The Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle first entered service in 1948, yet it continues to destroy some of the world's most advanced tanks. This video explores how a low-cost, reusable Swedish weapon helped Ukrainian forces defeat Russia's T-90M, the tactics behind its success, and why modern battlefields still favor smart infantry over expensive armor. We also examine its evolving ammunition, combat history, and how Ukraine's battlefield lessons are shaping the next generation of anti-tank warfare.
⏱️ CHAPTERS:
00:00 - How Ukraine Destroyed Russia's T-90M Tank
02:20 - Ukrainian Anti-Tank Tactics Behind 150 T-90M Losses
04:47 - How the 6.6kg Carl Gustaf Recoilless Rifle Works
08:16 - Why 84mm Carl Gustaf Ammo Beats Javelin Missiles
13:00 - Why US Army and NATO Adopted Swedish Carl Gustaf
15:39 - Can AI Smart Munitions and Drones Defeat Russian Armor?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
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SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/9hsGMLFY
⏱️ CHAPTERS:
00:00 - How Ukraine Destroyed Russia's T-90M Tank
02:20 - Ukrainian Anti-Tank Tactics Behind 150 T-90M Losses
04:47 - How the 6.6kg Carl Gustaf Recoilless Rifle Works
08:16 - Why 84mm Carl Gustaf Ammo Beats Javelin Missiles
13:00 - Why US Army and NATO Adopted Swedish Carl Gustaf
15:39 - Can AI Smart Munitions and Drones Defeat Russian Armor?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
#militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis
#themilitaryshow
SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/9hsGMLFY
Category
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NewsTranscript
00:00In early May of 2022, on a shattered stretch of road near the village of Sturysoltiv in Ukraine's
00:07Kharkiv region, a column of Russian armor rolled forward with one of the most advanced tanks on
00:12the planet leading the way, the T-90M. This was Moscow's showpiece, a modern main battle tank
00:18with a new turret, a digital fire control system, and layers of reactive armor bolted across its
00:24hull. Russian state media had all but declared it untouchable and a direct counter to Western
00:29armor. But Ukrainian territorial defense fighters, most of them not even Korea soldiers, didn't
00:35appear to have received that memo. In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it attack, the T-90M was left a
00:41burning wreck, thanks to
00:42a weapon that's basically a metal tube barely a meter long, firing an unguided shell that cost
00:47around $3,000 per round, and based on a design that first entered service in 1948. This is the
00:55Swedish-made Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, known in the US as the M3 multi-role anti-armor anti-personnel
01:02weapon system, or MOARS. So let's see how an 80-year-old recoilless rifle keeps turning Russia's
01:09best armor into scrap and how that's slowly rewriting modern warfare doctrine. Now, the rifle
01:15was just one piece in a moving puzzle when the pivotal shot was taken. According to a post on
01:20X by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the territorial defense troops first cut off the
01:25infantry escorting the tank with machine gun fire, then hit the vehicle with an RPG-7, which seemed to
01:31have jammed its turret. Only then did the Carl Gustav finish the job. Expert analysts have noted that the
01:38decisive blow may have been the detonation of the tank's own ammunition. One open-source assessment even
01:43raised the possibility that the crippled tank was finished off by Russians to keep it from being
01:48captured. Either way, the Ukrainians were pleased enough with the results that they included a thank
01:53you in their post to the Swedish king Carl XVI Gustav and his people for the weapon. Think about
02:00it. A cheap shoulder-fired Swedish bazooka-like tube was the weapon Ukraine used to put down one of
02:06Russia's most expensive tanks. In fact, within days, a second T-90M was reported destroyed the same way,
02:13near the same town. Now, if we zoom out from that single engagement, the pattern only sharpens.
02:19Over the course of the war, open-source trackers such as the Oryx Project have visually documented
02:25well over 150 T-90M losses by July 2026, alongside thousands of older Russian tanks. And while no
02:33single weapon can claim that tally, the shoulder-fired anti-armor systems handed to Ukraine sit near the
02:39center of it. The doctrine that made them lethal wasn't complicated, which is precisely why it
02:45worked. Rather than meet Russian armored columns head-on, Ukrainian infantry dispersed into small
02:50teams and waited at the choke points that armor cannot avoid. The tree lines, the bridges, the
02:55narrow approaches into towns. They let the vehicles enter, struck from the flank or the rear where even
03:01a modern tank is vulnerable, and left the area before the counter-fire arrived. The Carl Gustav was built
03:07for exactly this kind of fight, because a tank on a road is rarely alone, because infantry shelters
03:14behind it. The launcher fires a high-explosive anti-tank or heat round into the vehicle, detonating
03:20a fragmentation round that blasts into the men walking behind the tank. One weapon, two categories
03:26of target, seconds apart. The actual source on the effectiveness of these weapons comes from none other
03:32than Ukrainian troops on the ground, who were interviewed for Ukrainian military news outlets.
03:37Ukrainian gunners talk about loading out with just five rounds, four carried by an assistant and one
03:43by the gunner. They insist that five is usually enough, because a weapon this accurate doesn't
03:48need a truckload of ammunition, just the right shell and the discipline to wait for the shot.
03:53They talk about preferring the simple mechanical sight over the optical one in the chaos of combat,
03:59because the optic needs alignment, and alignment takes time they don't have. They talk about the two-man
04:04drill, one soldier shouldering the tube while the other loads from behind, and about the hard rule
04:10that nobody stands within two meters of the rear when it's fired, because what comes out of the back
04:15of a recoilless weapon can kill. The Ukrainians also spoke about the weight almost in passing,
04:20which is even more impressive than it first seems. The M2 Carl Gustav, which was arguably the
04:26originally widespread model back from the 1960s, weighed 14.2 kilograms. Its successor, the M3,
04:33which is what seems to have initially been shipped to Ukraine from Canada, cut that down to 10 kilograms,
04:39and the newest design, the M4, weighs only 6.6 kilograms, a third less than the previous model.
04:45To understand why this weapon works, we have to start with one key word in its name that is often
04:51admitted, recoilless. When a conventional cannon fires a heavy shell, the recoil would break a human
04:57shoulder. The Carl Gustav solves that with physics rather than electronics. At the instant of firing,
05:03a carefully calculated portion of the propellant gas is vented through the rear of the tube from a
05:08cone-shaped nozzle. That rearward blast generates a counter-thrust that almost cancels the forward
05:13momentum of the projectile, which allows a single soldier to shoulder what is effectively a manned,
05:18portable cannon, and feel little more than a firm shove forward when it fires.
05:22But that same elegant solution carries a tactical price that could be becoming more important every
05:27year. The rearward blast throws up a violent signature of dust, flame, and overpressure,
05:32and it creates a lethal danger zone directly behind the gunner. On a battlefield increasingly
05:37watched by drones and thermal cameras, that backblast is a flare that announces exactly where the shooter
05:43is, which is why crews are drilled to fire and immediately displace.
05:47The recoilers principle is what makes the weapon possible and also what makes surviving with it
05:52a matter of moving fast. The second design choice that sets the Carl Gustav apart from nearly
05:58everything in its class is that the barrel itself is rifled or bored. This means the barrel is cut
06:03with spiral grooves that spin the projectile as it leaves the tube, stabilizing it in flight the way a
06:09spin stabilizes a thrown football or a rifle bullet. This goes against the grain of almost every
06:15comparable shoulder weapon of the last century, including the American Bazooka, the German
06:20Panzerschreck, and the ubiquitous Soviet RPG, which landed that eponymous first hit on the tank in 2022.
06:27These rocket launchers are smoothbore and rely on the ammunition itself having fins to steady
06:33themselves and reach the target. Even the more modern variations of anti-tank weapons usually adopt the
06:39smoothbore design. The US used the M72 Law disposable rocket launcher for decades before introducing the
06:46AT-4, another Swedish-designed disposable recoilless launcher, which gradually took over many of the
06:52heavier anti-armor roles while the Law remained in service. But the spinning projectile, combined with
06:58a recoilless system that lets the round carry far more propellant, means the Carl Gustav gains much more
07:03velocity and accuracy at range. Some comparisons put the Carl Gustav's projectiles leaving the tube
07:09at speeds several times higher than a rocket launcher. In practice, Carl Gustav's accuracy and
07:15range are put between 600 and 700 meters, with an experienced gunner reaching well beyond that against
07:21a large stationary target. But the differences only start mounting from there, and you'll notice that we
07:26frequently refer to modern launchers as being disposable. This isn't accidental, as the most common
07:32anti-armor designs required a disposable launcher as a trade-off of shrinking the apparatus so it can
07:38be operated by infantry alone. This applied not only to smaller AT-4, but even the bigger Anglo-Swedish
07:45N-Law, which itself has garnered respect for its service in the war. It's only when we reach the
07:50Javelin that the system becomes semi-reusable. The Javelin is a single-use missile fitted inside its
07:56launch tube in the factory, and the entire contraption is fitted onto the Command Launch Unit,
08:01or CLU, which is what the human gunner actually operates. The CLU contains the optics and guidance
08:08package that zeroes in on the target, and the Javelin then takes over the actual targeting and
08:13allows the gunner to retreat for a true fire-and-forget. The Carl Gustav achieves comparable
08:18battlefield flexibility in a very different way. Rather than relying on guided missiles,
08:23it combines a reusable launcher with a wide variety of specialized ammunition. This ties into the
08:29roughly $20,000 price tag of the weapon, depending on the contract, and why it's been so important.
08:35That is the cost of the actual launcher, but the cost of the munitions varies from only $500
08:41to just under $3,000, and this depends on the specs of the munitions. By contrast,
08:46the Javelin CLU costs well over $100,000, and the cost of a single Javelin missile in tube assembly
08:53is between $160,000 and $170,000. It essentially makes a Javelin's cost overkill, even if you have
09:01to use multiple Carl Gustavs to take down a single tank. Which brings us to the real reason the Carl
09:07Gustav has outlived every weapon meant to replace it. The astonishing library of ammunition that the
09:1284mm rifle can use, and it's here where the specifics matter. Against armor, the workhorse
09:18is the HEAT 551 and its improved 551C variant, a rocket-assisted anti-tank round which is effective
09:26out to around 700 meters, the same as the rifle's nominal range. More importantly, the round can
09:32punch through roughly 40 centimeters of steel. And against a modern tank wrapped in reactive armor,
09:37the gunner can switch to the tandem warhead HEAT 751, in which a small precursor charge
09:43detonates the reactive armor plating first, clearing a path so the main shaped charge can
09:48pierce into the hull beneath. This broadens the round's penetration to over 50 centimeters of armor,
09:54and that's behind the reactive plating. And for the necessities of constricted urban combat,
09:59there's even a confined space round, the HEAT 655, which uses a saltwater counter-mass
10:04instead of pure gas to reduce the backblast enough that the weapon can be fired from inside a room,
10:10a capability that ordinary recoilless weapon simply can't offer without killing the crew.
10:15It basically allows for the creation of an anti-tank sniper from a vantage in or on a regular building.
10:21Now, beyond armor, the ammunition family reads like an entire infantry support company
10:26compressed into one tube. The HEDP 502 is a dual-purpose round that will crack light armor,
10:33brick and bunkers with a fuse the gunner can set to burst on impact or an instant later to detonate
10:38inside a wall. The ASM 509 is a dedicated anti-structure munition for collapsing buildings
10:44and fortifications, while the MT 756 uses a tandem charge to punch into a fortified position and kill
10:52what's sheltering inside. The ADM 401 packs over a thousand fletchits for close-range defense against
10:58infantry in the open. The high-explosive HE441 family lobs fragmentation out a kilometer away
11:05and can be set to airburst above troops in a trench, with the most recent development being the 441E
11:11or 448 round that was announced back in 2022 to be delivered across the globe for users like the US
11:17Armed Forces and Sweden's NATO neighbors. There are even smoke rounds to screen a movement and illumination
11:23rounds to light a night sky. And at the far edge of that development roadmap is the guided multi-purpose
11:29munition, a laser-guided projectile developed jointly by Saab and Raytheon that promises to strike
11:35moving targets out to around 2.5 kilometers, dragging this analog weapon toward genuine precision.
11:41And even the price is more reasonable, expected to land in the $80,000 range, roughly half of the
11:47Javelin, all the while achieving similar penetrative capabilities while offering precision
11:52guidance through laser designation. So, a Javelin kills tanks and occasionally fortified positions.
11:58The Carl Gustav is the closest thing the infantry has to a universal answer.
12:03Now, if you want to check out more weapons development from Sweden, the US or any other
12:08major military power, make sure to subscribe to the military show. We cover weapons of all sorts and
12:14how they're actively being used in real combat in Ukraine and beyond.
12:18Back to the Carl Gustav. It's important to underscore that while the weapon's efficiency lies in its
12:23versatility and reusability, it still suffers from a few limitations. The older HEAT rounds struggle
12:29badly against the thick composite and reactive armor on the front of a modern main battle tank,
12:34which is exactly why the successful engagements in Ukraine so consistently come from the flank,
12:39the rear and the top, and why the tandem rounds exist at all. That flexibility to use seemingly
12:45mismatched munitions and combine them with near-fire-and-forget capabilities, quick reloads,
12:50and ease of use is what's kept the rifle relevant through eight decades of armor evolution.
12:55And this is precisely why the Carl Gustav sits as one of the only remaining man portable rifle
13:00recoilless rifles in existence. Sweden's first attempt at a shoulder-fired recoilless weapon,
13:06a 20mm anti-tank rifle from the early 1940s, was a cautionary tale. It was a design that could
13:13barely scratch the armor of late-war tanks, and was built in only small numbers. The lesson from
13:18this failure was that while you could build and sustain a recoilless anti-armor rifle, you had a
13:23harder time making the actual munitions score a kill. A small solid slug was no longer enough to
13:28down a tank from up front, and you increasingly needed a larger-shaped charge warhead. So in 1946,
13:35designers scaled the concept up to 84mm, large enough to carry a proper-shaped charge, and in 1948, the
13:42weapon entered Swedish service. From there, it simply refused to age out. It first saw combat
13:47with Swedish UN forces in the Congo in the early 1960s. In the 1982 Falklands War, British Royal
13:54Marines used Carl Gustav's to help cripple an Argentine corvette, knocking out its missile launchers.
13:59The M2 of the 1960s gave way to the M3 of the 1990s, and in 2014 to the ultralight M4.
14:07Using titanium
14:08components and carbon fiber construction to reduce weight, good for thousands of rounds where the
14:13M2 barrel lasted approximately 500 rounds, while the M4 barrel lifespan was roughly 1,000 rounds.
14:20The clearest measure of how thoroughly this weapon has entrenched itself in modern combat
14:24is the sheer list of its operators, as what began as a Swedish national weapon is now fielded in some
14:30form by more than 40 countries. The United States itself is a case study of how the Swedish design
14:36overtook even domestic weapons are what's arguably the largest and most prominent weapons developer
14:41in the world. American special operators embraced the reloadable Carl Gustav decades ago. The regular
14:47army put the M3 into service in 2014, and by the following year, the goal was at least one in
14:53every
14:53infantry platoon, with a lighter M4 falling soon after. Then the war in Ukraine turned a steady business
14:59into a stampede. Poland signed what Saab called its largest ground combat contract ever in 2024,
15:06worth around $1.2 billion, and all of it went toward Carl Gustav's ammunition and training. Japan,
15:13Lithuania and the Baltic states lined up behind it. That same year, Saab broke ground on a dedicated
15:19factory in India, its first fully-owned production site outside Sweden, and moved to expand ammunition
15:25output. Sweden spent hundreds of millions of dollars replacing the roughly half a million rounds that
15:30had flowed to Ukraine and to the Allies, backfilling their own donations. An 80-year-old weapon doesn't
15:36get consumed at that scale unless it's genuinely useful. Which brings us to the more recent developments
15:41on the list, the aforementioned round called the HE-448, paired with a fire-controlled device
15:47designated the FCD-558. On its own, the HE-448 is a highly explosive round, and its alternate name,
15:56as the HE-441E in the US, suggests it's a direct improvement over the older HE-41 anti-personnel shell.
16:04It packs around 4,000 tungsten pellets for denser, deadlier fragmentation and better effect against
16:09enemies wearing body armour. What makes it different is that it can talk to the launcher. When chambered,
16:15the round and its surrounding tube report their own propellant temperature. The gunner then enters
16:20the range to target and selects either direct impact or air burst, and a small ballistic computer
16:26calculates an optimal firing, communicating with the fuse through a data protocol Saab calls firebolt.
16:32Paired this way, the round can reportedly reach targets beyond 1.5 kilometres away and detonate
16:38precisely above a trench, a wall or a machine gun nest, spraying fragmentation down onto enemies
16:43behind cover. Thus, the oldest complaint about the Carl Gustav was that it was still a dumb tube,
16:49flying straight into whatever is in front of it, but that's arguably been engineered away.
16:54This anti-trench capability also leads to a few interesting theories around how the weapon is
16:59being used in Ukraine in 2026. The two hardest problems Ukrainian infantry face are enemy troops
17:06dug into trench lines, and armoured vehicles advancing across open ground. But both are exactly what a
17:12programmable air burst round is built to defeat. A heat round is wasted on them, and a direct fire
17:17shot forces the gunner into a long exposed line of sight, a duel he may lose. An air burst detonating
17:23above the trench from more than a kilometre away is a fundamentally different and safer proposition.
17:29Against dispersed infantry, it can substitute for artillery. So, if the weapon is already deployed,
17:34the HE-448 and its fire-controlled device give Ukrainian squads a portable, precise counter-infantry
17:41capability that meaningfully changes what a single anti-tank team can do. It's a product of the weapon's
17:47design and the shape of the fighting, and it doesn't require us to speculate about who asked for it.
17:53But there's another possible solution, which is far more covert and brutal. Saab described the HE-448
17:59development on the basis of close customer relationships and feedback, language it repeats
18:04across its own materials. The earliest press release from that claim came in May 2022, and the Swedish
18:11armed forces started receiving the rounds in December 2021. This is too late to consider the
18:16round to be developed in the trenches of Ukraine. However, the more recent HE-758 actually fits the bill.
18:23Announced in May 2026, the HE-758 is a tandem anti-tank round, and crucially, it's the successor to the
18:31HE-751, which was actually credited for Carl Gustav kills of Russian T-90Ms. This is where the feedback
18:38loop stops being a marketing phrase and becomes something you can actually trace. Ukrainian crews
18:44had already proven the HE-751 against Russian T-90s, fitted with Contact 5 and Relic Reactive
18:50Armour, the exact protection Moscow bolts onto its best tanks. Saab took those results and
18:56went looking for a round that could defeat not just one Russian armour package, but all of them.
19:00But rather than iterate by hand, Saab's engineers used machine learning across 50,000 precursor designs,
19:07hunting for a configuration that would defeat every known Russian reactive armour. The result was a
19:12non-initiating precursor, a charge that strips away the reactive plating without setting it off,
19:17clearing a path for a main charge that punches through up to 70 cm of armour. As a reminder,
19:23the early design could punch through 50 cm. And according to coverage of the launch,
19:28Saab acknowledged that earlier performance of the Carl Gustav in Ukraine actively shaped the new
19:33round's development. So that's the development loop Sweden is using. A Ukrainian gunner fires a
19:39Carl Gustav round into a Russian tank. The reactive armour on that tank and on the ones that survived
19:44becomes data. That data becomes simulations in Sweden. And if we step back far enough,
19:50the Carl Gustav is just a small part of a bigger shift. Sweden has become one of the
19:55arms suppliers the Western world can no longer do without. Today, it exports the Gripen Fighter,
20:00the N-Law and the AT4 anti-armour weapons, the Carl Gustav, and starting in 2026, even the systems
20:07that watch the sky. The latest development came in July 2026, when NATO announced at a summit in Ankara,
20:14would open negotiations to replace its Cold War-era AWACS radar planes, the alliance's
20:20aging eyes in the sky. The winning system was Saab's Global Eye, a surveillance aircraft built
20:25on a business jet chosen over Boeing's E-7 Wedgetail in a deal valued at up to $4.5 billion
20:31for as many as 10 aircraft backed by 11 member states. NATO's leadership turned to the Swedish
20:37planes as they were built for the threats that now define this era, drone swarms and cruise missiles,
20:42and frame the choice around a Europe increasingly determined to build its own industrial base,
20:47rather than depend on what they believe is now an unpredictable American government
20:51and its foreign policy. Which brings us back to the beginning, where we discussed that Carl
20:55Gustav wasn't solely responsible for that pivotal T-90M kill. Increasingly, small reconnaissance drones
21:02do the target finding, loitering over a tree line to spot a dug-in position, or a vehicle that a
21:07ground
21:07team could never see from behind cover. The drone crews then queue the anti-armor crew to engage with
21:12a single well-placed round. In that division of labor, the pairing plays to the strengths of each.
21:18The drone is cheap and more expendable for reconnaissance, and the tube packs the firepower
21:23at a higher cost. A programmable airburst round like the HE-448 makes the combination even deadlier,
21:29because a drone can confirm exactly where the enemy is sheltering, and the gunner can set the shell to
21:34detonate directly above them. So while the concept behind the weapon might be decades old, the drone
21:40may be actually extending its life further rather than replacing it, letting each cover the other's
21:45weakness. But even then, the simple Carl Gustav is far from the only reason Russia has been losing
21:50tanks left and right, and you can check out the extent of the damage, and why even replacements aren't
21:56enough, in this video. And to learn more, subscribe to the military show, turn on notifications,
22:01and we'll see you in the next one.
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