Phalanx in Baghdad?
Strategy Page has an article out today that says that the Navy has shipped a couple of Phalanx Close-In Weapons System units to defend the Green Zone in Baghdad from incoming mortar fire. I know it's three months after April Fool's Day, but I'm still kind of amazed at this -- assuming it's true. It just seems that the odds of collateral damage downrange would be too great.
On the other hand, CIWS would be a great weapon to use against a massed Banzai charge of suicide bombers...
Going deep...
posted by Bubblehead at 8:44 AM
5 Comments:
Defense News in a recent paper edition mentioned CIWS going Army for anti-mortar work. As for the collateral damage, the Army is pulling out of the ammo bunkers 20mm ammo that had been used in the M-163 and designed to fragment in mid-air.
So the jihadi's weapon of annoyance will be a thing of the past since in tests the CIWS had over 70% success rate of intercepting the falling rounds. Plus CIWS will alert people about incoming mortar rounds.
7/01/2005 10:25 AM
collateral damage. yup. i read in the paper today that the lead imam bubba in lebanon has gone on record telling the folks to not fire guns into the air in celebration, because the falling bullets are killing people, as many as 8 this week. kind of remind me of the whole "they dropped bombs in civilian areas" bruhaha after reagan sent the f-111's into kadaffi-land. turns out almost (but not all) of the on ground explosions came from air defense armament returning to earth.
7/01/2005 2:05 PM
Let's not forget, that the new models have both IR and Low light cameras on them, and can be manually laid on target...
Helluva anti-sniper weapon:-)
7/01/2005 2:39 PM
Solving the IED problem: universal RC detonators, EMP neutralization.
And for Afghanistan's deadly mountains? FAE flyovers. Bye, bye, Ahmed.
7/01/2005 7:59 PM
The CIWS is an interesting thing. The best part is the closed loop spotting, where it uses the outbound bullet stream radar returns to generate error signals and then the software nulls the error out by driving the bullets to the target. In this case, a human can't react fast enough to make that happen well. Let R2D2 (and yes, we called them that on the ships) do the work on anti-mortar.
The gun was built with a surface mode, were a Target Designator Transmitter (TDT) (from the old days of 40mm and 3"/50 mounts I believe) operator had a button he pushed and it would slave the mount to the movements of the TDT, the plan being you could use it against close aboard surface craft. All I know is there was some heavy duty politics, and the ships were told not to hook that function up (rumor had it that some had), or we'd risk losing funding for the program.
The Saudi Navy purchased PGG and PCGs from US ship builders in the early 80's. They had CIWS and TDTs. On their ships, the surface mode was connected....and yes, that would make it an awesome anti-sniper weapon....just you have to watch out how long the human lays on the trigger. Reload times are not instantaneous....
7/07/2005 11:08 AM
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