Script for CM Units: M47 Dragon (Patreon)

I guess this is more of a weapon system discussion than a unit guide, but interesting nonetheless. Always good to dig into why something sucks...Subject to change and, I suspect, a very image heavy video.* * * *Micro Unit Guide: M47 Dragon

Welcome back to Combat Mission Cold War where we are going to take a quick look at the M47 Dragon. The Dragon has gotten some memetic momentum in the Combat Mission community thanks to the apparently uncanny ability of its missiles to miss their targets or plough into the ground. So I thought it’d be interesting to zoom in on that.

We’re going to over how the Dragon works, what might make it difficult to aim and/or guide and why, despite its flaws, it’s actually an incredible capability for US Forces in CMCW.

How it Works

First, let’s go over the technical side.

The Dragon is a man-portable, shoulder-fired antitank-guided missile system. It’s got a range of 65-1000m and carries a 140mm single-stage high-explosive antitank warhead. This generally won’t penetrate the upper front plate and turret front of T64s, T72s and T80s, but their lower front plates and side and rear armour are vulnerable and older tanks like the T55s and T62s are fair game along with BMPs, BTRs and other lighter vehicles.

The Dragon comes in two parts: a reusable sighting unit and disposable missile tubes. To fire the Dragon, the gunner attaches the sighting unit to a missile tube. Then he lines up his target with the sights, depresses the safety and squeezes the trigger.

This launches the missile, which flies off towards the target. In the back of the missile there is an infra-red flare and long control wire that maintains connection with the launcher. The Dragon uses Semi-Automatic Command to Line of Sight, or SACLOS, guidance: the sighting unit looks for the IR flare in the back of the missile and sends commands down the control wire to correct the missile’s course so it’s flying in middle of the crosshairs.

So all the gunner has to do is keep his crosshairs on the target and the sighting unit will fly the missile to impact.

Then the gunner detaches the sighting unit, discards the missile tube and is ready to go again.

Seems pretty straightforward, so let’s have a think about what might cause the Dragon to miss.

Guidance Problems

First, we have basic technical failures. All weapons have a failure rate. For wire guided ATGMs like the Dragon, missiles can misfire, control wires can snap, the sighting unit can be damaged. There’s all kinds of things that can just go wrong.

But the Dragon has a few characteristics that stand out from other ATGMs.

Shoulder Launched

Firstly, it’s designed to be shoulder launched. Most ATGMs are fired from a mount like a tripod. So the sight the gunner is using to keep the crosshairs on the target is attached to a steady object.

The Dragon, meanwhile, rests on the gunner’s shoulder. So when the gunner moves, the whole sighting unit moves. This obviously makes it considerably more difficult to keep the target in the crosshairs.

Even if the target is stationary, the gunner has to, for example, breathe. And that’s not even under battlefield conditions where any number of things can cause the gunner to flinch or move.

It also makes it harder for the gunner to adjust their aim. They don’t have fine controls for this, they have to move their entire upper body, which is obviously more difficult.

And that’s not all. Shoulder-launching also means that the gunner is dealing with the weight of the weapon system. Some of this is taken up by a front mounted bipod, but most of the weight is literally shouldered by the gunner.

When the Dragon is fired, the missile leaves the tube and the weight distribution of the weapon system rapidly changes: something else that might throw the gunner’s aim off. Compounding this, according to the manual, “There will be a momentary delay from time of trigger squeeze until missile launch.” Or in other words, the change in weight distribution is not directly linked to the gunner squeezing the trigger, there’s a pause and then the launch comes as a surprise.

One final consequence of shoulder-launching is that it’s generally fired from the sitting or kneeling positions. It can be fired standing, but there needs to be something in front of the gunner at the right height for the bipod legs. And it can be fired prone, but the gunner has to contort himself so he doesn’t get hit by his own backblast.

Neither the sitting nor kneeling positions are particularly comfortable- so again, it’s more difficult to stay still- and we get another problem: the height of the control wire.

This is not a unique problem to the Dragon, it’s common for all infantry wire-guided ATGMs, but the lower the missile flies, the greater the chance it will collide with something before it reaches the target, and the greater the chance that the control wire will snag on something and break, resulting in a loss of control.

Obviously firing from sitting or kneeling means that control wire is only a few feet off the ground.

In-flight Adjustment

So, the fact that the Dragon is both shoulder-launched and SACLOS brings a load of guidance problems. But we’re not done yet.

Most ATGMs are steered by control fins: when the guidance system sends adjustments to the missile, it acts on these by mechanically moving the fins.

Dragon uses a different system. There are some stabilisation fins at the rear of the missile, but corrections are made by a series of small rocket motors mounted to panels on the sides of the missile. The missile spins as it flies downrange and the guidance system fires off the rocket motors at the right intervals to correct the flightpath.

The downside to this is that the rocket motors have a limited supply of fuel. If there are too many adjustments and the fuel is used up, then the missile can’t correct its course.

We just saw how shoulder-launching introduces a lot of difficulty into aiming with the Dragon: not only will that increase the need for adjustments, but there’s the distinct possibility of unintentional adjustments as well.

Adding to this, the Dragon missiles are pretty slow. They travel at about 100m per second, meaning it will take 10 seconds for the missile to reach out to its maximum range of a kilometre. That’s a long time for the gunner to stay on target, the difficulties in doing so mean that there’s probably going to be a lot of adjustments and the more adjustments there are, the faster that control over the missile is lost.

There is an awful lot of negative synergy here: we have a lot of interlacing factors that all magnify each other’s negative effects on the Dragon’s accuracy.

But…

However, this doesn’t necessarily make the Dragon a poor weapon system. First and foremost, a lot of these problems are user-related and can be minimised by extensive training. Dragon’s SACLOS system is infinitely easier to use than the MACLOS- or Manual Command Line of Sight- systems used by earlier ATGMs. Soviet AT-3 Saggers, for example, are far harder to use effectively, but the Egyptians were still able to use them to decimate Israeli tanks in the early stages of the Yom Kippur War. Training can go a long way to mitigating technical problems.

Second, we need to look at the Dragon in context. In the US Army, it’s deployed at squad level. Every rifle squad is at least supposed to have one. That’s an incredible capability.

ATGMs obviously exist in other nation’s tables of organisation and equipment: the Soviets have AT-4, the Brits have MILAN and so on, but these are all company level assets. A Soviet BTR company has three AT-4s or AT-7s. A US Infantry company has nine Dragons.

Granted, the Dragon is comparatively shorter ranged than other contemporary ATGMs, but down at squad level it’s competing against the likes of the RPG-7 and the Carl Gustaf. These are both effective weapons that can in theory just about reach out to 1000m. But they’re not guided and the Dragon has a chunkier warhead: 140mm compared to the 84mm of the Charlie G and 93mm of the standard PG-7VL rockets of the RPG.

It’s also important to look at what the Dragon replaced when it entered service in 1975. Before Dragon, US Rifle Companies had two antitank teams in their weapons platoon armed with M67 Recoilless Rifles adopted in 1959. For all its flaws, Dragon definitely represents a clear step forward.

So Dragon is a cut above its competitors, while it has problems these can be mitigated to some extent and, perhaps most importantly, it’s a good fit for the anticipated highly mechanised warfare of a Cold War gone hot. An infantry squad with a 1000m don’t tread on me guided antiarmour bubble is a much more dangerous prospect than one with an effective unguided range of 400m or less like Carl Gustaf and RPG-7.

Conclusion

So that’s real quick once over of Dragon. This is really interesting for two reasons: first, that the technical characteristics of weapons have a significant impact on their effectiveness. That might sound obvious, but on the surface a weapon like Dragon is a short-ranged ATGM and it’s a mystery why it seems to struggle to hit in a game like Combat Mission. It’s only when you dig deeper and get a better understanding of the details- like how shoulder-launching and SACLOS are a bad combination- that it starts to make sense.

Second, that despite its shortcomings, Dragon has its strengths. It might be difficult to hit a traversing tank at 900m with an M47. But it’s basically impossible with a Carl Gustaf or an RPG-7 and other ATGMs are the preserve of specialist teams, not weapons you can hand out to every single rifle squad.

In a lot of ways I think the Combat Mission experience of Dragon has been fundamentally tainted by Javelin. Javelin essentially takes all the problems with Dragon, fixes them without compromising on the ability to be man-portable and shoulder launched and then takes its effect on target, range and guidance up a couple of notches to boot.

If Combat Cold War had come out before Shock Force and Black Sea, I think we’d be looking at Javelin as an upgrade to Dragon, rather than Dragon as a downgrade to Javelin.

Anyway, bit of a more narrowly focused unit guide to hit the letter ‘D’. Let me know what you think about the Dragon in the comments, hope you all enjoyed this video and found it interesting… I’ll catch you in the next one.