Top-attack

A top attack weapon is designed to attack armored vehicles from above, to take advantage of the fact that the armour is usually thinnest on the top of an armoured vehicle.

The device may be delivered as a smart submunition or a primary munition by an anti-tank guided missile (ATGM), mortar bomb, artillery shell, or even an emplaced munition such as a mine.

The top attack concept was first put into service by the Swedish Armed Forces in 1988 with the Bofors RBS 56 BILL top-attack anti-tank missile.

[1] Another method of top attack is the overfly top-attack (OTA or OFTA) where a missile with a vertically oriented shaped charge jet that fires downwards.

Notable weapon systems that utilize top attack include: France Russian Federation United Kingdom France

Ukrainian army soldiers fire the NLAW in training.
An Australian Army soldier carrying two FGM-148 Javelins at the Besmaya Range Complex in Iraq , October 2016
An M41 tripod-mounted TOW ITAS-FTL with PADS (a variant of the BGM-71 TOW ) of the U.S. Army in Kunar Province , Afghanistan, May 2009
The firing phase of a SMArt 155 submunition. The submunition is held aloft by a parachute, while the submunition seeks a target and fires