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To: Cannoneer No. 4; FreedomPoster; archy
If you read through the O&O for the different BCT they all are relying more and more on aviation assets to take the place of large caliber direct fire weapons in urban and open terrain. Nothing beat the ability the M551 had in Panama City to pop a 152mm HEAT round into the window with a sniper. Gets their attention real fast.
24 posted on 02/03/2006 8:19:09 AM PST by SLB ("We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us." C. S. Lewis)
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To: SLB
If you read through the O&O for the different BCT they all are relying more and more on aviation assets to take the place of large caliber direct fire weapons in urban and open terrain. Nothing beat the ability the M551 had in Panama City to pop a 152mm HEAT round into the window with a sniper. Gets their attention real fast.

That'd be great, if the M551 was still available to those clearing cities of snipers and other unfriendlies, particularly wire or laser-guided ones...which Noriega's *Dignity Battalions* did not have available, good thing for us. Given the current vehicles/launch systems available, an inexpensive unguided round for the TOW launcher with a HE or HESH warhead rather than a HEAT charge would seem to be the next best thing. You could even fire a M551 with the turret turned 90º to the side without recourse tooutriggers or engineer-prepared firing positions, though it wasn't the happiest experience in the world. I never saw it done with one of the Shillelagh missiles, however, and suspect that would have been a maintenance-intensive event.

During the closing days of the Second World War, 1944-'45, Patton's Third Army claimed the best tool for mopping up those urban areas that couldn't be bypassed as per Third Army SOP was the 155mm self-propelled howitzer, at that time most commonly found mounted on a Sherman tank chassis. 120mm mortars carried aboard Strykers seem an unlikely replacement for that role, though there are some Soltam and Tampella direct-fire mortars available just right for fitting on a wheeled transporter chassis.

Too, it might be possible to fit an M551 turret on a Bradley chassis as a fire support vehicle, but that wouldn't satisfy the transformational trackless tyrants. Of course, there's also the stretched M113 chassis the Finns have developed for the AMOS twin-mortar system...and there IS an *AMOS FIN* single-barrel variant mounted on an 8-wheeler.


25 posted on 02/03/2006 9:28:31 AM PST by archy (The darkness will come. It will find you,and it will scare you like you've never been scared before.)
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