The US Army once designed a grenade shaped like an American football and…it went wrong

The United States is known for its sophisticated military industry. The country, which allocates between 320,000 and 778.00 million dollars for this sector, it is home to such sophisticated war assets as the Lockheed F-35 Lightning or the USS Gerald R. Ford.

But in this industry, not everything is so perfect. The country has promoted ideas as strange as turningcats in spy devices even projects like MK-Ultrawhich would be used in interrogations to force confessions from people.

If you can throw a football, you can throw a grenade

The US Army Ground Warfare Laboratory thought in 1979: “If you can launch a American football balloon, you can throw a grenade.” And under this premise he began to develop a peculiar design of ball-shaped anti-tank grenades.

At that time, in the midst of the Cold War, the high command of NATO in Europe had expressed the need for a new type of weaponry. This was to be capable of destroying or severely damaging the new Soviet T-62 tanks.

As Military.com explains, handheld explosives were presented as a valuable alternative to missileswhose technology was not as developed as it is today and its use could cause significant collateral damage.

Grenades, for their part, had a huge advantage. He could avoid accurately revealing the location of the soldiers. Now making these accurate was a huge challenge, so the lab started brainstorming ideas.

Since the troops were familiar with American football, they thought that a ball-shaped grenade of the mentioned sport could be very effective. The soldiers would not have to try too hard to throw them correctly.

“Given that a regulation size football weighs 14 ounces (396.8 grams), it was deemed feasible to manufacture a shaped charge grenade within this weight limit,” an official statement read, according to a blog post by military analyst Joseph Trevithick.

On paper, the idea caught on in all aspects. And the development of this accelerated as the NATO reviewed its strategies facing a possible large scale attack in Europe with modern tanks by Soviet troops.

So, the scientists took care that the new grenades were the most similar to American footballs. To do this, they took the regulatory size and weight as a reference, and took it to the new project.

After months of research, the laboratory had managed to present a grenade concept that respected the parameters they had established in terms of weight and size. In fact, the prototype was inserted inside a hollowed out Nerf ball.

This, however, was not the first time that the US Army used this type of logic. Previously, I had experimented with baseball-shaped grenades with regulatory measures, but these ended up being discarded.

As Trevithick explains, two soldiers were killed in tests with baseball-shaped grenades and 44 others were wounded. Things with the Nerf ball had to be differentbut bad luck was also present in this project.

The team tasked with developing this new type of weapon concluded that while the weight of the football and the grenades were identical, they were not evenly distributed within the device.

Consequently, when the soldier threw a balloon-shaped grenade, the explosive charge inside it moved, altering its path and limiting its precision. In other words, this solution was not effective for what it was designed for.

The key to these Nerf grenades was for them to land on the top of the turret or the rear of the tanks to injure the crew or damage the engine bay. However, without sufficient precision this was impossible.

The lab ultimately dismissed the project using a series of frightening arguments. “Both the spring wire and the soft aluminum placed in the nose didn’t work as expected and the ball was unable to reach a stable trajectory.

Images: US Army

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