"PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE BUBBLE GUM!"
Frost, John J.
"PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE BUBBLE GUM!" The Navy isn’t the only branch of the military where the top brass ignore problems that plague subordinates in the field. It still rankles me to think...
...The problem with the mortars was with the fuse...
...For better or worse, we now have a $2.1 million new tank whose defects, I trust, will soon be corrected...
...What the crew members discovered was that this boresight didn’t take an expert to operate, it took a magicianand a very careful one at that...
...The targets are often more than two miles away and when you factor in wind, weather, and the movement of both the tank and its target, it requires a great deal of skill and precision equipment to score a firstround hit...
...The engineers made a pretty convincing case that this device was more sophisticated and preciseconvincing, that is, unless you were a member of a tank crew that had actually tried to use one of them...
...Except, of course, the soldiers on the ground in Vietnam...
...The M-1’s major defect, needless to say, is that it sometimes isn’t working right...
...But instead of defective ammunition, this case involves a rather arcane concept known as “muzzle boresight doctrine!’ For years, the NATO countries have competed in tank gunnery contests for something called the Canada Army Trophy...
...But then the Army’s arsenal engineers decided to enter the picture...
...This procedure involves opening the breech of the tank’s gun and stretching two pieces of string across the inside of the barrel to form a cross hair...
...But in spite of a lot of high-level meetings at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, as minutes of these meetings show, for several years the government made no progress in correcting the problem...
...Actually, the boresight works pretty well in the quiet of the laboratory or in peculiarly sedate peacetime conditions...
...Relying on this boresight is a lot like having to focus the headlights properly on your car almost every time you make a trip...
...It still rankles me to think that at the height of the Vietnam war we were experiencing a 14 percent dud rate with our mortars...
...Meanwhile, I know of at least one tank crew that has returned to string, binoculars, and bubble gum, and I know that in this summer’s competition for the Canada Army Trophy, the Germans once again made fools of us on the gunnery field...
...So among the troops in the field you won’t find many kind words-though you will find a great many profane ones-about the Army’s boresight...
...With tanks, it’s crucial to align the firing system so that, with a minimum expenditure of ammo and time, you hit what you’re aiming at...
...Such vigilance is inconvenient enough if you’re only making an occasional nocturnal foray to the corner grocery store but imagine what happens if you’re trying to stop Soviet tank brigades as they storm across the Fulda Gap...
...Evidently chastened by our tanks’ dismal performances, last year the Army modified its muzzle boresight regulations to specify the use of an optical alignment device...
...He is currently living in Belgium...
...Among afficionados, this is considered the America’s Cup of tank-shooting...
...Their intervention, I’m convinced, was prompted by the fact that our tank crews initially resorted to a handy, relatively inexpensive boresight of Swiss manufacture that cost less than $3,000...
...When the engineers discovered this, they threw a bureaucratic fit, manipulating the military specifications to preclude use of this boresight in favor of a much more expensive model that cost up to $9,000...
...Drop this boresight, or even knock it around a bit, and it’s suddenly worthless...
...of I1 boresights distributed recently to tank crews, seven of them almost immediately went out of whack...
...So far, only our pride has been injured...
...Unfortunately, this is no laughing matter...
...The 100,000 rounds we fired every month on the Viet Cong represented 14,000 globs of steel and TNT that the enemy could turn into Claymore mines to plant along jungle trails and in the streets of Saigon...
...And as tank crew members know, if you don’t hit the target the first time, you’re fairly likely to find yourself on the wrong end of the next volley...
...How many of them were maimed or killed with these defective American mortars is impossible to say, but the official U.S...
...No one, it seemed, thought it was all that urgent...
...Needless to say, no enemy is about to permit periodic “recesses” in the fighting so we can take our boresight back to the maintenance shop to be serviced...
...But I’ve also worked with the M-1, and I can tell you this: not only are the tank’s problems being solved, but when it’s working, it’s the hottest piece of armor in the arsenal...
...The difficulty arises when things get the least bit frantic, as they tend to when the shooting starts...
...A crew member then climbs inside the tank and, with the aid of binoculars, peers through the gun barrel to align the cross hairs with a target 1,200 meters away...
...it must be sent back to a specialized maintenance shop to be recalibrated...
...A lot more will be if the Army’s failure to listen to its own soldiers causes our tanks to charge into a real battle someday with a blind eye...
...Army handbook on mine training, which is still in use today, claims that fully 70 percent of the war’s deaths and injuries came from mines and booby traps...
...Now, I know there have been problems with the M-1: its terrible gas mileage, its flammable hydraulic fluid, and its abysmal repair record to name just three...
...Even with normal use, the boresight goes out of alignment with distressing frequency...
...Though other NATO armies long ago began using a small optical device to check and align all elements of the tank’s gun system, our tank crews traditionally have contented themselves with a time-honored method involving string, binoculars, and bubble gum...
...There’s a more contemporary example of this disregard for the concerns of those who dwell near the bottom of the organizational chart...
...John J. Frost John J. Frost, a retired colonel, is an international defense designer and consultant...
...The initial results of this change were truly impressive...
...Some tank crews began claiming success rates of 97 percent in first-round hits...
...The gum is customarily used to secure the string...
...Some of us even began having happy visions of winning back the Canada Army Trophy...
...And this leads back to muzzle boresight doctrine and the ability of the Army bureaucracy to foul up the simplest of matterslike making sure one of its most sophisticated weapons can hit the broad side of a barn...
...This is no backyard shoot...
...In recent years, the Americans have gotten their rumps shot off in these contests, but now that the Army has the new M-1 Abrams tank, hopes are high that it will do to the Germans (the perennial winners) what Australia ZI’s winged keel did to the Liberty...
Vol. 15 • November 1983 • No. 8
