ONE BAD HUMMER

Traditionally, Humvees come armed with a sin­gle weapon — a big machine gun, say, or a grenade launcher. But a new Hummer, devel­oped by the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, “may put the fire­power of an entire heavy-​​weapons pla­toon into one vehi­cle,” accord­ing to an Army news release.

The Assault Weapon System… fea­tures an MK-​​19 grenade launcher, .50-​​caliber machine gun and two TOW missile-​​firing plat­forms.
All three of the weapon sys­tems are con­nected to a cen­tral Improved Target Acquisition System that gives the gun­ner the option of fir­ing each weapon with the flick of a switch and auto­mat­i­cally gauges the range of the tar­get by using an eye-​​safe laser range finder.
When the gun­ner flips a switch on the con­trol panel and charges the weapon of choice, the dis­play will change for the par­tic­u­lar weapon and will show the sights for that weapon.
We can have one vehi­cle doing the job of three, or we can have three vehi­cles doing three times as much, he said.
The vehi­cle on dis­play was a watered-​​down ver­sion of the tac­ti­cal vehi­cle that is still in the con­struc­tion phase.
Plans for the tac­ti­cal ver­sion include a smaller, col­lapsi­ble tur­ret, remov­able com­pos­ite armor plat­ing, under­car­riage pro­tec­tion from mines, a smaller tar­get­ing screen, and the gun­ners seat may be moved to the rear of the vehi­cle to allow for another team mem­ber and lower the dis­trac­tions for both the gun­ner and the commander.

October 4th, 2004 | Ground Vehicles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.