Re: Advanced Guided Missile systems

John Atkinson wrote:

> That would be like the truck a buddy of mine was telling me about that
> ended up with an average height of 18" after it's chutes failed to
> open?  Ewwwww. . .
>

Axtually, they curtailled air drops for most of the tanks career and
went
to LAPES, (Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System) That's awhere a
C150
flies 5 feet off the ground and parachutes "extract" the vehicle out the
back and teh tank slides along teh ground on a pallet until it stops. If
something goes wrong it starts to tumble like a little toy. Saw one go
cartwheeling of into the woods and kill a few joes. Quite frightening.
But
that wasn't as bad as teh second time. It was during a live fire
demonstration for westpoint/rotc and various visiting dignitaries down
at
OP5 at Ft Bragg. First they had a bn jump right into a live fire
exrcize.
Once the DZ was secure and teh heavy drops came in, here comes the C30s
with the M551. The C130 swoops in but something went wrong and it "belly
flopped" in creating a huge fireball. The tank actually tumbled right
through the wreck (see them sheridens are actually impervious to
exploding
C130s! <g>)   What a mess. All crew dead of course.

> But God help the crewman that thought it was a tank and tried to take
a
> hit from, say, an RPG or something.  As a tank it was a POS.	When
used
> as such in Vietnam it ended up with really bad reputation.  As a fire
> support vehicle for airborne units that aren't supposed to drop into
> Panzer Corps assembly areas (Field Marshal Montgomery's opinion to the
> contrary!), it's better than anything else that was available.

You logic is funny to me. First off, No tank crewman goes "Oh theres an
enemy let me ride out his hit". He tries to avoid them, armor of not.
Second, god help the crewman of ANY vehicle that takes a hit from an
RPG.

The 82d's job is not designed to drop into tank assembly areas. It
functions in certain terrain and using certain tactical methods. I'm not
going to get into the specifics of the triple AD(Airborne Anti-Armor
defense). But it entails a shitload of TOW launchers. One parachute bn
has
at it's disposal, 18 TOW vehicles. Plus Brigade had two additional TOW
companies which were doled out to the battalions as necessary.

Each bn (that's how we usually deployed though bde ops were not
uncommon),
has only one platoon of sheridans attached. They operated with the rifle
companies as infantry support. Sur ethey had the AT capability but that
was
primarily the realm of the TOW platoons. We lihed having that mosnter
152mm
gun arounds which could pretty much level a bunker or a building in one
blow. SO you are most definately confusing mission capabilities here.

Los