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Posted by: JAIR FABIAN GOMEZ at September 17, 2007 09:45 AM

Apparently, the fellow with 20 years experience has never seen the damgage done by a 40mm low velocity grenade on a civilian(japanese) automobile. Looks like it was fired from up on the hillside, from a trace line forward of the vehicle down on the vehicle, notice the secondary fragmentation pattern on the hood. Not everything that conks you on the head is dropped by an f-16.

Posted by: Azrael at October 7, 2006 05:21 PM

Good Evening Folks,

Being an old ground pounder who has seem more of this kind activity then any human should,this vehicle appears to have been taken out by ground fire, 5.56mm and 7.62mm which would be would be the fate of someone trying to run a road block or getting caught in an ambush.

The two soldiers checking things out (IDF?) seems to suport this analysis. The hole in the roof. could it be a sun roof?

ALLONS,
Byron Skinner

Posted by: Byron Skinner at August 10, 2006 09:13 PM

SFW would drop onto/into the hottest portion of the vehicle as it was designed to punch through the lighter armor above engine compartments of armored vehicles. This damage is something else.

D

Posted by: DJM at August 10, 2006 03:07 PM

re: the BBC pic of the ambulance...note that the hole in the ambulance is small, with a roughly circular shape, and visibly burned at the edges (paint charred). In addition, there is a clear pattern of shrapnel/blast damage radiating from the impact point. Compare this with the large, almost square hole in the car in the post, with curled edges and no visible charring/shrapnel.

One quick note: the picture caption, at least, says nothing about an air strike. It says the ambulance was 'caught up in the violence.' An antipersonnel cluster bomblet and a hand grenade aren't noticeably different in many cases; this could have simply been a ground munition hitting the top of the ambulance - or, from the angle, a small mortar shell designed for fragmentation rather than penetration.

Man, I love to hear myself talk, don't I? Sorry.

Posted by: J.B. Zimmerman at August 10, 2006 02:52 PM

The BBC has a picture of an ambulance with curious hole in the roof, the result of an Israeli air strike.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/5245644.stm

Posted by: Bob at August 10, 2006 02:36 PM

Even a cluster munition would cause outward deflection of the metal, this vehicle looks like a roll over.

Also the windsheild is still in tact.

No shrapnel holes in the roof or heat/fire damage to the paint?

I wouldn’t call it faked, just mislabeled.

Posted by: John at August 10, 2006 11:44 AM

If it was hit by a weapon and not just a junker that was in a road accident, my vote would be for a non-explosive guided bomb. A rock with fins, in other words. Such an object would go through the roof, hit the ground below, and bounce back up. If it were small and didn't hit the gas tank that would be all you would see.

Cranky

Posted by: Cranky Observer at August 10, 2006 10:57 AM

That's some pretty shoddy reporting work there, David.

Seriously, a cluster bomb? Are you honestly telling us that? My cousin drives a car in worse shape than that. Your politics are showing through, AGAIN.

Posted by: Brian at August 10, 2006 09:04 AM

I've seen more highly stripped cars on the road side in many eastern U.S. metro areas. Anything that dropped/fell from the sky would have done a lot more damage than poping the sun roof. Even a BDU-33. See every comment below. Weapons contain explosives to enhance or achieve "terminal effects". I'm embarrased that the original individual who flagged this image (or the caption) as bogus claims to have been a USAF targeteer - I was one for real and this analysis is so, so bad that it necessitates sarcastic criticism. Do you know how easily a front window breaks? Moron!

Posted by: Rip at August 10, 2006 08:09 AM

Another, more likely possibility is that the car was just driving around partially stripped. Anyone who's been in a "developing country" situation like southern Lebanon can tell you that's not exactly uncommon.

Again, I am expressing no opinion about possible ordnance effects on the car, 'cause I don't have one, or whether or not photos are being 'faked', because I don't care.

Posted by: mike at August 10, 2006 07:27 AM

"The car has obviously been stripped. For example, the headlights are both missing, not because of damage, but because they were removed by hand."

No idea about cluster bombs or submunitions, so I'll keep my trap shut on that one, and I think arguing about whether or not a given photo is faked just plays out as a bunch of ideological yammering from both sides, so no comments there either. (Besides that one.)

But I *do* know that if you are going to be sneaking around in your car, and not in a convoy, you'll want to disable the lights.

Posted by: mike at August 10, 2006 05:57 AM

One more thing, if a SFW hit this car, which is on its face a ridiculous notion because a SFW is a very specialized weapon designed to be used on heavy armored concentrations, I could forsee one of two results:

1) The car would have a much smaller hole in the roof (and then the floor) and otherwise remain entirely functional, as the powerful but small penetrator would pass through the car quickly and nearly all the penetrator's energy would end up in the ground beneath the car.

2) That the car would be a charred, twisted mess. This could easily happen if the penetrator caused spalling, throwing small fragments of white-hot metal into the seats, for example, starting a fire. Cars tend to be filled with flammable materials and will burn for quite some time, leaving a blackened frame behind.

Posted by: Kaltes at August 10, 2006 01:49 AM

This is sooooo silly.

No weapon known to man could possibly tear a hole through the roof of a metal car while not so much as making a crack in the very fragile windshield.

Small pebbles falling off the backs of trucks crack windshields all the time, but we are supposed to believe that some weapon of war tears a square hole out of a roof, wrecks the interior and the doors, and yet won't harm glass mere inches away.

My theory is that the roof of the car was removed manually, with something like a crowbar, and the person or people doing it might have been standing on the hood of the car when they did it, which explains the small dents in the hood. The car has obviously been stripped. For example, the headlights are both missing, not because of damage, but because they were removed by hand.

Posted by: Kaltes at August 10, 2006 01:36 AM

Others have made these points, but I am compelled to chime in. I'm not an analyst, but I've played one for government contractors. The problems with the 'submunition' theory are, as I see them, at least the following: 1) Where are the other submunition hits? Even submunitions that fail to strike a target (specifically, for example, in the case of the SFW) are salvage fused and should hence have produced some scarring of the visible terrain. 2) The damage from such a munition would be from a self-forging penetrator - i.e. a jet of molten metal formed via explosion, entering the vehicle from above. There is no visible charring that I can see on the roofline of the car, or anywhere else for that matter. A plasma jet designed to penetrate the top armor of an MBT, hitting a soft vehicle like that, would at the very least produce significant thermal damage to the inside, blow out the windows from thermal expansion, and quite possible scar the pavement beneath the car. If it passed through the vehicle in line with the hole in the roof, there should be transmission oil, at the very least, on the roadbed, if not a fuel fire. There is no sign of any effluvia trail behind the car. 3) If it was not a plasma jet, i.e. it was not an armor piercing submunition, it would have been a fragmentation or high explosive device. Given that there is no outward shredding of the hole in the roof, and the windshield is intact and the body panels are not bulged, there appears to have been no sudden explosive expansion inside the vehicle body - so the detonation would have been above it. While there is slight stippling in the image that may be shrapnel damage, it is spread very evenly and lightly for it to be the result of a detonation close enough to do the damage that the roof appears to have suffered. The light metal of the roof and the hood appears to have stopped most of the fragments, if that is what those marks are. There is no burning on the roof of any sort, indicating that a general overpressure through high explosive is unlikely as well - plus, had there been such, it would much more likely have 'crushed' the roof posts down than punched a neatish hole through the top.

What *did* happen to the car? Here I have to go off onto much shakier ground, and eveyrthing from here on in I want to label a 'wild ass guess.' Note the brown smearing on the hood and roof, and the fact that the roof is crushed *in* slightly. Also note that the brown smearing is a close match to the soil color of the embankment next to the car, and that the car is indeed side-down in the ditch. If the car was rolled into that ditch in such a way that the roof hit the hillside first, and it then rolled back into position where it is, that would go a long way towards explaining the stippled damage (pebble/rock imprints) the crushed-in-slightly roof (from taking the weight of the car) and the smearing of soil on the roof and hood. It would also explain the lack of visible damage or debris on the road behind or next to the car, and the broken but not missing windshield.

Note that this still doesn't explain the hole in the roof, nor does it explain the fact that there is a small tree or bush close enough in that picture to have interfered with the car being dumped and rolled in that spot. The soil matching is easily explained by blowing dust.

But as for weaponry...perhaps if a purely blast device had been placed *inside* the car with a very directional effect (up), it might have opened a hole and caused the car to roll. We can't see the inside well enough to see thermal damage. If the windows were open, it's possible the bodywork wouldn't have ballooned. But I'm not speaking from experience, that's pure conjecture.

Posted by: J.B. Zimmerman at August 10, 2006 01:02 AM

David Axe,

you wrote "This is a cluster bomb we're talking about ... " No, it's a cluster bomb that you alone are talking about, which could not possibly have had anything to do with this vehicle, which has clearly just been run off the side of the road and abandoned. No penetrations, windshield intact, no road damage, no surrounding terrain damage ... com'aaaawn, dude.

Posted by: LK at August 10, 2006 12:08 AM

It's an odd photo if the car was damaged by some kind of air-to-ground weapon. Also, where is the damage to the surrounding area from the rest of the bomblets if it was a cluster bomb? The road seems undamage. If the car was hit by a cluster bomb wouldn't there be some holes in the pavement or at least some debris or shrapnel laying on the road? A cluster bomb seems like a wierd weapon choice for the Israelies who for the most part seem to be making precision strikes. My guess is the car was either dumped there for some reason, in an everyday auto-accident, or was just close enough to an explosion to be flipped over without being totally destroyed. I'd really like to see some more photos of the scene. Does anyone have the link to the AP's description of the photograph? I could almost buy a hit by something like the an Apache's 30mm cannon, but there's no sign of any obvious entry holes for cannon shells or shrapnel.

Posted by: Jeremy at August 9, 2006 11:56 PM

I think it's obvious that the Israelis are dropping laser-guided, kinetic energy house bricks from specially designed fighter jets.

-oz

Posted by: Oz at August 9, 2006 11:53 PM

The damage is suspiciously light even for a bomblet. The windshield appears intact, for instance.

Posted by: TheMasterTimekeeper at August 9, 2006 11:09 PM