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The Composite armor it had no problem with, basically the TOW II could punch right through that pretty easily. The Reactive presented somewhat more of a challenge. What they did was to attach a longer probe to the missiles nose cone and in that probe was a small explosive. It was designed to give a standoff capability to the missile that allowed it to detonate the reactive armor while still allowing the follow on shaped charge to deliver the killing blow to the tank itself. The TOW IV (I think, been 12 years since I retired), has a fly over shoot down capability now. It doesn't hit the tank itself, it flies over the top where the armor is thinnest and delivers it's shaped charge into the top of the vehicle. Quite effective and it also (from what I remember) has the ability to better set off ammo in the ammunition compartment thus completing the tanks destruction.

I was in Quantico for a Weapons Demo in early '87 where they had a new TOW (can't remember the designation) that they were working on. This one used fiber optics and was a vertical launch horizontal flight characteristic. Basically it operated somewhat like the Sagger did, but it had a 10,000 meter range (Tow II was 3800 meters). There was a small camera built into the nose of the missile. The gunner launched the missile and "flew it" like a video game out to it's target. The beauty of this weapon was you could fire it from almost anywhere, it launched vertically to 100 meters and then levelled out in a horizontal flight, the gunner could then fly the missile anywhere he chose just as if he was sitting on top of it telling it where to go. Don't know if they ever completed work on this thing but it damn sure looked impressive. I was an instructor with the Heavy Weapons Section at School of Infantry in Camp Pendleton when I retired. That's the best info that I have at the moment. I loved TOW's, still do, best damn anti-tank missile system the ground troops have ever seen.

Semper Fi