No, the U.S. Army does not use flamethrowers. The Department of Defense officially retired them from combat in 1978, and no branch of the U.S. military has fielded a traditional flamethrower since. The role flamethrowers once filled, clearing bunkers, fortified positions, and entrenched enemies, is now handled by a range of modern weapons that do the job more effectively and from much greater distances.
Why Flamethrowers Were Retired
Flamethrowers saw heavy use from World War II through Vietnam, where they were valued for demoralizing enemy troops and reducing fortified positions that resisted other forms of attack. But the weapons came with serious tactical drawbacks that eventually outweighed their benefits.
The most obvious problem was the operator. A soldier carrying a flamethrower wore a heavy fuel tank on his back, which restricted movement and made him an enormous target. Enemy fighters quickly learned to prioritize flamethrower operators, and the consequences of a ruptured fuel tank were catastrophic. On top of that, a flamethrower only offered about 20 to 30 seconds of actual use before the fuel ran out, at which point the soldier was carrying dead weight into a firefight. By 1978, the DoD concluded that the risks and limitations no longer justified keeping the weapon in service.
What Replaced Them
The military didn’t simply abandon the capability flamethrowers provided. It replaced them with weapons that achieve similar or better results without requiring a soldier to stand within spitting distance of an enemy position.
The most direct successor was the M202 FLASH (Flame Assault Shoulder Weapon), a four-barrel rocket launcher that fired incendiary rockets. It allowed a soldier to deliver fire effects at range rather than walking up to a bunker with a fuel tank on his back. The M202 saw limited use into the 1980s and was even listed in the inventory of some U.S. units during the war in Afghanistan, though it had largely been relegated to storage by the mid-1980s after being replaced by the SMAW shoulder-fired rocket system.
The bigger shift has been toward thermobaric munitions, sometimes called fuel-air explosives or enhanced blast weapons. These work in two stages: a first charge disperses a cloud of aerosolized fuel across the target area, and a fraction of a second later a second detonation ignites that cloud using atmospheric oxygen. The resulting blast generates enormous overpressure that collapses buildings, negates underground cover, and is devastating against enclosed spaces like bunkers, tunnels, and caves. The U.S. military deployed thermobaric weapons regularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, including dropping the GBU-43 (nicknamed the “mother of all bombs”) on an ISIS tunnel complex in 2017. Today these munitions range from warheads on shoulder-fired rockets to massive bombs delivered by aircraft, giving commanders options at every scale.
Incendiary Weapons Still in Service
While flamethrowers are gone, the Army still uses incendiary devices for specific purposes. The AN-M14 thermite grenade remains standard issue. It contains a thermate mixture that burns at extreme temperatures for about 45 seconds, hot enough to melt through a 1/8-inch steel plate. Soldiers use it to destroy captured or disabled equipment, fusing together metallic parts so they’re unusable. The mixture produces its own oxygen, meaning it can even burn underwater. It’s not a weapon you throw at an enemy. It’s designed to be placed or dropped directly onto the object you want to destroy.
These grenades fill a very different role than flamethrowers did. They’re demolition and denial tools, not area-effect combat weapons.
How Other Countries Handle It
Russia still fields a weapon system it calls a “heavy flamethrower,” though the name is misleading. The TOS-1A Solntsepek is a 220mm multiple-launch rocket system mounted on a tank chassis, and it fires thermobaric rockets rather than projecting liquid flame. One salvo of 24 rockets can devastate an area roughly 200 by 400 meters. The warhead uses a solution of liquid isopropyl nitrate and magnesium that disperses and ignites on impact, generating massive blast overpressure capable of destroying bunkers and structures at ranges up to six kilometers.
Russia has used the TOS-1A extensively in Ukraine and previously deployed thermobaric weapons in Afghanistan during the Soviet era, where they proved effective against fighters in caves and fortified mountain positions. The system’s main vulnerability is that its six-kilometer range forces it uncomfortably close to the front lines, making it detectable by modern sensors. Still, it represents the evolution of incendiary warfare: same destructive intent as the old flamethrower, delivered by rocket from kilometers away rather than by a soldier standing 30 meters from the target.
China and the United Kingdom also maintain thermobaric weapons in their arsenals, from vehicle-mounted systems down to individual grenades. No major military has returned to the man-portable, liquid-fuel flamethrower concept.
Are Flamethrowers Banned?
Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons restricts the use of incendiary weapons against civilians and against military targets located near concentrations of civilians. The United States signed the convention but has not ratified Protocol III specifically. In practice, however, this is largely academic. The U.S. retired flamethrowers for tactical reasons, not legal ones. The weapons were too dangerous for their operators, too limited in duration, and too short-ranged to justify their place in a modern arsenal when thermobaric munitions and precision-guided weapons could accomplish the same objectives far more safely and effectively.