Category Archives: Air and Naval Weapons

!60th SOAR opens to women

Posted with the least of comment, just one fact missing from the press report.

The Army will soon have women flying special operations missions.

As part of a push by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno to open more combat roles for women, the Army is looking for women for pilot and crew chief billets for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, according to the Army Times.

via Army opens Special Operations flying missions to women – Stripes – Independent U.S. military news from Iraq, Afghanistan and bases worldwide.

That fact: 160th normally conducts a selection course. It’s not exactly SFAS or RASP, but the air and ground personnel who experience it feel like they were well wrung out. it’s an important rite of passage, then, into ARSOF aviation.

The selection standards will be modified as necessary so that the initial women volunteers pass.

We won’t editorialize on that. That’s the aviators’ to do, not ours.

How accurate was a .50 in WWII?

We’re familiar with the feats of marksmanship pulled off by snipers using scope-equipped .50 machine guns in Vietnam (this was also done in Korea, but less has been written about it). The Vietnam successes, particularly the late GySgt. Carlos Hathcock’s, paved the way for the development of purpose-built .50 sniper rifles (it’s no coincidence that the M82 Barrett came to fruition at the exact time that the word of Hathcock’s then-15-year-old-feats spread far and wide among serving soldiers and Marines).

With all the ingenuity that was displayed in World War II, why wasn’t the M2HB used as a sniper weapon? A look at some wartime data from the Heavy Barrel’s close cousin, the aerial M2, might be instructive. The interesting website LoneSentry (which was this week’s W4) has a relevant document. They seem to alternate publishing press releases of new kits for modelers with fascinating original documents from the World War II era. And they’ve reprinted numerous excerpts from a 20th Air Force set of B-29 crew notes, which we’ll snag a short excerpt of:

There are several factors to consider in arriving at an answer to the question of how long a burst it is practical to fire. The ammunition has a high degree of accuracy. At 600 yards, when fired from an accuracy rifle held in a V-block, it will group in a circle 18″ in diameter. When fired single shot, using an aircraft machine gun on a tripod mount, tests have shown a 20″ circle of fire.

This is a Mann accuracy device, used for ammunition testing by the Army (this particular one is in 7.62 NATO on a Springfield acton). These were made in all calibers, and ammunition lots had to pass an accuracy test for acceptance. Image: CMP (which has some of these for sale as collector curiosities).

So that’s the purpose of their investigation — how long a burst makes sense for an aerial gunner to fire. And the first thing they establish is that the theoretical accuracy of the ammunition, fired from a (presumably Mann) accuracy rifle, as roughly 2.87 MoA. (Angular calculation from here, using values of 1800 feet [600 yd] and 1.5 ft [18"]). Using the same calculator to solve angle for longer ranges, using that theoretical accuracy established at 600 yards, we get about a yard dispersion at 1200 yards and 43 inches and change at 1500. Again, this is the theoretical accuracy of the ammunition. Using single shots from an actual MG on a ground tripod (presumably with T&E, although the record doesn’t say) we see a slight degradation which makes that 1200 and 1500 yard shot on a man-sized target problematical (and with iron sights, functionally impossible). In single-shot mode, the differences between the ANM2 aerial machine gun (several variations of which are seen here) and its M2HB ground counterpart are not telling.

The information file goes on to address burst fire, of less interest vis-a-vis sniping but interesting in its own right.

In a burst of 10 or 12 on the same mount the group was approximately five feet. When longer bursts were fired, it was observed that the gun soon lost accuracy, even though it remained relatively stationary in the mount. When over fifty rounds were fired, in one burst, the projectiles tumbled in flight and dispersed over a 75 foot area at 600 yards.

Why is that? Does the barrel get “shot out” that quickly? Not exactly.

When the barrel has been overheated, it will be found that it cannot be relied upon for further accuracy even though the lands and grooves measure up well and the barrel, to all appearances, seems good. If the exterior of the barrel has a burned appearance, it should be tested by ordnance before further use. When a barrel becomes over-heated it expands to such an extent that the muzzle velocity decreases several hundred feet per second. This decrease continues as the barrel continues to expand, until a point is reached where tumbling of the projectiles takes place and controlled fire is reduced to a few hundred feet.

If an enemy flew his plane to within “a few hundred feet” of a B-29, self-preservation was not high on his agenda. Pilots — German and Japanese alike — who excelled at attacking 4-engined day bombers tended to make fast, slashing, attacks from straight ahead — ahead high, if they could get up there (most of the Japanese fighters were doing well to get to the B-29′s bombing altitude). Pilots who settled in at short range to shoot the four engines out one at a time were in the convergence zone of several guns from that bomber and his cell mates, and their careers tended to the truncated.

The gunner instructors who wrote the document reached this conclusion:

The accuracy of the fire delivered, therefore, depends not only on how steadily the gun is held, but also on the length of the burst, and the condition of the barrel. If a gunner fires short bursts of three to five rounds, constantly using his sights, he will have a tight group and a high degree of accuracy. This is the most effective method of firing your machine guns.

Now, this has always been the advice for ground gunners using air-cooled guns, but it’s enlightening to see aerial gunners getting the same instruction. The ANM2′s principal differences with the M2HB were: a lighter barrel and a ventilated, full-length barrel shroud, on the theory that an aerial gun would be bathed in fast-flowing cooling air. (And, at bomber altitudes, cold air: 50 to 60 degrees below zero F). But they still suffered extreme accuracy degradation, and bullet tumbling, when long bursts were fired.

Many a Japanese fighter pilot's last sight on Earth. Note the upper turret is trained forward, the lower, aft. And yes, it embiggens. Bill Crump photo (CAF).

Many a Japanese fighter pilot’s last sight on Earth, although this photo, of the only surviving airworthy B-29, was taken at far lower altitude. Note that the upper turret is trained forward, the lower, aft; they can both be controlled by the bombardier in the nose. And yes, the picture embiggens. Bill Crump photo (CAF).

The 20th Air Force was the one that operated B-29s against Japan, first from Chinese bases and then, after the successful Marianas campaign, from Saipan and Tinian. To bring it full circle, its commander was General Curtis LeMay, who was an absolute gun nut, and as Chief of Staff of the Air Force would drive the US adoption of its longest-serving small arm: the M16 series.

Naval Malpractice

The Norks have broken the armistice and raised their readiness, the Chicoms are invading everyone’s computer networks in inhuman-wave attacks, while our own defense managers have parked a bunch of carriers all in a row, and cancelled the overhaul of others, because they’ve bungled the budget.

So what’s PACOM’s biggest worry? Well, if you ask the political admiral who owns the flag for now, it’s… drumroll…. the envelope, please…. global warming? WTF?!?

We are not making this up. The Boston Globe:

CAMBRIDGE — America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate change.

Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, in an interview at a Cambridge hotel Friday after he met with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

via Admiral Samuel Locklear, commander of Pacific forces, warns that climate change is top threat – Nation – The Boston Globe.

Lord love a duck. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

It may be that the “III” in Locklear’s name — something he shares with many of the Tufts and Harvard armchair experts he’s been consulting with — is a marker for inbreeding. After all, he didn’t stop with identifying the threat that launched Al Gore’s PowerPoint career as Public Enemy Number One, with respect to American national security. He went on to assert that American security requires that stricter control of the Internet — censorship, if you will — be given to some international body. (God help us, he probably means of academics from Harvard and Tufts, etc.)

How such a dunderheaded bozo reached four-star flag rank is a question for the sages, or perhaps for the ages. Our best guess? A bunch of naval officers owed enormous favors to Locklears I and II.

Update @ 1800 R

We’re not the only ones to have flipped over Locklear’s dereliction of duty. PowerLine has a guest post from warrior/writer Mac Owens that follows up on an earlier Scott Johnson post, and reminds us of last year’s Navy top priority, running ships and aircraft on $27/gallon biofuel to “check the green box.” Mac and Scott share our opinion of the pathetic Locklear, but they express themselves differently.

The real Bridges at Toko-Ri

It was a great and successful novel, winning James A. Michener considerable acclaim and helping him transition from newsman to novelist, and was made into a great movie starring William Holden and a pre-royal Grace Kelly. (Hmm… we can’t believe it hasn’t been a Saturday Matinee here yet). But we didn’t know, because we don’t read Naval Aviation News regularly, just how closely Michener, himself a former naval officer, followed real events he witnessed or at least heard about while a war correspondent on two straight-deck aircraft carriers, Essex and Valley Forge. (Aside: aren’t ships named after Reolutionary era ships and battles a better thing than ships named after grifting politicians? Well, the grifting politicians disagree, so we’re supposed to shut up). And we didn’t know, either, where he departed from reality in order to make his story sing.

Ultimately, the novel and the film rang extremely true, both ending with a noble admiral staring at the sea and asking the rhetorical riddle: “Where do we get such men?” But the real story, while not as neat a Hollywood package, is even more interesting, we think. Thanks to a Vietnam SF vet friend, we were pointed to this article from the March-April 2002 Naval Aviation News. (.pdf file). In the article, Richard Kaufman examines Michener’s posthumously-released notes and journals, and lets us see where some of the ideas came from: who the real Brubaker was; the helicopter pilot’s green baseball cap; the genesis of the blind pilot story, and how Michener got at least two feature film adaptations out of his carrier stories; and, not least, the real fate of the pilots and helicopter crews — which was a different kind of tragic from Michener’s fictional version, or even what he believed when he wrote.

It’s an excellent job of research and great background for any fan of the novel or the movie. Read The Whole Thing™. And if you haven’t read the book (if you’re daunted by Michener’s reputation for near-Russian-novelist prolixity, that came later; Bridges is short and snappy) and seen the movie, what are you waiting for? (OK, we’ll put it in the hopper for a future Saturday Matinee).

On the HMS Bounty sinking

…which we covered at the time, when Hurricane Sandy took the 1960 Brando-film replica to the bottom with her captain and a crew members (14 others were saved).

The decision to launch such a vessel into a hurricane was completely inexplicable, but now Outside magazine has put a ton of reporting into trying to understand and explain it.

Bottom line: after all that study, it beats them with a stick, too.

At the moment of truth for the ship:

Then all hell broke loose.

At 4:45 a.m., the C-130 got a panicked radio call from [First Mate John] Svendsen: The vessel was capsizing. Fast.

McIntosh put the plane in a quick descent as his crew rushed around the open hold, reconfiguring the ramp for a life-raft drop as rain pelted in. Within minutes, however, the plane hit its bingo-fuel level, the moment when any aircraft must turn around. They dropped the rafts and headed back, not knowing if anyone had made it off the ship alive.

At least 14 did, but they were fighting to survive. When the vessel capsized, it rolled sharply onto its starboard side, sending the crew and everything on deck—including the emergency drybags—tumbling into the sea. Svendsen, who’d been on the radio with the Coast Guard, was the last off the vessel; he broke his right arm and cut up his face as he crashed into the rigging on the way down.

The wind was blowing 50 knots and gusting higher. The sea was chaos. Its force pulled the Bounty’s masts 20 feet out of the water before slamming the rigging—and the tangled crew—back down. Josh Scornavacchi estimates that he was dragged 15 feet underwater. [Seriously injured assistant engineer Chris] Barksdale says he was trapped underwater multiple times.

“That was the scariest part,” he says. “I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not, but I did know that I needed to get the hell away from that ship.”

No one saw [Crewmember Claudene] Christian or [Captain Robin] Walbridge.

The HC-130, though, was practically at bingo fuel. They dropped life rafts and had to run for their base, while calling the HH-60s out earlier than expected.

More than an hour later, the first Jayhawk helicopter arrived. The much watched Coast Guard video shows the heroic and methodical rescue: the calm voice of co-pilot Jenny Fields as she counts wave intervals, swimmer Dan Todd plunging over and over into the angry sea, rescuing first Svendsen and then those in the first raft; flight mechanic Neil Moulder manning the rescue basket and then announcing that he’d dislocated his shoulder. What the video doesn’t show is Moulder slamming his shoulder against the chopper’s open door, trying to get it back in its socket. Nor does it reveal the full extent of this initial recovery—four aircraft and 22 rescuers—and the massive operation that followed. Before it was all over, the Coast Guard would search the Atlantic for 90 hours, covering 12,000 overlapping square nautical miles.

This is definitely one where you want to Read the Whole Thing™. It’s a real reporting tour de force. A Coast Guard hearing into the vesel’s loss has been underway now for several days, and may produce restrictions on the operations of such ships; it may also produce information that even Outside’s excellent reporters were unable to glean, in part because the USCG can subpoena and compel testimony, while reporters must gracefully take “no” for an answer. If we had to wager, though, we’d guess that the Coast Guard, too, will be unable to make sense of the late skipper’s puzzling seamanship, particularly as regards judgment.

The survival of the crew of this 19th-Century replica is a model of 21st-Century seafaring best practices. Bear in mind that in the time of the original Bounty, advance information about the hurricane would not have been available, nor would aerial search and rescue, nor would helicopter recovery. Absent those very modern capabilities, all sixteen of the crew would have died, not just two.

Another budget-cut story

We’ve got the Army slashing training (we even provided the memo) and the Navy pulling carriers back into port and mothballing them rather than conduct scheduled refueling.

Now the Air Force’s 81st Fighter Squadron, 52nd TFW, the last operational A-10 Thunderbolt II (Warthog to everybody despite the official name) unit in Europe, is bugging out of Europe, leaving behind empty facilities at Spangdahlem AB, and, no doubt, a bunch of unpaid bar bills. (Unless there are any SF around. We owe these guys).

Some individual crews and jets have been in the States on training evolutions; they won’t be returning. Instead the remaining German-based elements will be withdrawn over the course of this year.

Source (German language).

An A-10C of the 81st FS with an interesting ordnance mix. Click to embiggen.

Now, some people say we’re not needed to keep the peace in Europe. After all, we showed those Europeans how it was done in 1918 and they’ve scarcely been any trouble since then. But withdrawal from Europe also moves these vital close-air-support jets at least 3,000 miles further away from any future scene of conflict in the Middle East or Central Asia. For a short-legged, 380-knot-flat-out jet, that’s a pretty consequential move.

As it turns out, though, the 81st is not going to be reconstituted; it’s not going home, it’s going away. That is the Air Force’s mid-range plan for the A-10 fleet as a whole. This year, along with the active Air Force 81st, the Air Force is also eliminating four more Guard and Reserve A-10 squadrons, an F-16 squadron, and an F-15 squadron. It’s pink-slipping 10,000 airmen, and canceling the C-27 intratheater cargo aircraft. It’s canceling new Global Hawk drones and will keep flying 1955-vintage U-2s on high-altitude, high-risk ISR missions.

The essential problem: the service is flat broke, and DOD suits like Ashton Carter want it spending less money on war stuff and more money on stuff that makes it look like a jobs program with blue suits. And the only way they can manage the financial shortfall is to shrink the service’s combat strength and hollow out its ranks and capabilities, especially those capabilities “wasted” on other services.

Like the A-10, the C-27 would primarily have served Army users, a customer base that Big Blue recognizes only grudgingly. In fact, the Army developed the C-27, and the Air Force seized the project, ostensibly with a view to joint-service standardization and efficiency. Everyone understood, though, having seen it before in 1966, that this meant that the Air Force would do what they did with the C-7 and C-8 fleet in and after Vietnam — eliminate them and leave the Army lift users running ground convoys instead. Sure, some grunts will get croaked but you can’t expect an Academy grad to put on his white scarf and saddle up some thing with propellers.

The Air Force claims they can serve the Army and SOF lift requirements with C-130s, but they leave the Army hanging already, and they also plan to scrap over 20% of the C-130 fleet. In addition, over 1/3 of the C-5 fleet will go to the smelter. We’ll do less with less, and zero-integrity PR weenies will Newspeak it as “more.”

The USAF will also cancel its annual show-the-flag trip to the Paris Air Show. International prestige is of no consequence when you have a president with the Nobel Peace Prize already!

Air Force spokesmen quibble about the word, but the cuts in personnel and equipment, and deep cuts in readiness items such as flight hours (cut 20% in some commands), and even cutting the “fly week” to only four of seven days, call for the term, “hollow force.” Operations and maintenance cuts in the past have always led to degraded combat readiness, increased mishap rates, and international signals of weakness.

Despite the cuts in the overall budget — and these are true cuts against past-years’ spending, not the typical Washington “cut” which is a reduction in rate of increase — some line items will see increases, mostly those related to pay and allowances, social welfare and other entitlements. In some degree, the services are being repurposed as a busy-work jobs program.

We’re going to be living in interesting times. Boar 22, thanks for the 30 mike-mike on target, we’re gonna miss you.

Victory on the Thresher Memorial

The flag-haters have folded their tent and crept away into the dark unlit lowlands whence they crawled forth on their unholy mission.

They will no longer fight the flagpole.

Two of them will offer an alternative design for another part of the memorial — to the same Thresher Memorial Project Group they were just trying to sue.

If they can make the memorial better, why not? As long as they keep their grasping fingers off Old Glory.

Flag-haters fight Thresher Memorial

You may not remember USS Thresher, SSN-593. She did not serve long nor make notable accomplishments; on a shakedown cruise she plunged miles beyond crush depth and 129 members of the boat’s crew and shipyard’s staff lost their lives. This happened a very long time ago: 1963, and so the name is known more to submariners and naval architects and surviving families than it is to the general public.

But those families remembered, and while there are memorials to the lost sub on the secured shipyard grounds, they planned a simple memorial — a 129-foot flagpole, one foot for ever casualty — in the Kittery, Maine traffic circle.

Plans were made, money was raised, municipal approval was duly granted.

Then came the flag-haters.

A small clicque of angry art-colony hangers on, billing themselves as “landscape designers,” waited until after the appeal period was closed, and then began assailing the Memorial in the press. Lately, they’ve hired a lawyer to try to gum up the Memorial’s progress.

They always sound reasonable, so if you don’t keep track of their positions, you’ll miss a sudden volte-face, a free glissade, or an Immelmann turn, or whatever maneuver is required to keep them on target. Their positions shift, their arguments morph, their voices warble but it always comes down to the offense they take at the flag and flagpole. They are not willing to put voice to that offense, so they hide behind veils of sophistry. They are not willing to protest the flag by pulling it down and burning it, as they would prefer — instead, lawyers are their matches and a court their accelerant.

It is but a short step to understand that they do not ever intend to honor the sailors and shipyard workers who voluntarily dove deep and who remain on eternal patrol. They have the same contempt for those crushed heroes that they do for the flag that the sailors served — and the “landscape designers” didn’t.

These people deserve to be named. They are soi-disant landscape designers Martha Petersen. Neil Jorgensen, and Wendy Pomeroy, and their lawyer John C. Bannon. Bannon may just be a hired gun, and not a flag-hater himself, but there’s a reason that lawyers who seek out mob clients get labeled “mob lawyers.” And, in fact, Bannon was one of the original flag-hating complainers, before he undertook to represent the others.

One more thing: after a public meeting, the “landscape designers” and Bannon pronised to drop their complaint. After the public’s back was turned, they renewed it.

While no one expects much from a flag-hating landscape designer, it’s unusual to see an attorney, even a flag-hating one, that holds his word so cheap. (Not because anyone expects integrity from lawyers, but because it’s bad for business). But apparently flag-hating Attorney John C. Bannon’s promise is worth nothing, and he doesn’t mind everybody knowing about it.

A good gun is forever, nearly

This story from 2011 gives you a clue as to the durability of Browning machine guns. Take a gun. Wrap it in several thousand pounds of airplane, with several hundred pounds of 115 octane fuel. Slam it into a peat bog. Dig it up 70 years later. Will it work?

Maybe, if John Browning designed it in the first place.

A Browning machine gun found in a downed Spitfire has been fired for the first time in 70 years.

The weapon worked despite being buried in peat since the aeroplane that housed it plummeted to earth in Donegal in 1941.

A team from the BBC went to the site and dug the guns from where the Spitfire had crashed and could even smell aviation fuel in the air.

Six Browning machine guns were found in good nick thanks to the ideal clay, soil and peat condition

Despite being buried for the last 70 years, the Browning machine gun worked perfectly

There were six guns that presenter Dan Snow reported were in ‘great shape, with belts containing hundreds of gleaming .303 rounds.’

They even found pilot Roland ‘Bud’ Wolfe’s leather helmet among the wreckage.

The guns were cleaned and a couple of pieces were straightened out after suffering some damage on impact.

The soil, clay and peat had provided the perfect conditions for the artefacts to be preserved and, when fired, they worked like a treat.

Mr Snow continued: ‘The gun fired without a hitch. There can be no greater testament to the machinists and engineers in UK factories in the 1940s who, despite churning out guns at the rate of thousands per month, made each one of such high quality that they could survive a plane crash and 70 years underground and still fire like the day they were made.’

via Built to last: Guns of Spitfire buried in peat bog for 70 years fire first time | Mail Online.

While we’re all for giving credit where due, we think the anvil-like design of Browning’s original 1917 machine gun and its later variants including these .303-caliber solenoid-fired British models was a big factor.

The Browning is also a simpler and much more easily manufactured gun than the Vickers the British used as a ground gun at that time. But pulling a gun out of a hole and firing it after the passage of most of a century is a pretty neat trick.

The Supermarine Spitfire and its equally legendary rival the Hawker Hurricane were originally designed in 1934-35 around eight of these rifle-calibre machine guns. Mounting the guns in the wings, beyond the propeller arc, saved the weight and complication of interrupter/synchronizer gear, but required much additional wing structure, especially in the minimalist Spitfire. At the time these planes were introduced, standard fighter armament worldwide was two rifle-calibre guns — often variants of these same robust Brownings.

A little credit goes to the noncorrosive nature of the damp peat in which the Brownings slumbered for all this period. (The pilot, interestingly enough, was an American in the RAF. He survived. More details at the link).

Ghost Spitfires in Burma may prove mythical

Well, this is a disappointment. So soon after the announcement of the found crate, the crate appears not to contain a Spitfire, metal traces turn out to have been runway matting, and the whole dig seems to be in a state of collapse with the dig sponsors telling the BBC ‘there are no Spitfires.’ Some of the BBC’s analysis:

The team of archaeologists working on the dig are specialists in the field of war excavations.

They have been digging at the site over the last week.

They have also examined the file of evidence supplied by David Cundall which includes eyewitness testimony from eight individuals.

However they believe that none of the testimony proves that Spitfires were buried at the airport or any of the other sites in Burma.

via BBC News – Archaeologists believe no Spitfires buried in Burma.

There’s more at the BBC link. It’s pretty confused but we’d still advise you to Read The Whole Thing™,

Thanks to the reader who tipped is to this, confidentially — he knows who he is.

The dig is sponsored by an international computer gaming firm, headquartered in Minsk, Byelorussia: Wargaming.com. The company is best known for its massively multiplayer tank combat game, World of Tanks. The Spitfire dig was meant as a promotion for the presently-developmental aerial spinoff, World of Warplanes. The company sites, Wargaming.com and .net, had no information on the dig at press time.

WeaponsMan

Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery