U.S. Army aviators in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun removing the
from their
helicopters. Which is funny, since the radar is pretty much the point of the
.
The radar weighs 1,500 pounds and makes the Apache sluggish in hot and high-altitude environments — really the only places the Army fights anymore. Aviators are cool with flying without their radars since the things were designed for taking out Soviet tanks. “
,” Lt. Col. Mark Patterson told
Defense News. He added that the
(dating from 1983) is better suited to today’s fights.
This is
. In Balad, Iraq, in February, Sgt. Erik Morrow told me that the
tank was better for Iraq than the newer
since the A1 tank is more reliable and starts up quicker. Earlier, the Marine Corps aviators of All-Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332, deployed to Al Asad in western Iraq, had told me their old $40-million
equipped with sensor pods are
to counter-insurgency combat than $130-million
, which don’t even have hardpoints for pods. See my
for pics.
The major impetus for the constant development of new and more high-tech weapons was the arms race with the Soviet Union and the need to counter massed tank armies with much smaller forces. Those things no longer apply, and now critics across the services are calling for a different way of doing things — namely,
with weapons that work, even if they’re old. In some cases, the Defense Department has listened, which is why we’re seeing
rifles and
pulled out of storage for troops in Iraq.
But old stuff doesn’t keep the defense industry flush with cash. And
, one of the designers of the
and an F-22 critic, told me that’s the point of most new weapons. More on that later.
Read more:
Defense.org