Battlefield DIY – the homemade armoured vehicles fighting Isis



Kurdish YPG soldiers are battling the well-equipped militants in Syria with crudely modified tractors and trucks, part of a long tradition of wartime armoured improvisation

If you think 21st-century warfare is all remote-controlled drones, consider the Kurdish fighters attempting to take on Isis essentially using homemade armoured vehicles. They have taken tractors, trucks and dated armoured personnel carriers and crudely modified them with extra protection.
The result is a mishmash of improvised battle wagons, sometimes with wacky colour schemes. Pictures of the vehicles have drawn some mockery on the internet, from people who presumably have never had to ingeniously cobble together protective vehicles as they go up against well-equipped Isis militants.
But the ideas behind some of the peshmerga fighters’ vehicles aren’t as outlandish as they seem. One looks like a bulldozer wrapped in sheets of metal. “Armies like the Israeli Defence Force, for example, do operate armoured bulldozers because they need to do engineering tasks in exposed areas,” says Peter Felstead, editor of IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly. Another is a Russian-designed armoured personnel carrier, which has had side flaps added to protect the wheels. “They’re going to be less likely to have their wheels shot out from under them. They probably won’t have access to spares in the battlefield.”



“It’s part of a long tradition of improvised armoured vehicles,” says David Willey, curator at the Tank Museum in Dorset. Cars, trucks and tractors have all been armoured. In the first world war, Rolls Royce cars were sent out to retrieve downed airmen. “These guys started putting armour plate on their cars,” says Willey. “That leads to the Landships Committee and they start building a tank for the first time. This type of improvisation has happened through desperation at other times as well.” In Britain, during the second world war, cars and delivery trucks were armoured with oak planks and welded metal plates.
Tanks and armoured vehicles, says Willey, give people on their side a morale boost and “have a presence and a fear factor over and above the weapons they carry”. These DIY vehicles won’t offer much protection against rocket-propelled grenades, he says, but should withstand machine-gun fire, though this depends. “Hopefully, somebody stood there and fired an AK-47 at it to see that it’s proof against something.”
Some look more effective than others, says Felstead. “A lot of the armour looks quite heavy, which could make them slower and less manoeuvrable. The visibility doesn’t look good. But if you look at the kind of territory these guys are fighting in, a lot of it is very flat and featureless and what this does is give them a mobile base of fire that has some degree of protection.”


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Ketika perang berakhir, akankah kendaraan2 ala Mad Max ini akan berakhir di museum atau dibesi-tuakan atau malah membuka lembar baru sebagai alutista batel propen????

sumber:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...isis-peshmerga
[URL="https://S E N S O Rwar-is-boring/check-out-these-homemade-kurdish-tanks-86459f92e161"]https://S E N S O Rwar-is-boring/check-out-these-homemade-kurdish-tanks-86459f92e161[/URL]
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...d/para/ypg.htm
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