Mucho se habla en estos d\u00edas, de la eficacia mostrada por ciertas armas tecnol\u00f3gicamente avanzadas y de alto costo, como los misiles antitanque Javelin o los disruptivos UCAS TB-2 Bayraktar, para hacer frente a las fuerzas blindadas de la invasi\u00f3n rusa a Ucrania. Sin embargo, armas m\u00e1s modestas y poco reconocidas, est\u00e1n mostrando tambi\u00e9n su vigencia y utilidad en el campo de batalla. Es el caso del arma Atan port\u00e1til Panzerfaust 3, un lanzacohetes de corto alcance y bajo costo, que desde su invenci\u00f3n en Alemania (1943) ha sido empleado en innumerables escenarios de conflicto. Sucesivas modernizaciones le permiten estar vigente a\u00fan. La \u00faltima versi\u00f3n el\u00a0Panzerfaust 3-IT600, con su sistema de punter\u00eda opto-electr\u00f3nico, que permite batir blancos en movimiento y un alcance de 600m, ha resultado una herramienta letal para hacer frente a los tanques T-72 y T-80 Rusos.<\/p>\n
Though the Russian Army was once vaunted as the second-best military in the modern world, the greatly underestimated Ukrainian military has showed it up again and again, seemingly with only national pluck and a hodgepodge of donated weapons from sympathetic Western countries.<\/p>\n
Among the borrowed Ukrainian arsenal, the Panzerfaust 3 has made an impressive showing against Russian armored columns. What is this shoulder-fired antitank rocket, where did it come from, and why is it striking fear into\u00a0Vladimir Putin<\/a>\u2019s soldiers?<\/p>\n The Panzerfaust originated in World War II<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1943, with a resurgent Soviet army advancing on the\u00a0Third Reich<\/a>\u00a0behind a phalanx of first-class tanks being produced in numbers that Germany has no hope of matching, Germany developed a small, simple, easy to use antitank weapon that could turn any wielder into a tank killer. Called the\u00a0Panzerfaust<\/a>\u00a0(\u201carmor fist\u201d), it was essentially a tube that launched a rocket-propelled grenade with a shaped charge capable of penetrating armor at ranges up to 200 feet. The launching tube could be reloaded if extra warheads were available, but inexpensive enough to be discarded if they were not.<\/p>\n Distributed among soldiers and, as of Oct. 18, 1944, to hastily trained elders and children of the Volkssturm (\u201cpeople\u2019s storm,\u201d Nazi Germany\u2019s last-ditch national militia), the Panzerfaust required extraordinary courage to operate at its effective range and was not reliable enough to save the Reich from its\u00a0ultimate doom on May 8 (or May 9, depending on who you ask)<\/a>\u00a0the next year.<\/p>\n It became a Cold War staple<\/strong><\/p>\n It was, however, effective enough for postwar armies on either side of Iron Curtain to make improvements on its basic design. That includes the current German Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces) in the form of the Panzerfaust 3. After entering combat in\u00a0Afghanistan<\/a>\u00a0with the Bundeswehr, the new generation of Panzerfausts is again battling Russian tanks \u2026 except that the people wielding the antitank weapons are Ukrainian.<\/p>\n