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The scourge of asymmetric warfare is undoubtedly the improvised explosive device and although British Forces picked up a wealth of experience in dealing with this threat in Northern Ireland during the seventies and eighties it is fair to say that they took their eye off ball during the recent Iraq campaign and in the early days of the Afghanistan deployment as the IED quickly became the ’weapon of choice’ of the technologically mismatched insurgent.
While the attacker in a low intensity conflict zone will not have much of the expensive technology and equipment available to Western armies, assembling low technology homemade bombs from either munitions left over from previous conflicts or even from commercially available substances which can be combined and crafted into the deadliest of weapons, will not be beyond him and can be a great force equaliser.
Iraq, a country awash with surplus munitions following the 2003 Coalition invasion and the subsequent toppling of Saddam Hussein’s autocratic regime, was the ideal breeding ground for IED design and it was not long before heavy armoured vehicles were falling prey to simple devices which produced explosively formed penetrators that could punch through their defences like a hot knife through butter. As Twenty-first century insurgency is effectively pan-global, it was therefore not long before the lessons learned in the Garden of Eden migrated to the Green Zone of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand Province and casualty levels started rising as a result.
The bulk of explosion casualties and fatalities suffered in Helmand were originally caused by devices intended for foot patrols or occasional mine strikes from legacy munitions left over from the Soviet invasion of the eighties, but as the Taliban became more knowledgeable of British tactics and routines, they increasingly targeted transport and resupply vehicles. The recent Road Warriors television documentary series covering British Combat Logistic Patrols brought home just how omnipresent the IED threat is for routine vehicle movements and the recent revelation that the Grenadier Guards Battlegroup had encountered over one thousand IEDs in a five month period during Operation HERRICK 11 merely hammered home the point.
To combat the IED and landmine threat in Afghanistan the UK Ministry of Defence has started pumping large sums of money into the supply of heavily protected vehicles, such as Mastiff, Ridgback and Coyote, plus it has introduced better protected light vehicles such as Jackal and Jackal 2 as well as continuously up-armouring its Land Rover WMIK fleet as new materials and concepts are developed. However just adding more armour does not completely defeat the IED, as all the attacker needs to do is make the device bigger and better to compensate for new protective measures; indeed even sixty tonne main battle tanks are not impervious to the right IED.
Two maxims which hold true in the combat zone are that the devil usually has the best tunes and the insurgent only needs to get lucky once while the soldier needs luck on his side every time. If conventional forces introduce a new counter to an established threat, the insurgent can usually find a solution to defeat this much faster than the designer could put the counter through the necessary trials and evaluation procedures to bring it into service and the attacker also has the luxury of being able to experiment safe in the knowledge that he has little to lose if his attempt is unsuccessful and everything to gain if his experiment works.
A precise breakdown of UK fatality and serious casualty statistics attributable to IED attacks rather than small arms engagements is not easy to source and it is equally difficult to decipher how many IED incidents in the fatality and casualty categories targeted vehicle-borne or foot soldiers. However obituaries and publicised multiple death reports indicate the seriousness of the problem.
To put the figures in context, during six years of British military operations in Iraq a total of 401 fatalities and very seriously injured or seriously injured casualties accumulated. In Afghanistan in slightly over four years to mid-May 2010 the total had already reached 280 fatalities and 366 Very /Seriously Injured with over 100 and 150 respectively of these totals occurring in 2009 and with the tallies for the first four months of 2010 running pro rata.
While up-armouring vehicles is one part of the solution to the IED and the landmine, with V-shaped hull design to divert the blast, sacrificial wheel stations, axles and external stowage bins to dissipate effect, and incorporation of latest armour technology to prevent ballistic penetration also all playing their part in increased survivability, the acceleration and deceleration effects of an explosion on the body of the occupants must additionally be taken into consideration. Indeed often trauma injuries are much more of a threat to the life of those travelling inside an armour protected hull than shrapnel and sometimes it is even better to be in an open-topped and lightly armoured but carefully designed vehicle than in what may well be a heavily armoured but poorly designed bouncing steel box.
The effect on an armoured vehicle of a large IED or landmine blast, and in Afghanistan IEDs are often crafted from more than one anti-armour mine rigged in tandem, can be the same as driving it off a one hundred foot cliff meaning the organ damage and skeletal injuries are similar. To some extent the forces can be like those suffered in a helicopter crash, and they can far exceed those of an ejector seat bail-out where the forces are tailored to minimise spinal compression as much as possible, but unlike in aviation incidents an IED or mine strike has to cope with double impact; first the explosion punches the vehicle and occupant into the air and, shortly afterwards, there is a hefty secondary impact as the vehicle hits the ground again.
There are two schools of thought over how to deal with these forces, with some opting for a lightweight solution along the lines of crashworthy helicopter seating and others preferring a heavyweight solution involving a more solid seat with built-in damping or blast attenuation. The former offers crucial space and weight savings but tends to be more suitable for lightweight vehicles where there design is already dissipating much of the blast and the latter is more ideal for solid heavy vehicles which are likely to be lifted and dropped piecemeal.
The British vehicle class currently being evaluated for blast effectiveness is the Light Protected Patrol Vehicle (LPPV) and two manufacturers, Team Ocelot and Supacat, are both still in the running for this with prototypes under trials at time of writing, though several other manufacturers have now dropped out. Battlespace asked John Lake of Ricardo, who are teamed with Force Protection Europe on the Ocelot, and Nick Jones of Supacat, the designer of the SPV400 contender, for their thoughts on blast seating.
Ricardo are the designers of the improved blast protection on the in-service Land Rover Defender WMIK (Weapons Mount Installation Kit) variants currently in frontline service in Iraq and it is their design of lightweight mesh seating which that vehicle utilises. For the current MoD LPPV blast tests, which are tailored to a 50th percentile soldier weighing 78 kilos plus kit, John says, ”Team Ocelot feel the lightweight mesh design combined with the custom-designed vehicle’s inherent properties may be the ideal solution, though Ocelot has been designed from the outset to accept any user-preferred seat currently on the market.”
Jankel BLASTech
Supacat are the designers of the Jackal M-WMIK which is in widespread service in Helmand and their Coyote 6x6 version has also been procured by UK MoD as a logistic vehicle for Afghanistan; both vehicles are fitted with Jankel blast attenuated seating. Nick told Battlespace that Supacat looked at current British and American offerings in this field and found some to be good in some areas and some to be good in other areas but none appear to be spot-on yet although he feels they are all very nearly there so the company is still not firmly committed for LPPV; however they have opted for Jankel seats for their blast test vehicles. If there was sufficient time Nick would like to take up the chalice and design his own seat to address all problem areas, but as test data shows blast effect to not be a precise science and getting the best compromise out to Afghanistan is a priority, he won’t be entering that market quite yet.
Jankel seats are already saving British lives in Iraq and, due to open tender procedure reporting, it is no great secret that certain Australian units are using them too, plus the company has been down-selected by US Tank Automotive Command (TACOM) into the last three suppliers for the Hum-vee replacement seating contract, so Battlespace asked their designer Dan Crosby for his thoughts on the current state of play. Dan firmly believes that going down the aviation crashworthy route is not the way to go as that option cannot effectively deal with both the lateral forces and the acceleration plus it does not provide effective secondary damping for the almost equally important downwards impact.
Like all manufacturers Jankel realise they have to make their designs competitive but they also realise that they have to reduce weight to ensure valuable payload capacity is not used up while still trying to find a solution that will be effective for the 95th percentile soldier rather than just the 50th percentile, as though soldiers may wear uniform their size and shape these days is most certainly not uniform so seating must equally cope with the lightest member of a Female Engagement Team forward-deployed in Helmand and the burliest of Royal Marine 81mm mortar carriers.
The Jankel BLASTech (Blast Limiting & Attenuation Seating Technology) family consists of four siblings developed to enhance a military vehicle’s protection level by increasing the survivability factor and decreasing the severity of injury to seated occupants when it strikes an IED or landmine. The primary types are F-series and R-series, which are designed to be floor-mounted or roof/rear-mounted respectively for the likes of MRAP and Humvee or Stryker, E-series for engineering vehicles and plant such as the in-service JCB Talisman, and X-series bespoke designs for the likes of FV432 Bulldog, CVR(T) and Abrams main battle tank. Both F- and R- are adjustable fore and aft plus for elevation and the former can also be rotated. The E- offers similar properties to the F- but has inbuilt air ride suspension for excavators and the like which have no suspension of their own. The X- can feature a fold-down back for limited space access and egress or substantial elevation travel to allow turret crew to alternately travel under-armour or head and shoulders out while still provided with the same degree of blast mitigation.
Though catering for different requirements, all Jankel seats feature patented Automatic Weight Adjustment that sets the mitigation cartridge to optimise protection for the person sitting in the seat rather than being set merely to protect those who fall into the 50th percentile mass test category. Jankel’s patented design also offers a reset system that recovers mitigation following the primary event in time to cope with the secondary or slam-down event.
Universal and Creation seats
Another design of blast seat, which the designers claim to be radical in design and offering significant capabilities and outstanding performance, has recently been unveiled by manufacturer Universal Engineering (Charlestown) in partnership with defence vehicle design house Creation. Designed to help mitigate potential body shock, organ and skeletal injuries in the event of a protected platform encountering a roadside bomb or IED, the new seat’s test results suggest that benefits may be achieved across a wide range of platforms at different gross weights, configurations and levels of protection.
Universal and Creation loaded their test seats to simulate a 95th percentile male soldier with full body armour and weighing 120kg. Data, including measurement of acceleration at the seat frame mounting points as well as at the seat base and damper assembly interface, was monitored and will be used to correlate further modelling, FEA (finite element analysis) and future predictive engineering at escalating blast levels.
Explaining the appearance on the scene of the new seat Universal Engineering’s Projects Director, John Scott, stated: “During the evolution of our already highly acclaimed Ranger protected vehicle, for which Creation is our automotive design partner, we identified an urgent industry need to take a completely fresh look at seating accommodation. The result is a radical new blast seat, which sets new standards for occupant safety and survivability. It is now production ready and will be marketed by Universal Engineering. We have also created an engineering support capability with Creation, to assist with any design, installation engineering or associated requirements for other platforms and applications”.
Creation UK Managing Director, Bill Davis says, “A huge amount of attention has been rightly devoted to the evolution of protected occupant cells for armoured vehicles. Our collaborative blast seat programme with Universal Engineering has now taken that a stage further by reassessing the actual seating arrangement within the vehicle. We have been able to further mitigate the risk of serious injury, particularly to the spine, by looking at how blast shock is transferred to the body through the seat structure.
“Creation has in-depth experience of specialist orthopaedic and osteopathic seat design through one of our businesses, Iliac Design. This new seat bucket has hydraulically damped and upwardly limited vertical free movement on its mounting frame to mitigate blast acceleration; a feature which we are calling ‘linear energy absorbing system’ (LEAS). The frame – not the seat bucket itself – is mounted to the side of the vehicle and there is no fastening or rigid fixture between the floor of the vehicle and the underside of the seat. In the event of a blast therefore, the seat will rise in a controlled ascent, mitigating any severe shock being transmitted to the spine through the seat structure.”
Until recently the UK MoD may have giving the impression of having forgotten some of the lessons learned about countering asymmetric threats on the streets of Northern Ireland in the fourth quarter of the last decade and consequently may have seemed a little slow of the blocks with blast seating to counter the effects of IED and landmine attacks, but now back in its stride the UK defence design and manufacturing industry seems to be not only on track but maybe even offering our American military cousins effective solutions to their problems rather than relying on them to sort out ours.
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