There is a recurring pattern in defense procurement that the Pentagon’s acquisition bureaucracy never quite manages to learn: the weapon system everyone writes off as obsolete has a habit of refusing to die, because the problem it solves refuses to go away. The M60 tank is one example. The M72 Light Anti-armor Weapon – the LAW – is another, a contemporary of the M60 and in some ways a more interesting one, because its “second act” required not just political will but genuine engineering ingenuity.
The M72 entered US Army and Marine Corps service in 1963, replacing the aging M20 Super Bazooka as the individual infantryman’s answer to armored threats. The concept was elegantly simple: a 66mm rocket, pre-loaded in a telescoping aluminum-and-fiberglass tube, weighing under five pounds, that one man could carry, deploy, fire, and discard. No maintenance, no crew requirement, no logistics tail beyond the round itself. The design lineage ran straight back through the American bazooka and the German Panzerfaust of World War Two – the perennial infantry problem of “how do you kill a tank without becoming a tank yourself” – solved with the tools of 1963.
It saw its first extensive combat in Vietnam, where it earned a mixed reputation. The weapon was effective against light armor, bunkers, and fortified positions, but early production runs suffered from warhead detonation failures in flight, requiring a full recall and safety redesign. A large part of the early reports of failures of the M72 were shaped by the disaster of the Lang Vei Special Forces camp, which was overrun by Communist forces using PT-76 light tanks, vehicles which the M72 should have handled with ease.
A number of quality control and design issues surfaced immediately, which contributed to the base being overrun. The US defense establishment responded quickly. The corrected versions returned to service and remained there – through the wars of Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and Iraq – long after the system had nominally been “replaced” by the Swedish-designed AT4 in the mid-1980s.
In contrast, the Soviet bloc had the RPG-7, a near-direct copy of the WW2 Panzerfaust. While effective, it had all of the problems of the WW2 bazooka…but that’s for another article.
The lighter weight and lower cost of the LAW made it ideal for the kind of urban and mountain combat that dominated the post-Cold War operational environment. A soldier could carry two LAWs where one AT4 fit. That arithmetic matters.
The Huge Problem That Looked Unsolvable
By the time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began generating serious after-action data, a specific and deadly – but not unknown – problem had crystallized around shoulder-fired rocket systems: the backblast.
Traditional rocket launchers – the M72 included – generate a massive cone of super-heated gas behind the shooter at the moment of firing. In open terrain, this is a manageable hazard. In urban combat, it is frequently a killing problem. A Marine firing from inside a room, a doorway, or from behind a wall faced an ugly choice: expose himself fully to take the shot from a position where the backblast had clearance, or fire from cover and risk serious injury or death from the blast redirecting off interior surfaces.
According to Defense News [https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/eurosatory/2018/06/11/nammos-new-m72-launcher-causes-no-damage-when-fired-from-inside-a-room/], several Marines died as a direct result of having to expose themselves to take shots that could not safely be taken from covered positions. The requirement was real, documented in blood, and the Marine Corps knew it.
The Solution: Liquid Physics & Norwegian Engineering
The answer came from Nammo, the Norwegian-American defense manufacturer that had been producing M72 variants under license since 1966. Their engineers developed a patented system using an inert organic high-density liquid chamber at the rear of the launcher. When the rocket fires forward, the liquid is expelled rearward, absorbing and dispersing the energy that would otherwise produce the lethal backblast. The result is a fire signature at the muzzle roughly equivalent to a 9mm pistol at night – and a backblast so reduced that, in a demonstration firing inside a 12-by-15-foot shed in the Arizona desert, the only evidence of the shot was a spray of liquid on the rear wall and floor.
The system, designated M72 Fire From Enclosure (FFE), qualified for US service and entered a five-year Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity contract with a maximum value of $498 million. The Marine Corps Systems Command announced in May 2024 that current M72 variants would be succeeded by two FFE configurations: the M72A8, optimized for anti-armor work against light vehicles, concrete walls, and APCs; and the M72A10, a multi-purpose anti-structure munition with a dual-mode fuze capable of defeating brick, adobe, earthen fortifications, and light vehicles. Initial deliveries of 1,930 M72A10s and 800 M72A8s were scheduled for calendar year 2024, with production at Nammo’s Mesa, Arizona facility ramping to maximum capacity by mid-2025.
The tactical implications are significant. A squad that previously had to maneuver into exposed firing positions to employ rocket systems can now maintain concealment throughout the engagement. The reduced visual and acoustic signature – equivalent to the flash of a 9mm handgun – means the shooter’s position is not immediately compromised by the shot. And at 13 pounds, the M72 FFE is light enough that a squad can carry three to six systems rather than the single, heavier launcher a squad might previously field.
The Broader Lesson
The M72 FFE fits squarely into the pattern visible across modern procurement: the weapons that survive are not always the most sophisticated, but the ones whose core function remains essential, and whose designers remain willing to solve new problems rather than declare the mission accomplished. Urban warfare is not a temporary phase of the operational environment. From Fallujah to Mosul to Mariupol, the defining tactical challenge of the past two decades has been combat in built-up areas, where engagement distances collapse, cover is everywhere, and the cost of exposure is measured in seconds.
A weapon system that began its life in 1963 solving the problem of Soviet tank columns crossing the Fulda Gap has been re-engineered to solve the problem of a soldier taking a shot from inside a building in a city the Pentagon did not anticipate fighting in. That is not obsolescence. That is adaptability – and in a budget environment where new platforms cost billions and take decades, adaptability is increasingly the only procurement strategy that works.
Next time, we’ll look at the RPG-7.
