Why Triple-Strand Concertina?
I commanded tanks during my time in the U.S. Army, and a tank can absolutely crush anything on the battlefield. We had ammunition for bunker, buildings, and field fortifications. So jersey barriers or earthworks were no big deal. We had ammunition for shooting helicopters, trucks, troop carriers, other tanks, and dismounted infantry. There were only four things that I knew of which could stop a tank: land mines, a really deep and wide ditch, a river, or a triple-strand concertina wire obstacle. And since a tank is the most deadly threat possible, anything less doesn’t stand a chance.
You would think that a tank could punch right through a triple-strand concertina wire barrier, and it can. It would crush the pickets like toothpicks and stretch the concertina wire until it snaps like a rubber band. And then the nasty part begins. The tank tracks pull the concertina wire inside the suspension, winding it around the drive sprocket, road wheels, and support rollers until the tank has a huge rat’s nest of wire tangled throughout the suspension, and it then throws a track. A tank without track is a bunker. It is still a formidable threat, but tanks are much better at killing threats at a distance. If you get close enough to a tank, particularly on the sides and directly behind it, there are blind spots where the crew cannot see you and you can assault the tank without receiving fire. Tankers know what happens to a tank when they try to breach concertina wire. They know you can drive through single or even double strand if you are lucky, but that triple-strand barrier will mess up a tank’s suspension so badly, that it takes a crew hours to cut all of the wire out of the suspension and track by hand. I know this, because it happened to me when we sucked up a roll of single-strand concertina wire lining a road on an airfield. It took about three hours to cut it all out of the suspension. We were working with our sister platoon on another airfield in Iraq, and one of the tanks actually wound the wire between the road wheels and behind the wheels on the road wheel arms, pushing the center guide of the track out of its notch between the pairs of road wheels. When that tank commander rolled up to our tank line, you could hear the distinctive POP, POP, POP of a tank which is about to throw track. He had not wanted to open the tank skirts and cut it out in the field due to how vulnerable he and his crew would have been to potential sniper fire. Consequently though, he created a much nastier problem as described above. My soldiers and I had feelings ranging from disgust to a healthy respect of what concertina wire could do to a tank’s suspension, and I venture to say most tracked vehicle operators share those notions.
The only way that the U.S. Army trains to breach triple-strand concertina wire obstacles is with explosives. You have to literally blow it up, because you cannot effectively cut a hole through the obstacle any other way. A quick word on why I would not recommend just single or double-strand concertina wire obstacles. All you need to breach a single-strand obstacle is to get a running start and jump over it! All you need to breach a double-strand concertina obstacle is a piece of plywood that you flop down on top of the wire and walk right over it. Neither of those methods would work on a triple-strand obstacle though due to its height and the amount of pickets and wire holding the obstacle together.
Originally Posted by ghengis86
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