Because this was already available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard It is now replaced by the Ozelot Light Flak (leFla) System with LFK NG missile (range 10 km). http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiesel_2_Ozelot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFK_NG
They should develop something similar but use surplus M-60 hulls. No need for the M1's turbine or heavy armor as this is not a required feature for short/medium ADA. This would be a good platform for Hybrid engine development.
Here is my idea for the setup: 1. For the missile, stick with the new ESSM with the AMRAM’s active seeker. Arrange them in pairs of naval quad-packs (mk41 13ft Self-Defense Module), one pair on each side of the rear deck. This would be a total of 16 ESSMs. To deploy, they go vertical off the back of the tank like many Russian “S” series SAMS. By going with a Mk41 based solution, you maximize missile loadout and minimize upgrade costs.
2. Swap out the ESSMs with A2G missiles as the environment permits to support ground troops. Ground launched SDBs, VL Hellfire, etc are just a few possibilities.
3. Unify the radars (currently are separate search and acquisition radars) into 4 AESA arrays on their own extendable mini-tower (can be used in lower position for mobile use). This makes maintenance easier (less moving parts), allows for better target acquisition & tracking, and increases crew survivability if LPI techniques are used.
4. In the armored turret, put either a 35mm Millennium Gun or the 57mm gun from the LCS/DG-1000 for use as a SHORAD AAA. It can also be used against ground targets.
5. Install stealthy datalinks like MADL to ensure better networking without giving its position away.
well my main concern is that you have the extremely short ranged manpads in use today (have we seen an increase in the range of those systems since the 1980's?) and the longer ranged Patriots is a huge gap. if the enemy makes it past the fighter screen or whatever they call it and dodge the patriots then they can launch outside the range of our current anti-air.
two levels of protection instead of three because the enemy has upgraded his reach and we haven't. heck you can take precision 2.75 rockets and almost launch outside of manpad distance.
All good ideas, Spud -- especially with respect to considering a hybrid-engined, refurbished M-60 as the base vehicle, instead of the M-1. As for the 4x4-pack ESSM layout however, even a 2x4 load-out could be practical and effective. Also, perhaps the Stunner's dual-seeker could be integrated, in lieu of said AMRAAM seeker? Perhaps even reduce the the wh down to the weight of an AMRAAM and increase the amount of propellant??
Instead of your 2nd quad-cell on each side, maybe a single-shot elevated RIM-116 tube per side, atop the turret for closer-in engagement?
Perhaps also ponder the 40mm bofors concept as used for RoK's AD system. Or an integrated Oerlikon system as you mentioned... either that an enhanced and customized off-the-shelf German-designed kit altogether, perhaps with towed missile launcher trailer?
That said, US ground forces most likely do lack and seemingly neglect sufficient mobile ground Air Defence capability for the modern era.
While the US military has enjoyed great success with UAVs in the last 10-20 years, I have not seen anyone stop and ask "So what happens when we go up against an enemy with UAVs". I don't think that anything bigger then predator-A will last long against the Air Force, but smaller birds could be very pesky.
Here's a question for everyone bored enough to read the comments: As an abstract exercise, I want you to picture that you are on patrol in a hostile land of your choosing. Now imagine that you look up and see a Desert Hawk towing a banner that says "I R UR ENEMY!" You have all your regular gear, a radio, and the express permission of the pentagon to deal with this thing as you please. Do you ignore it and accept the fact that the enemy is watching you? Hide, wait for it to go away, and hope the operator didn't spot you? Do you turn your small arms and SAWS skyward and play a new and more challenging version skeet shooting? Do you request a Stinger mandpad? F-16 seems too fast, do you think an apache could hunt that thing down and earn itself an aerial kill? Maybe your solution would be to call up some Bill Gates equivelant in the Military Industrial Complex and have him whip you up some kind of superduper drone thumper to kill these things.
For bonus points, imagine the same scenario except that its' dark outside, and our enemy has IR or NVG on his little toy airplane.
hmm. i hadn't considered the idea of enemy UAVs in all this. something to chew on. time to dust off the old anti-air drills that infantry did in world war 2.
oh wait...i have an answer to Kirby's scenario. Its soo simple that no one has thought of it till now. I shall call the JSF-35 with its video game hud goggles to correctly verify if indeed its written "I R UR ENEMY!". Then i shall issue out a multi million dollar contract to the lowest bidder to give me a text converter software for my video game helmet which can convert Arab, Urdu, Mandarin, Slavic, cantonese etc. signs into english.
Then i will hope and pray that the JSF does indeed take out the target. In the reent controversy to give conventional bravery medals to drone operators, imagine if the drone chap turns out to be a cheeky little bugger and manages an F-35 scalp.
First, make sure every tank has a universal cargo bay into which VLS stacks can be pushed up with...whatever in them. This is because any tank must be able to be a AD shooter since every ADV is a prime target.
Second, you don't want to defend something on a whites-of-eyes basis. That's too much like reflexes and OK Corral nonsense.
You want to be able to see it from here (ELO drone like a scaled Dark Star or TACOM) or here (ground mount UGS ADADS) or here (ground mount UGS AHM (acoustic)) or here (JLENS across the border in Poland with a much longer tether and/or UAV independent power) or here (Blk.40 GHawk with MP-RTIP, suitably reprogrammed).
And _using datalink sharing_ launch a weapon like a MIM-160 MALI-
> The vehicle was launched from an F-4 fighter at an altitude of 20,000ft MSL. Following launch, it flew in a racetrack pattern for 11.5 minutes through nine waypoints. The vehicle reached airspeeds of up to Mach 1.1, achieving the primary objective of supersonic flight. >
At 300lbs and 10ft long, the MALI is the grandfather of all future S2A systems because, while it may be in a weight class similar to that of AMRAAM, it is, in fact, capable of 500nm ranges. More than 4 times the maximum of AIM-54 Phoenix (tested on in-service ADM-160 MALD variant).
Even if you have to halve the range to install a warhead, OTH image capable datalink and rocket booster to take the weapon to high energy terminals, this is effectively the ability to turn any ground launch system into an NLOS capable aircraft killer that _does not obey_ terrain masking rules.
Thus, I can fire a weapon from over here, and based on correlated track headings, hit a CM or helicopter or TFR'ing fighter which is head over there, to a known target, based on trackfile indications. All without having LOS on the defended asset or the threat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTu6tavuuA
As others have suggested, if you then took a universal turret well ahead of this aft cargo bay and added a laser system-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E57CqeH6PdE
Your ADV (Air Defense Vehicle) is now the equivalent of both a NASAMS and a Gepard for different threat types. The big question being whether you want to have your FAADS-II unit associated with specific targets to defend against threat drones (which are much more likely to skulk near the distant treelines in a Ukrainian scenario). Or be released to free hunt across a wider killing ground (for the missiles, it probably doesn't matter, but they will cost too much to be used against big-RC type small UAVs).
In the Balkans during the runup to OAF-99, we were using a drones quite a bit and found that they a large percentage of them were getting shot down for the simple reason that they all used a particular high mountain pass to transit through, under the clouds, as a major recognition point.
The same could be done here.
The other thing which cannot be forgotten is that APS which protect tanks from weapons like TOW and perhaps Hellfire/Maverick could easily be scaled up to hit the larger, slower, and less capable GBU-12/31/32/38. Not just for armor protection but for use in defending high value structures at larger standoff distances to prevent close-aboard blast-shrapnel damage (say 300ft).
These systems would be cheap and very hard to saturate, defensively and could be used offensively to throw proximity blasts at passing drones, missiles or aircraft on a 'one per hilltop or planted mast' basis of 2 ready shots.
If your aim is to deny the lolo envelope to all threats, then you need to think both BLOS/NLOS as a function of reach and wide area, _not point_ specific, for your sensorization cue.
This does not equate to conventional gun-missile systems though I confess E-FOGM (and the later FOG-MPM, Polyphem and ALAS all come considerably closer).
200-300 gallons of fuel per day for an M-1 on the march. Plus compared to diesels, it has outrageously bad fuel consumption at idle. Worse time between failure rate for maintenance too. So, less availability per day. All in all: logistically expensive by a high factor.
The increasing use of small UAVs means more consideration has to be given to air defense systems for the troops on the ground, gun based systems in particular. Lasers should be excellent against such targets once they mature further.
I love that AGDS concept but I think the author of it has the wrong dimensions for the ADAT missile. The missile tubes look too small.
1. It was done on the cheap (M48 Chassis, 40mm L60 _surplus WWII guns_ rather than the L70 modern from Bofors Sweden, bad ammo design, modified APG-66 rather than a dedicated surface mount radar system etc. etc.). By configuration it was not in any way different from the way the Gepard or the Gun element of the Tunguska worked and had an obvious caliber advantage in terms of both ballistic range and adaptability to 3P/AHEAD technologies.
2. Technology Underreach. No gun system is going to overmatch a late model Ataka or Vikhr ATGW from a helicopter firing low to the horizon. If you are not in fact willing to go BLOS to engage the threat before it fires 2-6 shots in fast-staggered beam riding intervals that end up killing a third of your platoon strength in tracks /whether or not/ you kill the Havoc or Hokum which fired the shots, you might as well abandon 'air defense' of the unit (archer kill) and fit APS (as Active Protection Systems) to individual tanks (arrow kill) instead. At least then each hit to kill metric is decided individually rather than on a saturation basis of 'who got the SPAAG?'.
The Soviets in fact did both. Using tank-bore (125mm) CLGP to push 'AAA' into the 5,000-8,000m category (though whether they would have had the targeting to exploit the absolute reach of the Refleks missile against Apaches I don't know...). At the same time they serviced first the Drozd and then developed the Arena into play as pioneering APS systems, followed by Shtora-1 EOCM.
Hellfire would not have minded so much because it has a variable lofting profile which can be set to high-dive above the -5/+25 degree coverage of systems like Drozd and Shtora-1 but TOW hasn't been useful as an ATGW vs. topline Soviet Armor (which is to say even the T-55AD-1 of the Soviet Naval Infantry) in decades.
APS makes that big a difference vs. subsonic ATGW.
At the same time, the only things we really needed from FAADS were the highly mobile sector radars and the EFOG-M which we did not. All the LOS-Heavy AD stuff like the Liberty and ADATS and the rear area stuff like the Avenger and later Linebacker mods were more or less useless because they simply did not exist in numbers sufficient to offer more than random coverage and even versus Soviet period-80s technology, the weapons system overmatch of the helicopter target acquisition and guidance was pretty severe.
Without the NLOS AD missile and given the Stinger equipped systems were basically targets themselves to any attack helo which made a studied approach to ATGW firing thresholds on fixed, high value, target sets; the entire concept of what FAADS was to be about as a _layered_ defense of low level FEBA level maneuver elements ended up being broken and useless.
Sgt. York predated FAADS by a decade and so cannot be judged the same way.
This would have been an over the top, uber-expensive option for a mobile air defense.
ReplyDeleteWhy ?
DeleteBecause this was already available:
Deletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard
It is now replaced by the Ozelot Light Flak (leFla) System with LFK NG missile (range 10 km).
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiesel_2_Ozelot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFK_NG
Exercise:
http://youtu.be/uaR98A6ahdI
Yhym... and from when US buy heavy military equipment from Germany or any other country ?
DeleteThey should develop something similar but use surplus M-60 hulls. No need for the M1's turbine or heavy armor as this is not a required feature for short/medium ADA. This would be a good platform for Hybrid engine development.
DeleteHere is my idea for the setup:
1. For the missile, stick with the new ESSM with the AMRAM’s active seeker. Arrange them in pairs of naval quad-packs (mk41 13ft Self-Defense Module), one pair on each side of the rear deck. This would be a total of 16 ESSMs. To deploy, they go vertical off the back of the tank like many Russian “S” series SAMS. By going with a Mk41 based solution, you maximize missile loadout and minimize upgrade costs.
2. Swap out the ESSMs with A2G missiles as the environment permits to support ground troops. Ground launched SDBs, VL Hellfire, etc are just a few possibilities.
3. Unify the radars (currently are separate search and acquisition radars) into 4 AESA arrays on their own extendable mini-tower (can be used in lower position for mobile use). This makes maintenance easier (less moving parts), allows for better target acquisition & tracking, and increases crew survivability if LPI techniques are used.
4. In the armored turret, put either a 35mm Millennium Gun or the 57mm gun from the LCS/DG-1000 for use as a SHORAD AAA. It can also be used against ground targets.
5. Install stealthy datalinks like MADL to ensure better networking without giving its position away.
You could also keep the missiles-on-the-side-of-turret layout of the main pic as two quad packs would only be about 3 feet tall.
DeleteAs a side note, EODAS would be a good addon as it would increase the chance of detecting small targets like cruse missiles and drones in the area.
well my main concern is that you have the extremely short ranged manpads in use today (have we seen an increase in the range of those systems since the 1980's?) and the longer ranged Patriots is a huge gap. if the enemy makes it past the fighter screen or whatever they call it and dodge the patriots then they can launch outside the range of our current anti-air.
Deletetwo levels of protection instead of three because the enemy has upgraded his reach and we haven't. heck you can take precision 2.75 rockets and almost launch outside of manpad distance.
All good ideas, Spud -- especially with respect to considering a hybrid-engined, refurbished M-60 as the base vehicle, instead of the M-1. As for the 4x4-pack ESSM layout however, even a 2x4 load-out could be practical and effective. Also, perhaps the Stunner's dual-seeker could be integrated, in lieu of said AMRAAM seeker? Perhaps even reduce the the wh down to the weight of an AMRAAM and increase the amount of propellant??
DeleteInstead of your 2nd quad-cell on each side, maybe a single-shot elevated RIM-116 tube per side, atop the turret for closer-in engagement?
Perhaps also ponder the 40mm bofors concept as used for RoK's AD system. Or an integrated Oerlikon system as you mentioned... either that an enhanced and customized off-the-shelf German-designed kit altogether, perhaps with towed missile launcher trailer?
That said, US ground forces most likely do lack and seemingly neglect sufficient mobile ground Air Defence capability for the modern era.
The turret looks just like the Russian Pantsir-S1. Why have I never heard of this?
ReplyDeleteWhile the US military has enjoyed great success with UAVs in the last 10-20 years, I have not seen anyone stop and ask "So what happens when we go up against an enemy with UAVs". I don't think that anything bigger then predator-A will last long against the Air Force, but smaller birds could be very pesky.
ReplyDeleteHere's a question for everyone bored enough to read the comments:
As an abstract exercise, I want you to picture that you are on patrol in a hostile land of your choosing. Now imagine that you look up and see a Desert Hawk towing a banner that says "I R UR ENEMY!" You have all your regular gear, a radio, and the express permission of the pentagon to deal with this thing as you please. Do you ignore it and accept the fact that the enemy is watching you? Hide, wait for it to go away, and hope the operator didn't spot you? Do you turn your small arms and SAWS skyward and play a new and more challenging version skeet shooting? Do you request a Stinger mandpad? F-16 seems too fast, do you think an apache could hunt that thing down and earn itself an aerial kill? Maybe your solution would be to call up some Bill Gates equivelant in the Military Industrial Complex and have him whip you up some kind of superduper drone thumper to kill these things.
For bonus points, imagine the same scenario except that its' dark outside, and our enemy has IR or NVG on his little toy airplane.
hmm. i hadn't considered the idea of enemy UAVs in all this. something to chew on. time to dust off the old anti-air drills that infantry did in world war 2.
DeleteEasy, bring one of these:
Deletehttp://www.hummerpedia.org/hummer-avenger-laser
oh wait...i have an answer to Kirby's scenario. Its soo simple that no one has thought of it till now. I shall call the JSF-35 with its video game hud goggles to correctly verify if indeed its written "I R UR ENEMY!". Then i shall issue out a multi million dollar contract to the lowest bidder to give me a text converter software for my video game helmet which can convert Arab, Urdu, Mandarin, Slavic, cantonese etc. signs into english.
DeleteThen i will hope and pray that the JSF does indeed take out the target. In the reent controversy to give conventional bravery medals to drone operators, imagine if the drone chap turns out to be a cheeky little bugger and manages an F-35 scalp.
DeleteFirst, make sure every tank has a universal cargo bay into which VLS stacks can be pushed up with...whatever in them. This is because any tank must be able to be a AD shooter since every ADV is a prime target.
DeleteSecond, you don't want to defend something on a whites-of-eyes basis. That's too much like reflexes and OK Corral nonsense.
You want to be able to see it from here (ELO drone like a scaled Dark Star or TACOM) or here (ground mount UGS ADADS) or here (ground mount UGS AHM (acoustic)) or here (JLENS across the border in Poland with a much longer tether and/or UAV independent power) or here (Blk.40 GHawk with MP-RTIP, suitably reprogrammed).
And _using datalink sharing_ launch a weapon like a MIM-160 MALI-
>
The vehicle was launched from an F-4 fighter at an altitude of 20,000ft MSL. Following launch, it flew in a racetrack pattern for 11.5 minutes through nine waypoints. The vehicle reached airspeeds of up to Mach 1.1, achieving the primary objective of supersonic flight.
>
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Northrop_Grumman_Conducts_Supersonic_Test_Of_Miniature_Interceptor.html
At 300lbs and 10ft long, the MALI is the grandfather of all future S2A systems because, while it may be in a weight class similar to that of AMRAAM, it is, in fact, capable of 500nm ranges. More than 4 times the maximum of AIM-54 Phoenix (tested on in-service ADM-160 MALD variant).
Even if you have to halve the range to install a warhead, OTH image capable datalink and rocket booster to take the weapon to high energy terminals, this is effectively the ability to turn any ground launch system into an NLOS capable aircraft killer that _does not obey_ terrain masking rules.
Thus, I can fire a weapon from over here, and based on correlated track headings, hit a CM or helicopter or TFR'ing fighter which is head over there, to a known target, based on trackfile indications. All without having LOS on the defended asset or the threat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTu6tavuuA
As others have suggested, if you then took a universal turret well ahead of this aft cargo bay and added a laser system-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E57CqeH6PdE
Your ADV (Air Defense Vehicle) is now the equivalent of both a NASAMS and a Gepard for different threat types. The big question being whether you want to have your FAADS-II unit associated with specific targets to defend against threat drones (which are much more likely to skulk near the distant treelines in a Ukrainian scenario). Or be released to free hunt across a wider killing ground (for the missiles, it probably doesn't matter, but they will cost too much to be used against big-RC type small UAVs).
In the Balkans during the runup to OAF-99, we were using a drones quite a bit and found that they a large percentage of them were getting shot down for the simple reason that they all used a particular high mountain pass to transit through, under the clouds, as a major recognition point.
The same could be done here.
The other thing which cannot be forgotten is that APS which protect tanks from weapons like TOW and perhaps Hellfire/Maverick could easily be scaled up to hit the larger, slower, and less capable GBU-12/31/32/38. Not just for armor protection but for use in defending high value structures at larger standoff distances to prevent close-aboard blast-shrapnel damage (say 300ft).
These systems would be cheap and very hard to saturate, defensively and could be used offensively to throw proximity blasts at passing drones, missiles or aircraft on a 'one per hilltop or planted mast' basis of 2 ready shots.
If your aim is to deny the lolo envelope to all threats, then you need to think both BLOS/NLOS as a function of reach and wide area, _not point_ specific, for your sensorization cue.
This does not equate to conventional gun-missile systems though I confess E-FOGM (and the later FOG-MPM, Polyphem and ALAS all come considerably closer).
Here's an interesting bit of background on E-FOGM, a fiber optic ground attack missile that could also be used against rotary wing.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.g2mil.com/efogm.htm
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete200-300 gallons of fuel per day for an M-1 on the march. Plus compared to diesels, it has outrageously bad fuel consumption at idle. Worse time between failure rate for maintenance too. So, less availability per day. All in all: logistically expensive by a high factor.
ReplyDeleteThe increasing use of small UAVs means more consideration has to be given to air defense systems for the troops on the ground, gun based systems in particular. Lasers should be excellent against such targets once they mature further.
ReplyDeleteI love that AGDS concept but I think the author of it has the wrong dimensions for the ADAT missile. The missile tubes look too small.
Forgot to citation that Airborne Dragon quote-
ReplyDeletehttps://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-538748351/operation-airborne-dragon-northern-iraq
wow.. Sgt York DIVAD deja vu
ReplyDeleteSgt. York failed for two basic reasons:
ReplyDelete1. It was done on the cheap (M48 Chassis, 40mm L60 _surplus WWII guns_ rather than the L70 modern from Bofors Sweden, bad ammo design, modified APG-66 rather than a dedicated surface mount radar system etc. etc.). By configuration it was not in any way different from the way the Gepard or the Gun element of the Tunguska worked and had an obvious caliber advantage in terms of both ballistic range and adaptability to 3P/AHEAD technologies.
2. Technology Underreach.
No gun system is going to overmatch a late model Ataka or Vikhr ATGW from a helicopter firing low to the horizon. If you are not in fact willing to go BLOS to engage the threat before it fires 2-6 shots in fast-staggered beam riding intervals that end up killing a third of your platoon strength in tracks /whether or not/ you kill the Havoc or Hokum which fired the shots, you might as well abandon 'air defense' of the unit (archer kill) and fit APS (as Active Protection Systems) to individual tanks (arrow kill) instead. At least then each hit to kill metric is decided individually rather than on a saturation basis of 'who got the SPAAG?'.
The Soviets in fact did both. Using tank-bore (125mm) CLGP to push 'AAA' into the 5,000-8,000m category (though whether they would have had the targeting to exploit the absolute reach of the Refleks missile against Apaches I don't know...). At the same time they serviced first the Drozd and then developed the Arena into play as pioneering APS systems, followed by Shtora-1 EOCM.
Hellfire would not have minded so much because it has a variable lofting profile which can be set to high-dive above the -5/+25 degree coverage of systems like Drozd and Shtora-1 but TOW hasn't been useful as an ATGW vs. topline Soviet Armor (which is to say even the T-55AD-1 of the Soviet Naval Infantry) in decades.
APS makes that big a difference vs. subsonic ATGW.
At the same time, the only things we really needed from FAADS were the highly mobile sector radars and the EFOG-M which we did not. All the LOS-Heavy AD stuff like the Liberty and ADATS and the rear area stuff like the Avenger and later Linebacker mods were more or less useless because they simply did not exist in numbers sufficient to offer more than random coverage and even versus Soviet period-80s technology, the weapons system overmatch of the helicopter target acquisition and guidance was pretty severe.
Without the NLOS AD missile and given the Stinger equipped systems were basically targets themselves to any attack helo which made a studied approach to ATGW firing thresholds on fixed, high value, target sets; the entire concept of what FAADS was to be about as a _layered_ defense of low level FEBA level maneuver elements ended up being broken and useless.
Sgt. York predated FAADS by a decade and so cannot be judged the same way.