HAMMER: During the battle of Osan Soldiers of TF Smith talk about how their bazooka rounds “burned out against the thick Russian Armor without penetrating.” The narrative Fehrenbach gives us is the equipment was too old and the Russian armor to strong. Challenge this. Look at the steps required to put a bazooka into operation and the armor stats on a T-34 tank. What else could have caused the bazooka rounds to have no effect? What parallels can you draw between the Soldiers of TF Smith and our own Soldiers/Leaders?

After looking at the technical specs of the WWII ERA Soviet tank that the North Koreans were using, the cast steel armor was 2 to 5 inches of thickness; which compared to modern armor that’s not a lot of armor. Along with researching the thickness of the armor on the tank, a little research showed the M20 “super Bazooka”  could penetrate up to 11 inches of armor.  so just looking at the statistics of the weapon Vs. target there should not have been an issue.  But, after looking at all of the steps of correctly arming the weapon system and the rocket itself there in lays the problem.   It is know that a strong majority of the soldiers of TF Smith was not trained very well on all of their weapon systems because of multiple different factors of sustainment, training, budget, time, ect….    Thus, was it really the temperature of the weather or did the soldiers using the bazooka just did not arm the rocket correctly to have the HEAT warhead deliver the total/full explosion to the T-34 tank’s armor?  In my opinion,  it was mostly a failure to properly train and understand the weapon system.

I believe that the lines that you can draw is not paralleling each other.  It is the same line that is continuing, the only thing that is different is time.   A common phase that is used in the shooting community is,  ” a firearm is nothing but a tool,  we are the weapons” and you can replace the word firearm with Bradley or tank.  That statement suggests that the level of proficiency that which an individual has with his/her tools will determine how lethal the weapon(the individual) will be. Thus, throw a weapon is the hand of an untrained civilian off the street and the total lethality will be negligible at best. Throw a weapon is the hands of a highly proficient professional then you will have a lethal weapon.    we as an organization/leaders have to refocus on becoming lethal weapons at the lowest level and that’s on the individual leaders to train soldiers how to become proficient with everything that is in the soldier’s “tool bag”.