- The Joint Assault Bridge (JAB) is designed to put bridges over water and different obstacles.
- The JAB ensures that Military items at all times have a conveyable bridge helpful able to dealing with the load of tanks.
- The brand new bridge layer replaces an older mannequin that is greater than 50 years previous.
Troopers with the U.S. Military’s 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) are testing a brand new tracked automobile system designed to rapidly lay down tank-capable bridges in a matter of minutes. The brand new Joint Assault Bridge (JAB) can unfold a 60-foot-long bridge in simply 3 minutes, permitting tanks and infantry preventing autos to cross rivers, ditches, craters, and different battlefield obstacles.
The JAB replaces the older Armored Automobile Launched Bridge (AVLB), a automobile so previous, the tank it’s based mostly on is not in service.
Way back, mechanized warfare, the area of tank and different infantry preventing autos, noticed the necessity for specialised bridging items. Armored autos are significantly heavier than their civilian counterparts, and plenty of bridges worldwide aren’t rated to hold 50-plus-ton fundamental battle tanks. Heavy armor items may additionally must cross rivers and different water obstacles which might be too deep to ford, or anti-tank ditches dug by the enemy to limit maneuver.
The consequence: bridging autos. The Military’s present bridging automobile, the AVLB, was designed within the Nineteen Sixties. AVLB takes the hull of an M60 Patton tank and provides a 60-foot-long bridge. However the AVLB is out of date for a number of causes: That M60 was retired almost 30 years in the past, the automobile is slower than the remainder of the armored autos it could journey alongside in fight, and it’s solely rated for 70 tons, making it simply barely able to supporting a 68-ton trendy M1A2 Abrams tank.
The AVLB is so previous, the requirement to exchange it was longer than the automobile was helpful in service.
