Heh! The Fat Electrician did tankers. I had forgotten that we called lesser mortals, "crunchies".
I was around for the transition from the M60A3 to the M1. They called us "Jedi tankers" because we didn't rely solely on lasers and computers to fire the gun. We could hit stuff when the computer was down, which was fairly often. '60s era ballistic computers did not do well under recoil, and tanks have recoil. Lots of it. When the computer went down, you switched to the gunners telescope and kept firing. The lost time I took a crew downrange, we fired a 97% Q1, which means we qualified on the first run, and were awarded the Distinguished Gunnery badge.
But, yeah, I had forgotten about "crunchies".
Military scientists predicted the demise of the tank on the battlefield many times.
ReplyDeleteFor example, they predicted tanks would be obsolete after the Yom Kippur war when the average life expectancy of a tank was 90 seconds upon reaching the battle-field. 90 SECONDS!!!
The scientists pointed to the wire-guided missiles and said why spend millions of dollars on a coffin when a $10k missile can destroy it?
Actual review of the hulks determined that the VAST majority of tanks had not been killed by missiles but by other tanks. The threat of missiles might have limited tanker's desire to maneuver near cover but had not been the total game-changer originally reported.
Maybe in ten or fifteen years we will learn what weapon systems contributed what percentage of dead tanks in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The M60 series (and the M48) had the optical rangefinders, IIRC. If you know how to use that, you can get good range. From my experience in Brads, getting the range estimate wrong was the largest single cause of misses in gunnery.
ReplyDeleteWhen my unit transitioned from M2A2 (no laser range finder) to M2A2 ODS (with laser), I think every single crew qualified Q1, with like 75% of the battalion shooting Distinguished. (It helped that we had just done Table VIII about 2 months prior, with no lasers.)
The M1s don't have the optical rangefinders.