By now most folks have seen the move Blackhawk Down, where the urban warfare use of burning tires is shown, but not focused upon. Long before that movie came out, I'd the opportunity to attend a briefing on guerilla urban warfare techniques intended to be used by German forces, taught by an American Army Major, in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion.

Old used tires are better than free, they are innoculous...they're eye sores or not noticed as assets.

Once they start burning, you don't need more fuel to keep tha fire going, simply toss more on top of the others. Spike nails can be stuck throught the tires so they'll remain, with hopefully enough pointing in convenient directions to continue to be a deterrent.

Focusing on the tire aspect of the briefing specifically, the uses of burning tires are numerous and they can be used in conjunction with many other devices, assets and techniques:

The best thing about burning tires is you can deny and/or canalize your enemy.

Burning tires provide a visual and foul smelling warning system of where the action is occurring.

If you're the side burning the tires, there's a psychological effect on both sides. Nothing shows chaos and violence like a city with burning tires in the street. Like battle horns and bugles, you're owning the air. You own that street.

Enough burning tires on a still day will affect low flying helicopters. They can affect some night vision as well and do some interesting masking of FLIR if there's enough fires, enough heat.

One burning tire can make something as large as an arena unusable for the duration of the burn and long afterwards.

Burning tires, being long burning can ignite/damage some things that faster burning fires like molotovs can't as readily ignite. (I forgot what specifically. Love it if someone knows.)

Burning tires are primarily a deterrent to wheeled vehicles directly, and to infantry and armor who don't wish to move through dense heavy smoke not knowing what's on the other side.

Rolling,burning tires can disrupt traffic, cause panic and be used against hardened positions. Burning, rolling tires can break up a mass attack.

Burning tires placed upwind of a hardened position can drive defenders out, prevent the use of openings for return fire, and can mask an attack.

A two-fer:




Set that off and even an M1A1 ain't getting through for days:

Good Stuff!!

cool! 'course up here, no telling when it would be something I could use. mostly draw attention more than naything else.

They a total PITA to put out once going good. I've never personally used them for anything like above, but I have been around and participated in burning tires (and other junk) when I was younger. Hot burning fire and nasty black smoke......

Wire tires togetether, using barbed wire or bailing wire, place large metal caltrops make of fencing posts inside the tires to help hold them tother and with the wire make a good denial of entry area for any wheeled vehicles and light skinned armor. Tracked vehicles hate to go through lots of wire and metal stakes, because the chance of losing a tread or the sprocket wheels is greatly enhanced.

In some countries, burning tires were used as a lure for tracked armor, let them run through it to make a breach and on other side they laid home made anti tank mines. Proves pretty effective.

Use of eagle cocktails from high buildings, also has proven a major hinderence to heavy armor. I expect if military in Egypt start going after the citizens to see both those methods used.

As most of you know by now I follow protests, riots and revolts in the news as something interesting to me. Even though after the LA riots I moved to a place were there would probably never be any type of protest or riots as the cattle just don't care.

The rolling tires have always been interesting as I have seen many of these riot/protests that take place on a slight hill. Just like water in a tire the liquid accelerant tends to stay inside the tire itself while it rolls. Then where ever it lands down slope it continues to burn.

Anyone that has been around a burning tire cannot deny the amount of profuse smoke that it puts in the air. I know when I was in Los Angeles during the '92 riots the smoke itself really lent to the feeling of Chaos, both a weird adrenalin driven excitement as well as fear of the unknown. In some of the areas where it was thicker the sun turned orange then red and was almost blotted out completely. Seeing the sun in those colors even miles away from a specific incident does indeed have a psychological effect as you know things are not quite right.

As it gets dark the orange hue floating in the smoke above the action only magnifies the affect. At a distance you are left wondering who and how many people are behind that action. What exactly is burning? A car? A building? Bodies? or just a few old tires.

Like others here I really doubt I will ever need to resort to tire burning but it certainly is a good arrow for the quiver if you ever needed to shut down a bridge for isolation without destroying the near priceless structure to be used later on post SHTF and WROL for commerce.

Forward to :49 seconds of this video when they first show a shot from a way off. You gotta know that is going to have a psychological effect when seen from afar.


Link To Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m8zfrJEcN8#t=0m49s

Another thing is there's steel belts in so many of the tires that it'll wonderfully add to the mix, and it'll make it more difficult to break apart, because the tires can be wired and chained together.

Eventually, that'd all be brittle.