Russia Bolted An Anti-Sub Launcher To A Truck & Braced It With Lumber

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While back-and-forth battles rage in muddy, snowy eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian marines reportedly are expanding their bridgehead on the left back of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, where the weather is slightly warmer but no less wet.

Lacking relief and apparently struggling with resupply, Russian troops around the bridgehead seem to be getting desperate. With more and more of their tanks, fighting vehicles and rocket-launchers falling victim to Ukraine’s speedy first-person-view drones, the Russians in the south reportedly have crafted an improvised rocket-launcher that might be one of the most awkward weapons in Russia’s 22-month wider war on Ukraine.

It’s an unarmored transport truck with a launcher for naval anti-submarine rockets bolted to its back.

The truck with its crudely-attached RBU-6000 launcher appears in a photo that circulated on social media last week. It’s not the first improvised RBU-6000 vehicle the Russians have fielded, but it definitely is the worst.

In September, a photo appeared on social media depicting an MT-LB tractor with an RBU-6000 attached to its hull. The armored MT-LB at least is a reasonably solid platform for a launcher. On the truck, the attached RBU-6000 apparently is braced with lumber.

The RBU-6000 is a 1961 update of a British innovation from World War II: the hedgehog, a bank of 24 65-pound mortars that warships would fire up to 900 feet ahead of the ships as they ran down Axis submarines. The mortars sank straight down and exploded on impact.

The RBU-6000 is a much more capable weapon. Its 12 250-pound RGB-60 rockets—each 213 millimeters in diameter—range more than three miles. While not terribly useful in an age of anti-submarine helicopters and submarine-fired cruise missiles, the RBU-6000 still equips most large Russian warships.

On land, the RBU-6000 basically functions as a very large mortar that’s capable of firing salvos. It’s not exactly useless—nor is it unprecedented. The British and Australian armies used hedgehogs in ground-to-ground roles during World War II. Current Russian doctrine allows for the use of ship-mounted RBU-6000s in the shore-bombardment role.

But don’t count on the RBU-6000 working very well from an armored tractor, to say nothing of working well from a lumber-braced truck. In its naval role, the RBU-6000 integrates with the Burya fire-control system. On a ground vehicle, it’s likely to be manually aimed … and wildly inaccurate.

Considering the havoc Ukrainian forces—FPV drones in particular—are wreaking on Russia’s purpose-built, fully-integrated and armored rocket-launchers around Krynky, the truck-mounted RBU-6000 probably won’t just fail to hit anything of value. It also will be extremely vulnerable to Ukrainian air-attack.

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