Monday, September 19, 2016

U.S. Army Designs a New Hand Grenade After More Than 40 Years

Hand grenades are an ancient weapon but hardly irrelevant. There are few devices as brutally effective at killing inside enclosed spaces, such as caves or rooms, than a device such as the U.S. Army’s M67 fragmentation grenade.
The M67 has been around for awhile, being first introduced into service in 1968. And mechanically, it’s little different from the grenades American soldiers lobbed into bunkers during the World Wars. It’s a relic, one still quite practical and useful, that has survived like the M2 Browning machine gun into the 21st century.
But the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal is working on a replacement, which if introduced into service, will amount to the first new lethal American grenade since Vietnam. And there’s an interesting design choice behind it.  more