Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

with terrific lethality. Weighing 15,758 1b/7,154 kg, it requires a heavy (5-ton) truck to tow it, along with its eleven-man crew and a supply of ammunition. It can be lifted as a sling load by the CH-53E helicopter. The M198 can hurl a projectile up to 14 mi/22.4 km, and a special rocket-assisted projectile extends this range to 18.6 mi/30 km. The 566 guns in the Marine inventory will serve for at least another decade, until the introduction of a new lightweight howitzer which is under development.

Mk 45 5-in./54 Naval Gun Mount

With the retirement of the Iowa-class (BB-61) battleships, the Navy's gunfire support capability is reduced to one or two of these rifled 5-in./ 127mm weapons on each major surface combatant (cruiser, destroyer, and a few amphibious ships). Built by United Defense's Great Northern Division, the Mk 45 5- in./54 turret has a high degree of automation, sustaining a rate of seventeen rounds per minute. The turret normally operates unmanned, with the six-man Navy crew working below decks. The Mk 45 can throw a 70-1b/31.75-kg projectile to a maximum range of 14 mi/23.6 km, though extended-range ammunition is under development. The main ammunition types are high-explosive and incendiary (white phosphorus). A ship generally carries several hundred rounds per gun in its magazines, and major task forces are accompanied by ammunition ships, which can rapidly replenish the supply, using a UH-46 helicopter.

The Future: The Lightweight Howitzer and Arsenal Ship

Solving the problem of replacing the fire-support assets lost since Desert Storm is a joint Navy/Marine Corps challenge. The most urgent fire-support upgrade is replacement of the M198 155mm howitzer. Six different industrial teams have produced competing designs for a new lightweight howitzer. These include United Defense, Lockheed Martin, Royal Ordnance, and VSEL. In addition to lighter weight, the Marines want a weapon with much longer range (which means a longer barrel) and smaller crew requirements, and a higher rate of fire (which means power-assisted ramming and loading.) Expect to see deliveries in the early years of the next century.

^{An artist's concept of the proposed 'Arsenal Ship.' The vessel would be packed with vertical launch cells for missiles that would provide bombardment and fire support for Marines ashore.}

^{OFFICIAL U.S. NAVY PHOTOFROM LOCKHEED MARTIN}

A bigger problem is offshore fire support. Marines really miss those old Iowa-class (BB-61) battleships. Nothing will ever match the spectacular effect of 16-in./406mm shells falling on a target within 25 mi/40 km of a coastline. Over a hundred ships with 5-in./ 127mm guns have left U.S. Navy service, gutting naval gunfire capability. To make up for this drawdown, the Chief of Navel Operations and former Deputy Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Bill Owens conceived the idea of the Arsenal Ship. The Arsenal Ship would replace the lost firepower of the retired Iowa-class (BB-61) battleships by constructing a simple, relatively inexpensive ship packed with missile launch cells — as many as 732 tactical missiles, including Tomahawk and perhaps a version of the Army TACMS. In effect, the arsenal ship would win the war in one salvo, and then reload for the next war. The ship would rely entirely on off-board sensors for targeting. Covered with radar- absorbing coatings, an Arsenal Ship would have virtually no superstructure. Some design studies envision ballast tanks that could be flooded to give the ship extremely low freeboard, making it a very difficult target for enemy anti-ship missiles. Unfortunately, all this thinking hasn't gone very far; and there are practical problems. Not the least of these: The Navy has done virtually nothing to integrate and procure the TACMS missile for naval service, perhaps because it's reluctant to use an Army missile aboard Navy ships (the 'not-invented-here' syndrome). Only nuclear submariners have done substantive work on TACMS, since they are desperately looking for new missions for their subs in the post-Cold War period. Whatever happens, supporting fires will be the make-or-break item for continued forced-entry capabilities into the 21st century.

Anti-Armor/Aircraft Systems

Cambrai, Northern France. 0620 hours on November 20th, 1917. In the misty dawn, the soldiers of the Kaiser's 2nd Army looked out over 'No-Man's-Land' and saw over two hundred primitive British tanks lumbering toward them. The Germans opened fire with the Mauser rifles and Maxim machine guns that had made them nearly invincible during three long years in the trenches, and watched in horror as the bullets bounced off of the armor plate. Then, surprisingly, and most uncharacteristically for German infantry, they ran away.

Almost thirty-five years later, near Osan, Korea, on July 5th, 1950, soldiers of the 24th Infantry Division's Task Force Smith had held their roadblock stubbornly for almost five hours against a superior force of invading North Koreans. They were mostly young draftees, but their sergeants were tough World War II combat veterans who knew their business. Then they heard a low rumble that grew to a roar as thirty Russian T-34/85 tanks came down the road. The bazooka teams fired, and watched in horror as the 2.75-in./70mm armor-piercing rockets bounced off the tanks' sharply angled armor plates. Then they did something surprising and uncharacteristic of American infantry. They ran away.

There is a common lesson in these two stories. Tanks scare the crap out of infantrymen who have no way to fight back effectively. To stand up against tanks, foot soldiers need two things: courage and an anti-tank weapon they trust. Good leadership and training will supply the courage. Good ordnance engineers and technicians can supply the weapons. Early tanks were practically blind on the battlefield, and even the best modern tank designs (like the M1A1 Abrams) are visually handicapped. Men on foot can exploit this weakness with great effect. During the Hungarian Revolution in Budapest (1956), Russian T-34s were knocked out by Hungarian freedom fighters, who immobilized the tanks by jamming steel pipes between the tracks and the road wheels, then bombarded them with firebombs made from bottles and gasoline.

Modern portable anti-tank weapons fall into two categories: those light enough for one soldier to carry, and specialist weapons that require a crew and possibly a motor vehicle to haul them around. The Marine Corps has usually followed U.S. Army doctrine, equipment, and tactics for anti-armor combat, but has a few ideas of its own. Let's take a quick look at the portable anti-armor systems used by the Corps.

AT-4

The Marines have always been willing to acquire foreign-made weapons when they are the best of their breed. The AT-4 was acquired to replace the very light and inexpensive 70mm M72 LAW (Light Anti-tank Weapon), which is increasingly becoming ineffective against modern battle tanks. The AT-4 is a lightweight, single-shot, disposable version of the 'Karl Gustav' 84 mm anti-tank launcher manufactured by FFV in Sweden. The AT-4 can be carried and shoulder-fired by one Marine, but is typically employed in the heavy weapons platoon of a rifle company with a two-man fire team. The second Marine serves as a spotter and carries additional AT-4s for the team. Weighing 14.75 lb/6.7 kg, the 40 — in./1.01-m.-long rocket launcher has a nasty back-blast. Maximum effective range is 300 m/984 ft, and the shaped-charge projectile can penetrate 400mm/15.75 in. of armor plate. The FY-96 unit cost is about $1,100 per AT-4 rocket.