just being filled as the TOW-2A came out in 1988-89.  The TOW-2A introduced the precursor shape charge. Put a different way, there were not any TOW-2 to be casually issued to allies.  Ever.  More telling, the dual-lamp capability was restricted from foreign release, like DU ammo, for many years (Congress passed a law restricting TOW technology).

Bringing me to DRAGON-2.  The DRAGON-2 were not new production missiles.  DRAGON production STOPPED in 1978 at McDonnell Douglas and 1980 at Raytheon.  The DRAGON-2 program took existing missiles, dismantled the warhead, and rebuilt it with a probe.  The only way you could get DRAGON-2 was to send the missile back to the USA and have its warhead replaced.  Not to put too much reality into the game, you can’t do this once you shoot it.

The US Army declined to improve the DRAGON in 1981, and the USMC reluctantly went on to improve DRAGON on its own nickel as an interim solution when the Advanced Antiarmor Weapons System Medium (AAWS-M eventually Javelin) crashed and burned in 1985.  After two years of intense engineering effort, the first conversion was in 1987.

There was no pile of DRAGONs to put into this program.  Every DRAGON Crew Launch Unit (CLU) was ideally given six missiles as its basic load.  The total Army requirement for these missiles was 250,000 – never produced.  Actual DRAGON production was just shy of 85,000 missiles with at least 12,000 sold as FMS (the Dutch got 350 CLUs and 2,300 missiles in their initial buy; 70 CLUs and a small number of additional missiles later).  After deducting FMS and 17,000 purchased by USMC, the Army originally had 55,000 and this number steadily decreased by reliability testing/demonstration firing.

In 1985 there were 42,000 missiles allocated to basic load and 8,000 left in sustainment – roughly 7 missiles per each of 7,000 Army CLU.  The old Gun Lobby bumper sticker about ‘cold, head hands’ comes to mind in categorizing the likelihood of getting DRAGONs back from deployed units to replace warheads after the shooting started.  And 15 days into the war, USAEUR was out of DRAGONs.  (This was why many units in USAEUR tried to hang onto 90mm recoilless rifles, and other Army units authorized DRAGONs never had them).

To summarize, BF has reached into the mid 90’s to provide the MILAN and HOT an upgrade that couldn’t have existed for at least a year, more probably two, after the first CAPTURED Soviet ERA tank made its way to the laboratories, authorized TOW-2 for units that didn’t have the upgraded launchers, and indulged in the sheerest of fantasy by allowing virtual DRAGON missiles to transit the ocean two ways and provided that upgraded capability to launchers that would be out of ammo before the R&D on the upgrade was complete.

Armed with this knowledge, gamers with a historical bent or desiring a historically limited technology base can confidently exclude these upgrades (and for that matter, the TOW-2 upgrade in the World War III Team Yankee American book.  And PACT/Arab players using T72M as well as T55s can take comfort in NATO players wasting points.