Some Russian troops in Ukraine apparently have built their own mortars. It was a very, very bad idea.
A video that circulated on social media on Thursday depicts a pair of Russian soldiers dropping 82-millimeter rounds into what, at first glance, might appear to be standard-issue infantry mortars.
Look more closely. The mortar tubes are simple metal pipes, with attached handles, badly welded to a hinged base. There presumably is a firing pin at the base of the tube.
Why Russian soldiers would craft their own mortars is unclear. Maybe the Russians are running low on purpose-made mortars, just like they also are running low on modern tanks and fighting vehicles.
In any event, it’s clear why the Russians shouldn’t make their own mortars. Besides being wildly inaccurate, a do-it-yourself mortar is extremely dangerous to the operator. Any flaw in the tube could cause the round to explode inside of it—with catastrophic consequences for the shooter.
It’s possible the Russians did have access to standard-issue 2B14 82-millimeter mortars but wanted something more portable: what soldiers call a “commando mortar.”
Where most infantry mortars require a crew of at least two to haul, assemble and operate—and a 2B14 normally needs four crew—a commando mortar is sized for one soldier. The Soviet army issued a 37-millimeter commando mortar during World War II. Today many armies issue 51-millimeter or 60-millimeter commando mortars.
But not the Russians. The smallest mortars in Russian service fire 82-millimeter bombs. This might reflect tradition. Where in many armies, the operators of the smallest infantry mortars indeed are infantry, in the Russian army all mortar crews belong to the artillery corps.
That doesn’t mean the mortars don’t directly support small units—they do. The Russians’ 82-millimeter mortars usually take aim in the late stages of an infantry assault. “The final advance is covered by infantry mortars and then grenades are used before entering the target position,” Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds noted in a May report for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
It’s not hard to see how a smaller, more portable mortar could be useful in the stress and chaos of a close battle. A single soldier could kneel, slam his tube in the ground, eyeball the angle and pop off a few rounds.
But armies that have embraced this spray-and-pray method of indirect fires wisely have produced factory-grade mortar tubes that are clean, straight and rated for hard use.
Improvising a commando mortar out of construction materials is likely to produce a tube that is dirty, warped and fragile. It takes just one malfunction to blow up the mortar and its unfortunate operator.
Read the full article here