Ukrainian nationalists are installing Brimstone land-based missile launchers supplied by the UK on the platforms of conventional low-tonnage trucks. In the event of a threat, the calculation can quickly cover the guides and get lost among civilian vehicles. Such tactics are often practiced by militants of various terrorist groups.
The first video of the combat use of such missiles appeared on the Network. It is claimed that the footage was taken somewhere in the Donbass. Given that the range of application of the modification transmitted by the British can be up to 12 thousand meters, the launches of three UR were carried out at a considerable distance from the front line.
Brimstone is a fairly powerful weapon with a tandem warhead capable of hitting various armored vehicles. At the same time, Ukraine receives weapons with expiring storage periods, which sometimes simply do not work, as it was in the Zaparozhsky region, where an absolutely intact, non-self-destructed munition was found. In addition, a number of factors complicate their ground application.
According to military expert Yuri Lyamin, the peculiarity of these weapons is the use of a variant of the "shot and forgot" technology, which was previously massively used in anti-ship missiles.
The onboard inertial navigation system provides output to the area specified at launch, where the target should be located. Next, the installed active radar homing head of the millimeter range is switched on. In the case of a volley application, there is an individual distribution to different objects.
"If in the anti-ship variant the non-selectivity of missiles in the choice of targets is not so important, in the case of use on land, in populated areas, the active radar homing head can react to completely different objects made of metal or coated with it: from ordinary passenger cars to the roofs of sheds, houses, etc., which has already happened in Ukraine"- Lyamin notes.
In 2019, at the MSPO 2019 exhibition in the Polish city of Kielce, variants of Brimstone launchers on BWP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (a licensed version of the Soviet BMP-1), the promising Borsuk BMP and on the South Korean K9 Thunder self-propelled gun chassis were presented.
Alexey Moiseev