TREADHEAD PING
Posted on 11/13/2017 6:00:26 AM PST by C19fan
Two decades ago, the U.S. Army phased out its last light tank. Now the Pentagon has decided its infantry could use some lightweight armored firepower, and is looking to choose between at least three off-the-shelf designs by 2019.
This initiative, called Mobile Protected Firepower, intends to outfit infantry brigades with their own 14-vehicle companies of armored fire support vehicles. That way, they no longer depend on separate heavy armored battalions to detach tanks to help them. The new light tanks would assist the infantry by blasting bunkers, fortified houses, machine gun nests and the occasional armored vehicle.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
My son is the driver of a Stryker and he complains of the vehicles instability - his is only sporting a 50mm.
The Army is always searching for a good light tank.
A blast from the past a Freeper Foxhole on the ONTOS.
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
The Sheridan also had an extremely slow rate of fire due to the naval screw-type breech it had to use in the 152mm main gun. The hull armor would not keep out .50 BMG or .51 Russian machine gun rounds, let alone anything bigger.
The author David Drake rode the Sheridan into battle many times in Vietnam and he had this to say about it:
““The incident around which I plotted “The Butcher’s Bill” was the capture of Snuol the day before I arrived in Cambodia. That was the only significant fighting during the invasion of Cambodia, just as Snuol was the only significant town our forces reached.
G, one of the line troops, entered Snuol first. There was a real street, lined with stucco-faced shops instead of the grass huts on posts in the farming hamlets of the region. The C-100 AntiAircraft Company, a Viet Cong unit, was defending the town with a quartet of fifty-one caliber machine-guns.
A fifty-one cal could put its rounds through an ACAV the long way, and the aluminum hull of a Sheridan wasn’t much more protection.Before G Troop could get out, the concealed guns had destroyed one “of the Allied War Crimes Commission.
The incident around which I plotted “The Butcher’s Bill” was the capture of Snuol the day before I arrived in Cambodia. That was the only significant fighting during the invasion of Cambodia, just as Snuol was the only significant town our forces reached.
G, one of the line troops, entered Snuol first. There was a real street, lined with stucco-faced shops instead of the grass huts on posts in the farming hamlets of the region. The C-100 AntiAircraft Company, a Viet Cong unit, was defending the town with a quartet of fifty-one caliber machine-guns.
A fifty-one cal could put its rounds through an ACAV the long way, and the aluminum hull of a Sheridan wasn’t much more protection.Before G Troop could get out, the concealed guns had destroyed one of either type of vehicle.
The squadron commander responded by sending in H Company, his tanks.
The eleven M48s rolled down the street in line ahead. The first tank slanted its main gun to the right side of the street, the second to the left, and so on. Each tank fired a round of canister or shrapnel into every“structure that slid past the muzzle of its 90mm gun.
On the other side of Snuol, they formed up to go back again. There wasn’t any need to do that.
The VC had opened fire at first. The crews of the M48s didn’t know that, because the noise inside was so loud that the clang of two-ounce bullets hitting the armor was inaudible. Some of the slugs flattened and were there on the fenders to be picked up afterward. The surviving VC fled, leaving their guns behind.”
And from his short story, “The Way We Die”:
““A Sheridan’s bigger than an ACAV but it doesn’t have as much room inside. An ACAV’s just an aluminum box on treads. The TC’s got a cal fifty in his cupola, and there’s two swivel-mounted M60 machine guns for the rest of the crew. With only machine gun ammo and personal gear inside, there’s room enough for all three of the guys who aren’t pulling guard to rack out at the same time.
“Sheridans’re tanks. The hull is aluminum, sure, but it’s got a big steel turret in the middle with a one-five-two millimeter main gun.
“That gun’s the worst thing about a Sheridan, worse ‘n the unarmored belly that nearly rubs the ground. Some bright boy figured out that the brass case holding the gunpowder takes up a lot of room. If you make the case so it burns, you could hold thirty shells in a Sheridan instead of maybe twenty.
“Only the bright boy didn’t figure out what might happen to them thirty bare charges if something started a fire in the turret. If a B-40 hit the hull, for instance, or if you ran over a mine big enough to punch a hole through that little thin floorplate, or if somebody screwed up and set off a grenade inside the hull.
“Ever see a Sheridan burn?
“With all them big shells inside, there’s not room for much else. Our gear goes in the bustle rack, the mesh trough around the back of the turret. Since it’s out in the wet, you can’t just carry your socks in a duffle bag. You either put your gear in empty ammo cans or you might as well leave it back at Quan Loi for all the good it’ll do you in the field.”
““We’d thought maybe the new guy’d want to ride an ACAV instead. There’s six ACAVs and three Sheridan’s in a platoon—full strength; we were already down to five and two—so the platoon leader’s got a choice. Sheridans have the firepower, which is nice; but a lotta guys wouldn’t ride on one for a bet.
“It takes a while to get used to all that bare gunpowder down below you. A lotta things don’t seem important after you been in-country a while, though.”
““Except for the drivers, nobody rides inside a track over here, especially if it’s a Sheridan. And in this troop we don’t fight the main gun except when we’re pulling perimeter security back at the firebase and there’s a dirt berm to keep B-40s outa the hull.
The loader’s got a machine gun welded to the top of the turret. He sits on the hatch cover—some guys have regular seats welded there—and doesn’t have a foot inside the track while we’re moving. The TC, that’s me, has a cal fifty in the cupola. There the red handle to fight the main gun, too, but that’s one shot only: nobody expects the loader to be inside the hull until things’ve quieted down again.”
““When a Sheridan burns there’s nothing you can do but watch. The flames kept roaring out of the hatches for five minutes. The turret settled through the aluminum hull until it rested on the treads.
There were half a dozen smoke grenades inside my cupola. When they cooked off, puffs of red and yellow and violet smoke burped out of the glare.”
Another good summary is here: https://www.quora.com/How-good-was-the-Sheridan-tank
As best I can tell, it was a deathtrap that liked to burn and had a hull that was too weak to actually be used as a tank. It was really a self propelled gun with poor personnel protection,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currently_active_United_States_military_land_vehicles
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currently_active_United_States_military_land_vehicles
Well, I know what I want for Christmas.
The Panther was actually slightly more mobile than even the last Shermans, but the Germans couldn’t produce enough of them and their quality control sucked at that time. It was a threat, but it was really too little too late.
And as another poster pointed out, the Sherman was designed to be worked on by men straight off their newly mechanized farms in the Midwest. If you could fix a tractor, you could fix a Sherman in the field. Later Nazi German tanks like the Tiger and Panther were designed with tech first, servicing second - more than a bit of a change from the Panzer III and IV - and many of them had to be abandoned because even ‘simple’ repairs and maintenance took so long (days!) that the Allies would have overrun the position long before the task was completed. Even when Germany was on the advance, they had to combat-loss tanks with minor mechanical problems as they didn’t have enough recovery vehicles and crews would be left on their own in a not-entirely-secured rear area for days on end; nobody thought it was a good idea to let any resistance forces in that area have a free tank.
Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbQPtgwe6k4
Turret ring is way too small for a modern gun system, I think.
One of my cousins was a Sheridan driver in a cav unit that was involved in the Cambodian Incursion. The VC/NVA rigged a dud 500 lb bomb into a land mine that went off under his Sheridan. He survived, but carried shrapnel next to his spine for the next 25 years until he died. He told me, when I was enlisting for armor to stay away from Sheridans. I ended up being an Artilleryman in the Fire Direction Center.
A few years after that I became a Recon Sergeant/Forward Observer experimenting with the FIST team concept. I was attached to B/1/32 Armor, 3d. Armd Div as the company’s FO. I had to learn how to fight as a tanker and my tank was an M-60A2 that had the same 152mm Shillelagh gun/launcher. By that time, mid-70s, the 152mm HEAT and Target practice rounds had a combustible casing for the shell, thus there was no brass casing by that time, about 5-6 years after my cousin was wounded in Vietnam.
The 105mm is still a NATO standard gun; our M1s stationed in Korea still mount the 105mm as a weight saving measure combined with the older armor pack as Korean bridges will not support the weight of the all up 120mm armed M1A2.
Steel alloys suitable for armor have not gotten any lighter.
As for your last point, that’s been the problem with the Army since WW2.
The brass casing was never part of the 152’s basic issue in either the Sheridan or your M60 Starship after early deployment in Vietnam, which is why the Sheridans burned like they did.
As you probably know, the whole 152mm system concept ended up being regarded as a failure and all the active duty M60A2s were taken out of service by 1981. They were either re-turreted with a conventional gun as the M60A3 or converted to bridging vehicles without a turret.
>Those undergunned sherman stories are mostly late 44 and 45, when they were going up against German tank guns that didn’t exist in 1940-41. Even then it wasn’t that our guys were morons. Production was so overwhelming that they cranked them out even when it was outgunned and upgraded the 75 we had on it.
The Sherman kicked ass in one area, speed and mobility. The German tanks were wretched in that regard.
Then instead of trying to design a new super tank like the blockheads did, we simply cranked out 15,000 P-47 Thunderbolts and played a different game.
Poor tactics by US commanders were the primary problem with the Sherman. They used them like heavy tanks with frontal charges instead of like mediums that took out heavy tanks by blowing up their support vehicles and leaving them helpless as the mediums moved on.
Patton was the only US general to use the Sherman in it’s designed role and he was spectacularly successful at it. With US WW2 tank tactics(mostly infantry support) what we really needed was a good heavy tank or something like the STUGIII. Instead, we used Shermans in a role they were not designed for.
Thanks for the end of ‘brass casing’ date. FYI, none of us in 1/32 Armor ever called the A2 a “starship.” The first time I saw that term linked to the A2 was on an old ESCI 1/72 scale model of it.
Back in the 90’s at a facility we had a job on there were 5 air mobile prototype tanks that utilized appliqué armor and I think a crew of 2, and a 105 smoothbore. Really neat tank designed for the Marines but it got the axe and I think they gave those 5 to Taiwan.
Reportedly (because I obviously wasn’t there) the nickname came from early exasperated crews converting to the M60A2 from earlier types. Wouldn’t be surprised that the nickname didn’t survive into service as it wouldn’t be the first time; the nicknames given to US tank destroyers other than the Hellcat were reportedly never used by units at the sharp end.
One of my old bosses was at a camp in South Vietnam. He was SF.
He said that there was an artillery piece that was slowly adjusting fire onto the camp.
He said that they went looking for it but couldn’t find it.
They finally went out with metal probes and found it.
It was a captured Sheridan and the enemy had buried it.
They dug it up and found where they had been putting marks inside the turret to use to adjust fire onto the camp.
Well ain’t I a dumas:-( here be the link to the ONTOS
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/1827176/posts
Dang I is slipping in my dotage.
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
Bradley 28 tons, Stryker 21 tons, LAV 14 tons:
M113 13 tons, AAV 30 tons:
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