Posted on 05/13/2013 3:42:25 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Then imagine that you have 8 inch howitzers firing in GS reinforcing; 203 millimeters of pure, precise devastation and 200 pounds of America's best HE and forged steel to overlay your fires.
Nice, isn't it?
Now please don't tell me that we're back to towing 8 inch howitzers...
In that kind of combat environment, the King of Battle needs rapid-moving and rapid-firing SP artillery, not just light DS.
Larger cannons can be towed than can be self-propelled.
I’m going to venture a guess that you’re not an engineer and probably never served in artillery..
Eight inch guns are a little large for towing and WAY too large for air lifting.
The L/12 is 16.5 inch towed artillery.
Incorrect.
The US had several towed 8" and larger guns.
The 240 mm howitzer M1 was towed.
Even the frickin 280mm M65 atomic cannon was towed.
Here's an
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_howitzers
Btw I am an engineer and served in the US Army artillery -if that helps.
Your definition of “towed” and mine differ a bunch! The M65 wasn’t Towed in my book: it is clearly carried by its transport and then emplaced on the ground. We have one of those puppies at Aberdeen and I would be pleased to show it to you. As far as I know, 240mm howitzer was rarely used -Anzio, as I remember.
You are correct that we had towed 8 Inch howitzers in WWII. Very clearly a large, unwieldy weapon on today’s battlefields. Should I ever be privileged to command a division, I would opt for the SP version..
How's that again?! This one's bigger than 9 inches...and it is towed.
*oh yeah, we had a self-propelled version, but we scrapped it...wanna **guess** why?? You can guess; I can tell ya.
Self-propelled howitzers provide mobility, speed (compared to towed, anyway) rapidity in emplacement, crew assistance in the form of projectile handling, loading and aiming and can use much smaller crews and fire far more rapidly. Further, SP howitzers can be used for more rapidly shifting fire fans than a towed howitzer, covering more area for attack. SP guns do require more maintenance support than towed artillery but the mobility and speed of firing is worth the effort.
We have the technology, so it's time to use it. Modern howitzers aim using ring laser gyros which sense the turn of the Earth so precisely that we can aim within less than one mil in traverse and elevation. We now have ballistic programs that can iterate the flight of the projectile through all of the elements of its trajectory including the latest weather effects and provide a firing solution that dead-nuts-on for the first shot as long as we're given a good target location. We have laser rangefinders now, so the targets provided are pretty darn good. As I mentioned earlier, I have worked on an armored system which will be capable of accurate firing on the move for our future battlefields - we are in the 21st Century now and our prospective enemies all have large, modern armies. We have to be able to offset their advantages in mass and mobility, so we have to use the best equipment possible.
It's fine to look back to the past to gain an appreciation for history but do you seriously think we should use towed 240mm howitzers today? Heck, we had massive railway guns too but do you think those are a great idea today?
Why not go back to horses as prime movers?
I don’t see a need for larger artillery than our standard 155 mm at this time. Rockets, aircraft, and drones are for longer distances or harder targets.
Really, I just took issue with your bizarre claim that “you’re not an engineer and probably never served in artillery.. Eight inch guns are a little large for towing...” when we towed greater than 9 inch artillery into battle in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam.
It’s as though you didn’t know that we towed larger artillery, yet were pretending that others didn’t know what they were talking about.
Now you know.
“I don’t see a need for larger artillery than our standard 155 mm at this time.”
They have a devastating effect on massed things like artillery and vehicles. Also on Japs hiding in caves/bunkers.
Artillery is mandatory. Size was the point/debate.
Sizes have tradeoffs. Time to fire. Crew sizes to load/reload. Blast radius/depth. Quantity of munitions that can be transported.
Don’t fight the last war.
Well. that's swell. Now what is the basis for your expertise?
To the best of my knowledge, we never used any artillery larger than an 8 inch in Vietnam. We had that worthless 175mm but that isn't larger. You have repeated the "all we need is towed artillery" tripe, so let's hear about your actual experience.
The pic in post #29 is from Vietnam.
A surprise to me - I spent 18 months in combat over there and never saw or heard of anything like that beast. They must’ve had a whole lot of ammo left over from WWII and Korea and had to use it somewhere. I was at Dong Ha and Con Thien and even though we had several battalions of Marine Corps and Army artillery there, we didn’t have monstrosities like that.
You still haven’t answered my question: did you serve in artillery or did you get all of your opinions from reading?
Here's my experience: I actually served on towed 155mm (M114) and 105mm (M101A1) gun sections for several months in combat. Work on a cannon section is strenuous to say the least. You have to manhandle the stupid thing into position over ground that is never level, you have to dig it in, including digging trail pits and recoil pits, dig the position in/fill sandbags, put up a camo net, manhandle the ammunition boxes and break out the ammunition and of course, run through the manual labor of serving and firing the damn thing. With the 105, we often hit firing rates of 500-1,000 rounds per tube per day during Operations Prairie and Hastings on the DMZ. That meant convoys of trucks to the ammo dumps, working parties to unload the ammo and then break the WWII-era ammo out of its boxes and then strip it out of its creosote tubes. Hours of backbreaking labor in the sweltering heat. Towed guns are comparatively light compared to SPs and therefore the smaller ones can be moved by helicopter, however, most of the time you move by towing with a truck. The gun has to be broken down and march ordered and then hitched to the truck. If you are under fire, you have the choice of trying to get all that done so you can recover the guns, or just get the heck out of Dodge and hope there's something left to recover when you get back. While you're towing the guns, you are slow, loaded with ammunition and crew and extremely vulnerable to ambushes. We lost a lot of people during our convoys.
After Vietnam, I was commissioned and spent 24 years as an artillery officer, including commanding a 24 gun 155mm artillery battalion. I applied many of the lessons I learned as an enlisted cannoneer as an officer, including taking into account the strenuous and hazardous work serving the guns. The current fixation with 155mm towed artillery was frustrating because the people at the top saw the M198s as an improvement to direct support artillery where I saw a 7 1/2 ton behemoth that took 12 minutes to emplace in emergency conditions. After I left active duty, spent 13 years designing next-generation artillery. I applied the lessons I learned as an enlisted and commissioned officer - and Mechanical Engineer - to designing lighter, fast, more effective and less labor-intensive artillery support.
SP artillery is evolving and we have the ability to make them more effective and more reliable. Given the strong probability that we will eventually face large conventional forces again, it would be an enormous mistake to neglect self propulsion and armor protection and crew assistance systems for artillery.
So why did you say that anything bigger than 8 inches was too big to tow?
Famous last words: Honest sir, I thought the freeway overpass was higher.......
Was that too difficult for you to understand?
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