The Soviet Union decided to adopt a 50mm light mortar in 1937 as a company-level armament. The first such weapon they used was the RM-38, introduced in 1938. It was a complex design, with a gas venting system to adjust range (200m – 800m), a bipod specifically set to either 45 or 75 degrees, and a recoil buffering system. This was clearly too complex, and it was replaced by the RM-39 the next year. This remained a well-made mortar, but now had a freely adjustable bipod. However it quickly proved too complex and expensive and it was in turn replaced by the RM-40.
The RM-40 is a much more efficient (aka, cheap) design. It used simple stamped bipod legs and a heavy stamped baseplate. It still uses adjustable gas venting to set range and retains a simplified recoil buffer, but it is a much more quickly produced weapon. A 1941 model of completely different design did replace it though, and by 1943 the Soviet Union moved to 82mm mortars for better effectiveness.
The Soviet mortars were generally well liked by German troops who captured them, as they were significantly longer ranged than the German 50mm mortar. They were also captured in large numbers by the Finns, who used them as well but found them underpowered. In 1960 some 1,268 Soviet 50mm mortars of all models were sold by the Finnish Defense Forces to Interarms to be imported into the US. Some were registered and sold as Destructive Devices and some were deactivated and sold as dummies.
So what is the current US Army doctrine on mortars?
Mortars in future will be self-propelled, in AFVS, and very likely remote-controlled.
The classic “11-Charlie” two-man detachment with a 60mm or 81mm mortar is a thing of the past. Today, while they were getting set up, they’d be blown to dust bunnies by a drone.
An autoloading mortar of about 120mm, by comparison, could be mounted in something about the size of an M113. It could be positioned, fire a dozen rounds, and leave before even drones could react effectively.
The future of war will be automated.
clear ether
eon
I think you’re (somewhat…) wrong, in all that.
My belief is that you’re going to start seeing semi-autonomous ground drones mounting small automortars and machineguns in lieu of the classic MG/mortar teams. The tech is there; they just need to get off their ass and develop it, along with the networked fires controls they’ll need.
Ideally, infantry combat is going to consist of a couple of guys out there playing scout/fire control specialist with a literal shed-load of such handy little vehicles. Infantryman spots the enemy, inputs the necessary, and everything within reach fires on it. If they get quantum links going, as it looks very much like they will, such things will be effectively unjammable, and things are going to get very, very ugly for anyone. I envision a bunch of specialized little semi-autonomous ground and aerial drones doing most of the fighting. The majority of what we ought to term “anti-infantry” work will be by MG and mortar mounted systems, and the tank main gun function will be taken over mostly by disposable suicide drones carrying self-forging fragment warheads that are going to obliviate anything that’s armored enough to still be mobile… I honestly can’t see much role for anything that’s got as much signature as a modern tank or APC. Any of that crap is going to be like moving around with a huge-ass “Kill Me” sign, and you’re going to have to have itty-bitty little teams of stealthy bastards supported by a horde of semi-expendable drone assets.
War in the future is gonna suck.
“(…)can’t see much role for anything that’s got as much signature as a modern tank(…)”
We will see, but that was announced many times before, see https://youtu.be/p9M_9pqqeMo
All due respect, Daweo, but…
I’ve actually worked with those things, and I’m here to tell you that even the heaviest practical tank ain’t got enough armor to ever stand up to a self-forging fragment warhead. I’ve improvised some of those out of scrap steel and a wad of C4; the resultant effect went through close to six inches of steel armor, some concrete, and a whole lot of dirt. The charge itself was only about 10-15 kilos, easily within the carrying capacity of your average remote-control car. You get one of those within 15m of the targeted tank, and it’s game over for the tanker. Countermeasures? What the hell are you going to do when there’s ten of those things swarming your vehicle?
Die.
People have written off the tank before, but this time I really think it’s going to be over. The problem with the coming technology is that there’s really not all that much potential to counter it, other than “Not being there”.
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-high-fidelity-entangling-gates-remote.html
Right now, they’re demonstrating 30cm distances. If it scales, then you’re looking at the potential of linking dozens of swarmbots, all armed and working together to take down targets. No radio to jam, and from what I know of the science, there isn’t any such thing as interfering with quantum entangled comms. Supposing they get this to work, and it scales? You’re going to have to destroy each and every one of the members of the swarm to survive. How’s that going to work when the damn things are the size of someone’s RC car, and coming at you from all directions through whatever cover they can find? Not to mention, smaller warheads are more than easily made air-portable, soooo…
Yeah. Armor crewman? Screw that for a game of soldiers, as the Brits like to say. You’re basically going to be hauling around the target that gets you killed, with a small side-benefit of also bringing your portable crematory along for the ride…
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on all this crap, and I’m here to tell you, what’s coming down the pike towards us militates towards “War is getting so lethal as to make it a waste of time…” I mean, some of the bots may live through it all, but the humans using them? Too damn fragile, too damn visible. You can’t hide from what’s coming, and there isn’t much in the way of countermeasures that I can see working.
The quantum entanglement communications thing is simultaneously terrifying and absolutely amazing. Right now, it’s being done between qubit processors on a bench, but if they can make it scale, the damn things may well work at interstellar ranges. We just don’t know if there are limits; I keep hearing rumors that a lot of what the X-37 has been doing involves quantum comms experiments in deep space, and I’m really starting to wonder if there’s something actually behind that rumor. I never expected to hear they were making this stuff work at any scale, and with it going open-source about bench-scale stuff…? There’s something to all of this, and it’s going to revolutionize drone warfare and everything else.
Kirk;
IOW, “Second Variety” by Philip K. Dick, filmed under the title Screamers.
I’m SWAGing that you’re probably on the money. But those AAFVs are going to get built and deployed because armies are bad at learning from experience and worse at predicting what they’re going to get hit with next.
The Textron M5 is a good (or bad) example of the planners’ definition of a “drone”.
https://www.textronsystems.com/our-company/news-events/articles/news/textron-systems-completes-ripsaw-m5-vehicle-deliveries
It will probably be eliminated by something literally the size of a 1980s G.I. Joe tank.
https://www.actionfigure411.com/gijoe/images/mobat-motorized-battle-tank-2120.jpg
But not until after Ord and Mobility have bought about two or three thousand Textron toys and tried to use them.
cheers
eon
“(…)Countermeasures? What the hell are you going to do when there’s ten of those things swarming your vehicle?(…)”
Shot. Something akin to, but smaller to Goalkeeper CIWS should work, if way to reliable detect threats would be developed.
“(…)armies are bad at learning from experience(…)”
See for example Abrams Tanks Now Armed With Legendary Miniguns — But the Gunner Is Left Exposed Even to Shrapnel and Drones https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/abrams_tanks_now_armed_with_legendary_miniguns_but_the_gunner_is_left_exposed_even_to_shrapnel-15309.html
“(…)something literally the size of a 1980s G.I. Joe tank(…)”
I doubt in that. Ground tracked vehicles trench-crossing capability are proportional to length. So I presume 0,5 m wide and 0,5 m deep trench would be impassable terrain.
Wow, Kirk, someone really sold you a load of quantum hooey. That 30cm communication? It’s over a coaxial cable. And the whole business is inside a dilution refrigerator to bring it down to millikelvin temperatures (fractions of a degree above absolute zero; even lower temperatures than are needed to liquify helium), because that’s the way they roll in quantum computing; at higher temperatures qubits are quickly destroyed by noise. Dilution refrigerators aren’t cheap or lightweight.
Now, quantum physics does have spooky action-at-a-distance properties, with distant quantum-entangled particles affecting each other, even at speeds faster than the speed of light. But it also has the no-communication theorem, which says that this CANNOT be used to transmit useful information.
There is research into actual quantum communication, and it could have some useful security properties, but it has nothing to do with jam resistance. Indeed, it’s almost the exact opposite, extreme fragility: you send a single photon down a fiber-optic line, and anyone who tries to snoop on it destroys it. This is different from normal electrical and fiber-optic lines where you can easily tap in to them and pick up the signal without affecting it enough to matter. Now, an tapper could destroy the photon and emit one of his own, but that’s where the special quantum sauce comes in: he can’t measure enough to reproduce all the properties of the photon he destroyed, even if he has the same type of receiver that the legitimate destination has. (This is a basic property of quantum physics; for instance you can’t exactly measure the position and the momentum of an electron at the same time; measuring either one destroys the other.) I doubt if this special quantum sauce is really worth it, as compared to what we do these days (encrypt the signal), but it’s not crazy to research it and see how it works out in practice.
Anyway, if you have a fiber optic cable to your drone, you already have unjammable communications, and can do everything they’re already doing with fiber optic drones. And you do need the fiber optic cable; a single photon emitted into the air will just get lost in the noise.
@Norman Yarvin
I’m sure similar things would have been articulated back when Marconi and the rest of them were first doing the early spark-gap transmitters.
The thing I’m looking at is where it is going; it is early days, yet. Where and how long it takes to get there, nobody knows.
The point is, quantum communications are effectively beyond any known or hypothesized countermeasures. You can cut fiber-optics; you can jam radio; you can even jam or disrupt line-of-sight laser. Quantum entanglement, which wasn’t even a certainty a few years back, has nothing.
I keep hearing rumors about X-37 doing proof-of-concept work, and the smugness of my informants makes me wonder, because I’ve raised some of the same issues with them that you do. Seeing that stuff about them doing bare-bones bench testing that seems to prove the whole concept? I’m gonna guess that “they” are further along than we might like to think.
The implications of all that are worth thinking about, and among those are the reality that there’s basically no known countermeasure to remote operation using these techniques. None.
Of course, there were also no known countermeasures to radio waves, back in the day. Now, of course…? So, there might be hope. I’m just looking at the idea of unjammable comms, and carrying out the math to the logical conclusion. It’s certainly at least as likely as packing enough hardware in to make the damn things fully autonomous and affordable… Which would probably be equally bad.
Kirk, please. Quantum entanglement has been a proven fact since before either of us were born.
And sure, communications based on it are beyond countermeasures, because they don’t bloody exist in the first place. This is a proven theorem (as I mentioned, the no-communications theorem). Of course it is possible for proofs to have errors. But someone who found an error in such an important and widely-known theorem would be gunning for a Nobel Prize, not competing with all the charlatans who get money from the military based on false hopes and half-baked ideas.
I mean, you wax quite eloquent about the deficiencies of small arms procurement. Do you really think the situation gets _better_ when it comes to technologies that are even more inscrutable to the average person, and thus even farther away from democratic oversight?
There will always be a place for the human, trained, disciplined, versatile, killer. The industrial battlefield, or the state supplied suppression apparat, will have all these toys. But, at some point, it comes down to human on human, and there one had better have learned the arts and sciences of killing with what you were born with. Ok, cyborgs and androids may come, but it still comes down to humans. We were given sovereignty, lost it to a snake, won it back by a human, and the endgame will be human vs. human. Now get back to training.
You keep up with robotics technology? Didn’t think so.
Yeah, the British cavalry and the German Uhlans were exquisitely trained, in 1913. For Napoleon’s wars.
The thing is, I don’t see any amount of training that’s going to compensate for drones that can fly into your fighting position, find you, personally, and then kill you. That’s actual “bullet with your name on it” come to life, there.
Facing the facts, the nature of war has just changed profoundly, and not a one of us knows where the hell it is going.
The “human” one will be up against is Argus-eyed and effectively in dozens of places at once. The guy in the field will be bereft of that advantage. The only good news, if such it be, is that robotics technology will replace live soldiers before the middle of this century. Tomorrow’s “warrior” will be a wanker with a real life Sony PlayStation and nothing at all of an Achilles or an Audie Murphy.
The concept of the fixed angle and adjustable vent was possibly from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granatnik_wz._36
It appears that the Japanese had much more success with the Type 89 50mm than either the Germans or Russians had with theirs.
That’s probably because the Type 89 grenade discharger was not treated as a traditional mortar that required a minimum of three people to operate. The Type 89 could be operated by one person. That alone made things nastier for whomever was on the receiving end, as retaliation would be more difficult to perform. All the grenadiers have to do is pop off a few shots each and then run before their surviving victims can even think of barraging them back with crew-served mortars.
The Type 89 was more along the lines of a modern 40mm grenade launcher than it was the classic mortar. Even a “commando mortar” was more complex than the Type 89, and required rather more training. Friend of a friend had a Type 89 that his father, who would have been more my grandfather’s age, brought back from WWII. They’d spent some time working up a means to reload the Type 94 training rounds that they had, and the family would spend time on the 4th of July doing “mortar shoots” with them. My informant related to me that it was literally “child’s play” to get good accuracy with the Type 89, soooo… Yeah. I don’t think it’s much harder to master than the M203 or M79.
“(…)Japanese(…)more success with the Type 89 50mm than(…)Russians had with theirs.”
They were fighting in much different environment. In tropical zone with rare to none roads they were limited to what they could bring. See KOKODA TRAIL for details.
On the other hand most areas where Red Army operated was more logistic friendly, with catch than 50 mm mortars were in high regard among Soviet partisans, which avoided taking heavier weapon as it would cripple their mobility at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamps_of_Belarus