Bantam (missile)
1960s anti-tank missile by Bofors
The Bantam (Bofors ANti-TAnk Missile) or Robot 53 (Rb 53) was a Swedish wire-guided, manual command to line of sight, anti-tank missile developed in the late 1950s by Bofors. It served with the Swedish and Swiss armies from 1963 and 1967 respectively. It can either be deployed by a single man carrying a missile and control equipment or from a vehicle. It has been fitted to the Volvo L3314 and the Scottish Aviation Bulldog. In the Swiss Army, it was mounted on Steyr-Daimler-Puch Haflinger light wheeled vehicles, as well as experimentally on a MOWAG Tornado IFV prototype
The Bantam missile was used operationally by Argentine Marines during a British helicopter attack on the ARA Santa Fe during Operation Paraquet in the 1982 Falklands War. As the submarine approached Grytviken, she came under attack by several British helicopters. Argentine troops at King Edward Point responded with machine-gun fire and at least one Bantam missile. The Santa Fe crew attempted to defend themselves with small arms, but were unable to halt the assault and Santa Fe sustained severe damage before being scuttled.
Description
The missile is carried in a rectangular launcher box, which is connected to a control box by a 20-meter cable, allowing for a degree of separation from the operator. The missile can be set up in around 30 seconds by a single man.
The public source identifies “Bantam (missile)” as 1960s anti-tank missile by Bofors. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bantam, missile and 1960s.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q660925. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1967 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bantam (missile)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.