FJAG
Army.ca Legend
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This video raised two interesting points. The first was the mention of a safety officer on the position. In peacetime, the safety officer is a junior officer or senior NCO whose job it is to ensure that any round fired lands (and/or ricochets) into a safe impact area. I wartime the same function is provided by one of the "section commanders" i.e. one of the troop officers or senior NCOs and the detachment commander himself. Ensuring safety requires an observation that the barrel's bearing and elevation points at a safe area and that the proper charge is utilized. This is done in an unobtrusive manner. While a safety officer can easily see the bearing and elevation on an Archer, I expect they have zero ability to see the charge being loaded.
I don't give much importance to the "fault finding" issues. That's part and parcel to a new gun, but, with the PzH 2000 our folks were noting that the Dutch were having frequent problems with heat and dust and computer resets etc etc. That shouldn't be routinely happening with a gun that's been in-service for years.
Once again, I'm aghast at the difficulty of reloading the gun's magazine (especially with its small size) A system that uses an unarmoured ammo carrier, needs an admin area to do in and uses little hoists and rails just seems impractical to me and takes the gun out of action too long.
Actually I failed to hear those reasons other than we made a deal with Germany and got jobs in both locations and a nod to commonality with the Germans and the rest of the Brit's Boxer fleet. It ignores the many K9s in Europe and in particular that Estonia has them. - Okay - the delivery time for the guns also came up - interestingly especially pointed at Caesar's slow rate. Tracks was glossed over with the usual glib 'they're not as fast on highways' bulls***.
Interesting videos just the same. The Boxer one in particular since it's a recent video and mentions that the Boxer RCH seems to not be quite ready for full-rate production - something that bugged the US a few years ago.
