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Army Testing Stackable Grenades for Infantry | Kit Up!

U.S. Army testers recently evaluated a new type of hand grenade that allows soldiers to connect up to three sections of explosive for a more powerful blast. The Scalable Offensive Hand Grenade offers conventional soldiers a new capability. Unlike the standard fragmentation grenade, this design offers mainly a blast effect that can be doubled or…

U.S. Army testers recently evaluated a new type of hand grenade that allows soldiers to connect up to three sections of explosive for a more powerful blast.

The Scalable Offensive Hand Grenade offers conventional soldiers a new capability. Unlike the standard fragmentation grenade, this design offers mainly a blast effect that can be doubled or tripled to suit the job. It has also been fielded to U.S. Special Operations Command since 2010.

Army officials tested it during a recent live-fire portion of the service’s annual Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment at the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Ga.

via Army Testing Stackable Grenades for Infantry | Kit Up!.

Interesting.

The Army hasn’t much used “offensive” hand grenades. The “offensive” hand grenade is something of a term of art, or cant. In general, they produce less fragmentation than the standard M67 grenade or other “defensive” grenades. Not “no fragmentation,” just less.

The famous German Potato Masher was something of an offensive grenade. The benefit of an offensive grenade is it reduces the need for friendly troops to take cover during an assault, while stunning the enemy via blast.

It would appear that this particular grenade is intended for use in buildings such as the compounds frequently seen in Afghanistan, or in places like Iraq.

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  1. SFC Dunlap 173d RVN

    Combat Leggos as it were. I remember grenades used in my war (there were two). The first was wire wound around the explosive charge and looked like an egg with a flat bottom. The other resembled a baseball and had ball bearings around the charge and were called COFRAMS as I recall. Good grenades I thought. I appreciate the notion of user potentiated explosives.

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  2. xbradtc

    The “egg” was the M26. The baseball was either the M33 or M67, which are virtually identical to one another, with the exception of a safety clip on the M67. The M67 is still the standard US grenade, though variants with an impact fuze are theoretically available.

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