The Russians Stuck Rockets and A Mortar on the Same Old Tractor

A new armored vehicle—actually, a very old vehicle, but with a previously unimaginable mix of bolt-on weapons—has recaptured for Russia the prize for weirdest weapon of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The MT-LB armored tractor with a bizarre dual weapons fit first appeared in a photo that circulated online late last month. The two weapons—a UB32 rocket pod borrowed from a helicopter and a 2B9 automatic mortar—have no business being on the same vehicle.

The MT-LB-UB32-2B9, for lack of a better moniker, is the umpteenth example of an improvised armored vehicle in Russia’s 16-month-old wider war on Ukraine. And it by far is the strangest.

Stranger than Ukriane’s growing family of do-it-yourself vehicles based on the hulls of captured Russian T-62 tanks. Stranger than the MT-LBs Russia has armed with obsolete naval cannons for rear-area air-defense. Stranger, even, than the BRDM scout car that some enthusiastic Ukrainian workshop fitted with a superstructure in order to produce the war’s most awkward armored personnel carrier.

The basic MT-LB isn’t a bad vehicle. The 13-ton, diesel-powered tractor—which was manufactured by the thousands, in Ukraine, between the early 1970s and early 2000s—has room for two crew and 11 passengers and enough empty volume to accommodate a wide array of weapons in the place of some or all of the passengers.

The Ukrainian armed forces have produced at least two effective vehicles based on the MT-LB: a lightweight self-propelled howitzer with a DT-12 100-millimeter gun and an equally lightweight infantry fighting vehicle with a modern remote-controlled turret packing a 14-5-millimeter machine gun.

The Russians’ own MT-LB hybrids are less elegant. The handful of tractors Russian technicians outfitted as mobile air-defense guns appear to lack any means of guiding the guns besides the naked human eyeball.

The MT-LB with the dual rocket-and-mortar armament is even more awkward. It combines a single 32-round pod for unguided rockets with a 2B9 mortar that can rapid-fire four 82-millimeter bombs in just a few seconds.

There’s a long tradition in Soviet-style armies and militias of fitting UB32 rocket pods—taken from air force stocks—to trucks, armored personnel carriers, trucks and even handcarts.

The S-5 or S-8 rockets aren’t accurate, but they’re cheap, reliable and available. “They are predominantly employed when more suitable munitions are not available,” Yuri Lyamin and N.R. Jenzen-Jones wrote for Armament Research Services. A volley of rockets, fired from a mile or two away, at least can force the enemy to take cover.

The 2B9 likewise is an old, reliable weapon. Aimed high, it can arc a clutch of seven-pound bombs a distance of three miles. Again, it’s not terribly accurate, but it works just fine to suppress enemy troops. As a bonus, the mortar in a pinch can double as a direct-fire anti-tank gun, Lyamin and Jenzen-Jones pointed out.

The problem, for the dual-armed MT-LB is that the weapons are incompatible. Firing the rocket pod from one end of the vehicle first requires the mortar crew to bail out—lest the gunners eat the rockets’ hot exhaust. The same exhaust could foul the 2B9’s breech.

The MT-LB-UB32-2B9 is a child of desperation: the kind of DIY vehicle an army would produce only after it’s run out of carefully-designed, properly-integrated armored vehicles.

But it’s no secret that the Russian army long ago crossed this desperation threshold. In 16 months of hard fighting, it’s lost 10,000 of its best vehicles in Ukraine. That’s more armored vehicles than most of the world’s armies have in their entire inventories.