wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin) (02/26/91)
From: Will Martin <wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL> The list references to the Lance caused me to think about the opportunity the Gulf war is giving us to actually use up weaponry that would otherwise just be scrapped and surplussed. What with all the MLRS bombardments we've seen, wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity to fire off all the Lance missles with conventional warheads we have in the inventory? If they are not in the current operational inventory, surely some of the activated Reserve or Nat'l Guard units have personnel who were trained on and used the Lance during their active duty, and thus we would have a source of experienced personnel to fire them. Wouldn't it be far more cost-effective to use up these and any other equivalent previous-generation weapon systems as opposed to retiring them unused? Basically, we'd just have to pay the cost of shipping them to the Gulf; the actual cost of the weapons themselves could be considered nil. It makes me wish the timing of this had coincided more closely with the scrapping of the Pershing missles. We wasted all of those by static firing and unproductive launches as a result of the treaty with the Soviets to reduce the IRBM forces. Makes me wish we could have used them with conventional warheads in this war, maybe with the Soviets bringing their equivalents to the Turkish border and lobbing them into Iraq from the North. What better way to use them up? (We probably could have gotten Turkey to agree to the overflights... :-) What else have we got filling warehouses and in old pre-positioned war reserve stocks that would fit in this scenario? I suppose missiles are the best bet... Or have we peddled just about all of our preceeding- generation hardware to other countries and don't really have much in this category? Regards, Will wmartin@stl-06sima.army.mil
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (02/28/91)
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) >From: Will Martin <wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL> >... wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity to fire off all the Lance >missles with conventional warheads we have in the inventory? Trouble is, a conventional-warhead Lance is about as militarily useful as a Scud. That is, not very. Conventional-warhead ballistic missiles, with the possible exception of Pershing 2 with its terminal-homing head, have always been toys for public-relations value rather than practical weapons. Like Scud, Lance is effective only with a nuclear or chemical warhead. It simply isn't accurate enough to put a conventional warhead within lethal range of anything. -- "But this *is* the simplified version | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology for the general public." -S. Harris | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
styri@cs.heriot-watt.ac.uk (Yu No Hoo) (03/01/91)
From: styri@cs.heriot-watt.ac.uk (Yu No Hoo) In article <1991Feb26.012713.7033@cbnews.att.com> wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin) writes: > >The list references to the Lance caused me to think about the opportunity >the Gulf war is giving us to actually use up weaponry that would otherwise >just be scrapped and surplussed. [...] i guess the fact that Iraq had older weapons than the allied forces didn't contribute to the result of the gulf war. ;-> (not to mention the effect on morale such politics would have.) ---------------------- Haakon Styri Dept. of Comp. Sci. ARPA: styri@cs.hw.ac.uk Heriot-Watt University X-400: C=gb;PRMD=uk.ac;O=hw;OU=cs;S=styri Edinburgh, Scotland