Feral Jundi

   This latest conflict in Israel has highlighted an interesting weapon.  Enter the 122 mm Grad Missile, or the 9K132 Grad-P rocket.  Why is this different from the Kassam rockets and other homemade stuff?  The range and lethality.  It can go 20 plus kilometers and it is a factory made rocket.  That means more Israeli deaths, and someone outside of the country is getting these things in.  It could be Hezbollah, Syria, Iran (their Arash rocket-see article below), Egypt, Russia… Who knows? But they have them, and they are using them.  The most recent attacks were Grad rockets, and these longer range rockets were probably the tipping point(as well as just launching a massive amount of homemade missiles) for the recent activity.  Just check out how many attacks have increased over the years.-Matt 

Edit: According to news sources, these are Chinese made Grad rockets. 

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9K132 “Grad-P”(Wikipedia)

Single-round man-portable launcher, which can be reloaded and used again. The rocket itself is a 122mm fin-stabilized rocket, armed with any of the warheads used on BM-21 rockets. The weapon is not often used by the Russian military, but is popular with paramilitary and guerrilla force.

Egypt(Wikipedia)

The Egyptians domestically manufacture the rockets “Sakr-36” and “Sakr-18” with a respective range of 36 and 18 km. Rather than a standard HE-Frag round, the Egyptian military prefers a 23 kilogram cluster munition, which can be extremely effective against lightly armored equipment and troop concentrations. Both rockets, as well as the original Soviet models of course, are fired by locally manufactured rocket launchers like the RL-21 (copy of BM-11) and RC-21 (copy of BM-21, similar to the Hadid HM20). The Helwan Machine Tools Company also produces portable systems with one, three, four and eight launch tubes.

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The discovery of BM-21 components indicates that the Palestinians can now buy, or build, more accurate, and longer ranged, rockets. The 150 pound, 122mm Russian designed BM-21 rocket is nine feet long and has a range of 20 kilometers and a 45 pound warhead. Developed in the late 1930s, the 122mm rocket is normally fired in large numbers from many launchers at spread-out targets.That’s because the rockets are unguided. Aim lots of them at a target and you’ll hit something. Aim a few of them at something, and you usually won’t, But the rockets are made by many countries, are relatively easy to get, and favored by terrorists for attacks that terrorize, rather than actually do any damage.

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