Kontakt-5 [Cold war]
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontakt-5

I was wondering how many tankers on here knew about this form of reactive armour? I've heard of ERA but never knew of its high success rate against the M829 APFSDS of the same time period and it's kind of shocked me.
For years my view on the possible 'Red Storm' scenario has been that NATO forces while being forced to fall back to the Rhine would be able to use Sabot rounds to pick off incoming Soviet armour divisions until the sheer force of Soviet numbers would threaten to overwhelm their defensive position and they'd have to fall back to the next one, fighting defensive line to defensive line until either the NATO line crumbles due to lack of supply (depending on the successes or failures of the Second Battle of the Atlantic and/or the successful completion of REFORGER prior to the conflict) or the Soviet advance falters due to over-reaching.
However, this little tidbit of info throws a rather large spanner in the works and would have robbed NATO of a vital tool in their armour divisions.
I mean, Soviet tank losses would still be high, no doubt, due to multiple conventional HEAT round impacts and careful defensive tactics, but this armour coupled with the sheer number of Soviet forces involved in the spearhead of any advance into West Germany...it would at the very least surely result in higher than expected casualties amongst NATO forces.
Kind of knocks Clancys finest work on its head somewhat, poor old SFC Mackall would have been in trouble.

What are peoples views on this? I've always been interested in the Cold War of the 1980s as it was the era I was born into, and some might argue the era in which the war had the greatest chance of happening since the Missile Crisis with the breakup of the Warsaw Pact giving the possibility for a hardline takeover in Moscow deposing Gorbachev and going to extremes to keep its territory intact. Just one scenario anyway.

I'm rambling a bit here, but I will end with a question and that is, what do people recommend for reading purposes for scenarios relating to the Soviet invasion of West Germany and the war that would result from it, I speak of novels such as 'Red Storm Rising' and 'The Third World War' by General Hackett, but ones which people here with more grounding in modern armoured warfare than I have found to be more to their understanding of the possibility of the outcome of events in that time.

The excess penetration of western first line APFSDS at the time of the tests was marginal at best...

The M829 only has a perforation of less than 480mm of zero obliquity RHA, because of the tendancy of the failure path to orient itself to the plate normal, the effective penetration is around 300mm of plate at 60 degrees (or the oft-quoted 600mm).

With the T72B, the protection level is so close to this that even an inert plate of the weight of the K5 brick (~35mm steel) is sufficient to offer nearly complete protection while the brick is intact. I am sure that the effectiveness of the K5 blocks exceeds the base armour level of the block, but the exaggerated effectiveness given in the reports is not necessary for the test results to be observed IMO.

I doubt that it is sufficient to immunise even a T72B against the later model APFSDS rounds though - the M829A1 can exceed 600mm of zero obliquity armour, or around a 370mm plate, or 740mm effective perforation.

Team Yankee By Harold Coyle is the best book you could possibly find, the events in the book are based on Hackett's Third World War (Coyle himself says so in the foreword of my copy.)

The Ten Thousand By Coyle follows a different idea of WWIII but is also an entertaining read, because it follows all levels of politics, from the President, to the General, to the man that executes his orders. Those are two in my collection, both great books. :yeah:

Thanks for the recommendations Sledgehammer, I'll keep an eye out for those, should be able to pick them up on Amazon with no probs when I have the money handy :salute::up:

Regarding the later makes of the M829, I agree that it would be able to penetrate Kontakt-5 however the A2 version didn't come into service until '93 when the US realised how effective Kontakt-5 was. So the Warsaw Pact forces would have had the upper hand on defensive measures in their armour divisions, although I suspect that reliability and supply issues may still have forced a limited advance, 'Seven Days to the River Rhine' comes to mind, although that would have been through a post-nuclear battlefield would have had been hellish fighting in NBC gear in constant buttoned down mode. Then again, it's quite likely that the Soviets would have used chemical weaponry even in a non-nuclear attack scenario, so NBC gear would still have to be used. :hmmm: