BM-21 Grad

The Soviet-era 122 mm Grad is the world’s most ubiquitous multiple rocket launcher — 40-tube burst fire, truck-mobile, and a massed-fire mainstay in both Russian and Ukrainian arsenals, now reliant on North Korean and Czech-brokered 122 mm ammunition pipelines.

Overview

The BM-21 “Grad” (Russian for “hail”), full system index 9K51, is a truck-mounted 122 mm multiple rocket launcher that has been in continuous frontline service since 1963. A single launcher packs forty tubes and can ripple-fire them in roughly twenty seconds, saturating a grid square with some 256 kg of high-explosive fragmentation. The design trades precision for raw volume: its unguided rockets are area weapons, not point weapons. Over sixty years the Grad has been copied, modernised and produced in at least fifteen countries, making it the most widely distributed MLRS in history. In the Russia–Ukraine war it serves as the standard divisional- and brigade-level area-fire system on both sides, sustained by a global scramble for 122 mm ammunition.

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