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Subject: Artillery for Light Troops
Thomas    6/11/2003 5:24:12 AM
On the infantry board, there is a discussion of the future of light infantry. On the armour board there is a discussion of the future (if any) of the Light tank. To complement these discussion in the spirit of combined arms: What sort of artillery should go with Light troops. It should be airportable. It should be "resupplyable". It should be able to operate under the conditions of the Light Infantry. Any thoughts?
 
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Nichevo    RE:Just the tip of the proverbial iceberg...   11/10/2004 4:46:21 AM
Would you rather have one $1M Netfires or $2M+ Tactical Tomahawk, or a thou or two of these at even $1000 apiece?
 
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Nichevo    RE:Finally - ??????   11/10/2004 4:52:04 AM
Drat, I see it ate my ASCII. Look at any network diagram, just with hosts as launchers or other modules. Any LAN/WAN configuration on top of that. With fire control, sensors, datalink as network services like file and print. You can 'print' a fire mission from any sensor to any shooter across the network. Even get back error messages--Out of Range, Friendlies Detected, Paper Jam, They Found Me--Self-Destructing, whatever.
 
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neutralizer    RE:Finally - ??????   11/10/2004 8:23:58 AM
Apropos light infantry and the reference to mountains. Perhaps its worth remembering that during the Cold War the Bundeswehr's premier light infantry (Yeah I know the GE Paras will argue this one), 4 Gebirgs Jaeger Div (ie Mtn) abandoned pack hows, they used M109s. In Italy during WW2 the Brits were all prepapred with full pack arty regts (they used Basuto muleteers, it being a bit hard to find men in UK with the necessary animal husbandry skills), however, they found it unnecessary because they could get 25-pdrs to provide all the necessary coverage. The point being that for arty it's mobile firepower that counts, you don't have to move the guns to the target as you do with direct fire weapons (or light/medium mortars). Data comms merely do better and faster what has always been doable with voice, although the latter needs a lot more training to get a well performing arty system. However, the sensor to shooter stuff is basically BS, you need some controllers in the loop to allot fire units iaw the comd's priorities, particularly at those times when demand outstrips supply. And given the area that a bty's mobile firepower can cover and the reducing size of arty in western armies then this is a real issue. Not forgetting the old fire control maxim, 'the important is seldom urgent and the urgent is seldom important'. Of course 'important' depends on where you sit, the div comds view is likely to be different from that of a grunt who has a few guys shooting at him. Light arty is basically a strategic mobility and heli mobility issue, the inf might walk but the guns are mostly going to be towed and their ammo carried. Of course having the right soert of gun tower is important. What's often forgotten is that the weight of a towed gun pales into insignificance when compared to the weight of ammo. It depends a bit on the packaging, but for 155mm it's about 13 complete rounds per tonne. And a modernish towed 155mm can fire this in a fews secs over 2 mins (and that's the book rate, in practice order 13 FFE to a well trained detachment and they will probably be quicker than that).
 
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Shooter    RE:Artillery for Light Troops   11/10/2004 1:34:01 PM
There are really only three options for this thred. 1. The LEO 105 mm Gun/howitzer with it's 12 liter chamber can out range most 155s. Coupled with smart munitions and ICMs, it is one option to the long range component of the total system. 2. The smart variant of the 160 mm RYRO? rocket and the lightest possable multiple tube launcher on a trailer or Hummer. The other possable long range component of the system. It out ranges any Gun and with brilliant ammo gets it done. 3. A composit 81 mm Mortar. Optional 120 mm for fighting in urban areas. Locheed built and tested a ~63 kilogram 120 mm composit construction Mortar some years back that would fill the bill. Again with optional smart munitions. I prefer 81 mm because you get more kills for any given weight of munitions. In addition, the British "Merlin" projectile did for 81 mm what STRYX and BUSTARD did for 120 mm. The choise between item one and two has to do with the unit of fire required and the rate of supply envisioned. The heavier gun uses less mass of ammo for any given number of missions but is itself heavier and shorter ranged. The rocket launcher is much lighter and 50% longer ranged than the gun, but the ammo load is several times heavier for any given number of engagements. Better if you can get resuplied often, worse if you only get what you bring with you. Again, it is the ICMs and SMART ammo that get the job done, not what type of weapon fires or launches it.
 
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neutralizer    RE:Artillery for Light Troops   11/11/2004 4:01:11 AM
It's interesting that after GW1 the UK questioned Iraqi prisoners about the effects of arty fire. According to the new edition of Bailey's 'Field artillery and firepower', ICMs didn't worry them too much, but they really hated and feared HE L15 (the only HE UK uses for 155m), a high capacity HE with significant blast effects. The new M795 is on the same lines but with slightly less HE. Lesson - don't assume that ICM is the most effective 'unguided' type of shell. As always it depends on the nature of the target.
 
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k3n-54n    RE:Artillery for Light Troops   11/11/2004 2:53:31 PM
In my niavety, I might suggest a couple more options. First, update the 75mm pack howitzer. Obviously it won't have the range of a 105, but a 75mm device could be developed with an extended range. Sure, bugger shells are nicer, but for light troops, it might make sense. Improvements have been made to the shells used by 155mm guns, and I am sure similar changes could be made fro 75mm ammunition. My other thought is something similar to a 75mm howitzer, an 81mm smoothbore howitzer which can accept larger charges, but fires the same shells as an 81mm mortar. Either of these systems would be significantly lighter than a bunch of rockets or a 105, both the device and the ammunition.
 
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Nichevo    OK, now we fight   11/12/2004 4:00:01 AM
Neutralizer, I am quite sure that you have forgotten more about modern tube artillery than I have ever known. However, I think you're not getting what I'm saying. 1) I don't get what *you're* saying in 1st pgh about mobile firepower. My guys are a hundred miles inside the Kvetchnian border. Nobody knows they are there. There is no vehicular support. They may be in swamps or ditches or caves. Or high up on a mountain. They may be in MOUT or even infiltrating an enemy encampment. They may be one or two guys who are lost. Maybe they have no commo and cannot order takeout. I have great faith in you, but you can't take a howitzer everywhere, or even be in range of everywhere. And I'm sure no howitzer is man-portable. What is artillery for light troops? What are light troops? Let's just posit that you can't have tuber artillery. Am I unrealistic? Where were you at Tora Bora? What could we have give the guys at Tora Bora, since they couldn't have you? I submit my idea. It will never be the ballistic engine of perfection that is your realm. It is not meant to be. It is a sawed-off shotgun of artillery. This is, in your parlance, chiefly for "urgent," especially when someone else thinks your "urgent" isn't "important." As for sensor fusion, it doesn't revolve around autonomous shooting. The point is you can see Weapon A on your scope and Target B and tell Weapon A to hit Target B via BFT. There is no point to voice. There is no one to hear. This is an unmanned artillery piece. It has no crew (in some cases a crew of one, perhaps) and fires itself or can be fired automatically, remotely, whatever. There is no resource conflict, you fire the shells you brung. You could be offered control over someone else's but if you carried a dozen into the field, a dozen is what you got. There is no sustained fire with this concept. The mortar, the howitzer, the cannon, is DISPOSABLE. That is why it weighs 2 lbs instead of 200. And if you want to fire 13 rounds simultaneously, you can, because what you have is 13 cannon, each of which fires one shot and then bursts. Never reloads, thus cannot be captured and used by the enemy or found and destroyed (except in advance) by the enemy. Also, a 155mm shell 10km away cannot be set up for use as a claymore or bangalore. They're quite different roles--I have nothing to say about which 105mm or 155mm cannon should be used--this is For When You Haven't Got Those. What, this never happens?
 
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neutralizer    RE:OK, now we fight   11/13/2004 1:57:35 AM
Well the key question is 'what are light troops'. From an arty point of view I think that whatever they are they fight in a combined arms battle. Special forces are a different matter altogether although a few nations have SF who are artillery with the task of directing depth fire as part of the arty system. Of course there have been exceptions. In WW2 Chindits, definitely 'light troops' had a few 25-pdrs operated by an RA unit (and some Chindit columns were arty regts retrained as inf). You could call paras operating deep or on a flank 'light troops', but again in most armies they have para arty. There have been occasions when SF have been accompanied by arty fwd obs, but that means they were operating in gun range. And yes the last 25-pdr fired operationally by Brits were SAS, but this was a strange and exceptional circumstance. However, any recon tps operating deep, incl armd recce, are going to be beyond the range of the arty system (for a few years yet). 'Proper' SF are also in this category although some can direct CAS themselves. Recce is about being covert, if you want to go deep raiding then you need to structure and equip the force to do that job. Throwing explosive munitions, even indirectly is not necessarily arty. Infantry mortars are not artillery, neither are inf guns, because they are not 'plugged in' to the arty system (they can be, that's easy, and for some fireplans have long been so). They are 'support weapons' and remain under both command and control of their own inf battalion and are only very rarely detached to outsiders. Now, there is a military view that over the next 20 years virtually everything will become 'indirect fire', what this means definitionally is unclear. However, I'd suggest that arty is in the business of delivering firepower to wherever it's needed, range permitting, ie the firepower is 'mobile'. The key point about arty is that it is commanded at the highest practical level and controlled at the lowest practical level. Both vary with circumstances but it is relatively unusual for command and control to reside at the same place. Support weapons are both C&C at a fairly to very low level. Boundaries and where the arty guns or launchers are don't matter, nor does it matter to the immediate beneficiaries of firepower whether the guns, etc, are SP, towed or something else. The arty problem is to get the firepower to where and when and in what form it's needed and iaw the commander's intent. Sometimes the need is close support to troops in contact, other times it is high value depth targets and usually these needs are concurrent. One of the current trends in some western armies is that the notion of having different arty for close and depth fire is disappearing. If 'light toops' need their own support weapons that's fine, but arty it ain't. If they want concentrated arty firepower with a choice of effects (range permitting) then that can be accomodated by being plugged into the arty system. And data systems reticulating formatted processable messages have been enabling this for a couple of decades, although technically it's not quite as easy as it sounds.
 
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ArtilleryMan    RE:Artillery for Light Troops - ArtilleryMan   11/13/2004 12:04:54 PM
You really don't know Jack. I have first hand experience. The guns max rate-of-fire is 4 rounds per minute unless you got into the decimal places. If you are so knowledgeable why don't you provide a report that states otherwise. I won't hold my breath.
 
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ArtyTester    RE:Artillery for Light Troops - ArtilleryEngineer, Neutralizer and ArtilleryMan   11/13/2004 2:00:04 PM
Lets settle this once and for all. The topic is getting confusing and so called experts seem to have their facts confused. Let’s go over the claims… CLAIM 1: "The M777A1 will replace the M198's. However, it is not considered "light" artillery. It can be airlifted by a CH-47 Chinhook, a great advantage over the M198. " by ArtilleryEngineer. This is false the CH-47 is used now to airlift the M198 howitzer. CLAIM2: “RoF for any gun depends on technical limits, basically overheating, and what crew can achieve.” - by neutralizer Basically Overheating? The number of rounds that can be fired is dependent on the gun tube overheating. However rate-of-fire is not dependent on this. It is unlikely that a tube will over heat within 8 rounds, which is number of rounds fired during the max ROF (4 rds/min for 2 min). Overheating is usually used to state how long a weapon can maintain a sustained rate-of-fire (a different requirement altogether). CLAIM 3: “I am telling you that of all the testing I have witnessed the crews can maintain 5 rounds a minute for 4 minutes. This exceeds the burst rate of fire requirement which IS 4 rounds a minute.” – by Artillery Engineer This is incorrect, the max rate-of-fire requirement is 4 rds/min minimum to 8 rds/min desired. A matter-of-fact the howitzers requirement was 5 rds/ minute, but because the howitzer had difficulty even getting 4 rds per minute the requirement was changed in the Operational Requirements Document. The rate-of-fire has improved somewhat over the years to meet the new “relaxed” objective requirement of 4 rounds/minute (for 2 minutes). This was mostly due to a new clamp like device on the loading tray. The loading tray brings the projectile to the front of the breech. Without the clamp like device, this process was slower because the crew had to make sure the projectile would not fall of the tray. The new device ensured the projectile would stay secure on the tray allowing for easier placement of the projectile and increased load tray speeds. CLAIM 4: “Well news flash, the vast majority of fire missions are fired on a fixed Deflection and QE, unless the FO calls for an adjustment of fire or you are trying to do something fancy like a rolling barrage or some sort of Multiple Simultaneous Impact mission, but these are not the norm,there is no if about it.” – by Artillery Engineer Well, this statement is made with a lot of confidence, but to borrow some arrogant words “news flash”, it misses the big picture. The M777 howitzer can not even be loaded at high angles therefore an elevation adjustment is needed much of the time to simply load the weapon. This means the elevation in many cases needs to be lowered and then raised. Does this type of situation need to meet the max rate-of-fire requirement? Yes, it certainly does. CLAIM 5: “Lack of power rammer and need to swab probably makes 6 rpm unobtainable for even a well practised crew. 777E1 with auto laying has potential to give faster rate than basic 777 with manual laying (and its not very slick 2 pers procedure), but without power rammer probably very slight.” – by neutralizer Laying the gun is NOT part of the max rate-of-fire timeline. This task is NOT on the timeline for this requirement. It is true the Digital Fire Control System on the howitzer will have “laying” the gun advantages but this has no impact on max rate-of-fire. CLAIM 6: “On the other hand I may have forgotten more than 'ArtilleryMan' ever knew or even had several times the amount of hands on experience:-)” – by neutralizer Based on your posts, it could be possible you forgot everything you ever knew.. sorry I couldn’t resist. It troubles me to find so many inaccurate statements posted here. So far none of these inaccurate statements were made by Artilleryman.. so he “may” know a thing or two. I hope this helps you all.
 
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