Posted on 08/09/2017 11:46:09 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: If you fly Russian MiG fighters, Sukhoi attack jets, or Hind helicopters, your life just got a little harder — and in the event of war, potentially much shorter. At the Space & Missile Defense conference here, General Dynamics rolled out the latest variant of their eight-wheel-drive Stryker armored vehicle, with the troop compartment that’s normally in the back replaced with a Boeing-built anti-aircraft turret. Scroll down for our photos of the vehicle, dubbed the Maneuver SHORAD (Short-Range Air Defense) Launcher, or MSL Stryker.
Evolved from the Cold War era Avenger, which mounted Stinger missiles on Humvee, the new turret can mount a wider array of more powerful weapons:
AI-3s, a ground-launched version of the AIM-9 missiles used by US fighters, with significantly better range and maximum altitude than the old Stinger.
Longbow Hellfires, originally an anti-tank missile, made famous as the favored weapon of the Predator drone, and suitable for both ground targets and low-flying aircraft like helicopter gunships.
Hydra 2.75 inch guided rockets;
0.50 caliber machineguns;
and even low-powered lasers capable of burning out quadcopters and other small drones.
The vehicle on display at Huntsville’s Werner von Braun Center mounts Hellfires on one side and AI-3s on the other, as well as a specialized electro-optical sensor on top. But the GD Stryker is just one of a family of anti-aircraft vehicles that Boeing is developing with various partners, as heavy as BAE’s tracked Bradleys and as light as Oshkosh’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicles. A JLTV with anti-aircraft missiles and a machinegun will debut at the enormous Association of the US Army annual conference in Washington, DC this October.
The MSL Stryker’s turret, with two AI-3s (modified AIM-9s) on one side, four Hellfires on the other, and a sensor on top.
The mission for all these vehicles: highly mobile air defense that can keep pace with frontline units and survive in combat zones– what the Army calls Maneuver SHORAD. There’s been no successful airstrike on US Army forces since 1953, when a North Korean biplane flying low and slow slipped through US defenses, Since 1991, the Army has focused on missile defense and disbanded anti-aircraft units, assuming Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps pilots will rule the air and keep enemy aircraft off their backs.
That assumption no longer holds. On the low end, proliferating drones present targets too low and slow for jet fighters to intercept. On the high end, advanced adversaries like Russia and China have developed anti-aircraft missiles that can keep US planes at bay and sophisticated fighters that can challenge US pilots for control of the air. The new threats are driving all of the services to seek countermeasures, especially a new concept for all-service operations known as Multi-Domain Battle.
But we can’t carry out any kind of operations if our forces are bombed and strafed every time they try to move, like the German reinforcements struggling to reach the D-Day beaches in 1944. That’s what Maneuver SHORAD — and the new Stryker vehicle — are all about. If friendly fighters can’t keep enemy aircraft at bay, the ground troops will shoot them down themselves.
The anti-aircraft turret replaces the passenger/cargo compartment normally found on Strykers.
I totally want one.
Will this one require the helo to hover stationary, with add-on radar reflector?
The last dismal failure at a gun solution was a pathetic failure.
Oh, yeah. Sgt York, I think the wretched thing was to be called.
That wasn’t the last gun solution. There’s the M6 Linebacker - a Bradley equipped with Stingers and able to use the 25mm chain gun in AA mode.
I would also point out that the Russians have had a recent series of successful combo gun-and-missile systems. Part of the US military’s sudden interest in these type systems is the combat performance of things like the SA-19 Grison/2K22 Tunguska and the Pantsir S1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K22_Tunguska
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir-S1
So I guess any old chassis can work but again the taxpayer will get royally screwed on the cost of everything. Maybe if they bought a bunch of the Israeli Python missiles in quantity of say 20k, then I'd give it a pass especially as the Python is state of the art multi angle air to air & surface to air missile. Heck if you slap on a good rocket booster to it the SAM version can get 100km coverage and I'll bet anyone that the Anti air would probably beat out the legendary Phoenix missile that we used to have.
And it just makes sense to attach it to a proven platform instead of reinventing the wheel like so many Government contractors like to do
Now I did however get to check out and operate a German Gepard self-propelled AA gun system, and I wondered to myself, "Why aren't we making something like this?"
That was in 1988.
Curious, where is this being built? Canada, London Ontario?
Technology is changing at an astonishing pace. By the end of the American Civil War wooden hull ships were obsolete, along with muzzle loading guns and cannons. Everyone thought the first world war would be a war of movement and the cavalry would be king. Barbed wire ended that. Along came the airplane and nations were still preparing for war by building battleships. In the next war battleships barely took part when compared to aircraft carriers. We are constantly upgrading and improving the weapons that were important during the last war. The danger here is the enemy has all the time he wants to study what you have done and come up with a counter.
With the advent of fully robotic manufacturing, miniaturization and the inevitability of Moore’s law, I suspect the next war will see clouds of robotically produced drones ranging in size from a small fighter plane down to a seagull. I think we are entering the age of swarm attacks. Unfortunately, the military industrial complex is tuned to produce big, expensive weapons, primarily because that’s where the money is. Politically, Congress isn’t interested in small weapons built by robots because robots don’t vote.
I am in favor of giving the guy on the ground the best weapons and best protection we can afford. However, history shows that Donald Rumsfeld was right; “You don’t go to war with the weapons you want, you go to war with the weapons you have.” I hope somewhere, perhaps in DARPA, somebody is developing and planning to rapidly field the weapons we will want.
Scourged1,
I beg to differ about the DIVAD system. As the overseer of that benighted attempt at cobbling together a proven air-to-air radar, a proven Bofors autocannon and an M48 chassis, the Sgt York was a political disaster because the Army thought they could hoodwink the acquisition system established first by Regulation, later by Statute. The Ford Aerospace software designers failed to integrate a system that would accurately pick out actual threats from the dirty environment of a battlefield, and couldn’t keep up with the fast-moving forces in Bradleys and Abrams tanks. The Army failed to understand that hostile attack crews would exploit the many DIVAD vulnerabilities and go home safe themselves.
The antics of the Ford test designers under cover of Army “Marketeers” got caught at their game and the morning after receiving a factual and objective assessment of the results of a realistic operational test, SecDef Weinberger cancelled production that never should have begun. In supervising that test, and objectively the dismal results thereof, I simply applied the viewpoint of an attack pilot instead of an Air Defense Artillery careerist, based on my experience of 412 attack missions in Vietnam.
So the DIVAD system was a failure both on a realistic battlefield and political battlefield.
TC
“...your life just got a little harder...”
Shouldn’t that read “just got a little shorter”?
I was a SHORAD Army Officer from the late 70s to the mid 90s. This looks like a weapon by committee, doing everything for everyone. I hope it works well and lives up to its advertisements. The problem we had in the years I served was that our SHORAD units were assigned to support maneuver units, that is Armor and Infantry. None of those commanders knew or cared a wit about our capabilities and never used the asset correctly. Will this be any different? We will see.
Yep, and many careers ended with that boondoggle.
I was an SP Vulcan Platoon Leader in Germany and later Battery XO. It would have been a fantastic anti Infantry weapon, not so much anti aircraft. I later commanded the HHB in a towed Vulcan BN at FT Campbell. Luckily we never had to use any of them. I also saw the German system in action and wondered too why we didnt either buy it or build it. I guess I was young and naieve to think we shouldnt spend billions on our own system.
I was an artillery FO in Germany in the 70s and back as a Cav Sqdn S-2 in the mid-80s. I recall the French and Germans having the Roland anti-aircraft missile system that worked quite well. I recall that the US bought a battery or two to test out, but Congress said “No” due to it ‘not being designed in USA,” even after they mounted the Roland launcher on a M-109 artillery chassis. The Germans also came out with the Gepard, twin 35mm AA tank during that time frame.
Roland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_(missile)
Gepard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard
IIRC, the linebackers have been withdrawn from service
Yeah, the Army had decided that they were not needed; as noted in the article, they had decided to de-emphasize ground air defense against aircraft. However, as the article also notes, the Army is now hastily revisiting the issue. The M6s were “withdrawn” by bringing them into depot, swapping the Stinger missile pack for their original TOW missile packs and updating the software; the Army is now seriously considering reversing that as of this year. http://breakingdefense.com/2017/08/laser-in-front-grunts-in-back-boeing-offers-anti-aircraft-vehicles/
Actually, only the Europeans thought that WW1 would be a war of movement. There were a number of Americans that figured it would look more like the end of the Civil War where it had actually begun devolving into trench warfare.
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