LAV III Mobile Gun System (MGS)

[TCBF]

http://www.mecar.be/

For the CM1 Mk8 Wpn Sys:
M690A1 APFSDS-T (300mm of RHA at 2km)
M691A2 HEP-T

For the GIAT F3 and F4:
M669 APFSDS-T (defeats a NATO Single Heacy Tank Tgt at 100 meters)
M678 HE-T

For the CM1 MK3:
M620A1 HEAT-T (defeat 260mm of armoured steel)
M625A1 HEP-T

For the F1:
M630 HEAT-T (defeats 260mm of armoured steel)
M631 HE-T.

Over 50,000 rounds of MK3 delivered in the last five years. 
Over 11,000 rounds of MK8 tested, certified  at Aberdeen PG in 2002.

Tom

 

[Kirkhill]

Thanks Tom

I presume that APFSDS-T for the F3/F4 is at 1000 m not 100 m?

What do you professionals think of the 90mm option? 

 

[Lance Wiebe]

This buy confuses the heck right out of me.  It appears that political pressure and military buys go hand in hand in Belgium as well.

No other NATO country is even one tiny bit interested in a 90mm.  There are really, no advantages that the 90 has over the 105.  Not in terms of cost of weapon or ammo, not in weight, not in rate of fire, not in performance......somebody got suckered.  Like the poor soldier, again.

 

[solidarnosc]

This buy confuses the heck right out of me.  It appears that political pressure and military buys go hand in hand in Belgium as well.

No other NATO country is even one tiny bit interested in a 90mm.  There are really, no advantages that the 90 has over the 105.  Not in terms of cost of weapon or ammo, not in weight, not in rate of fire, not in performance......somebody got suckered.  Like the poor soldier, again.

Correct me if I am wrong. The last decades over 8.000 Piranha's I,II; III's were sold world wide. At this moment none of them are equiped with a (working) 105mm gun. The only (working) MGS on a LAV platform (-20 ton) have a 90mm gun, used by Quatar, Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia. (I don't know but are the Centauro/Rooikat considered in the same category as the Piranha III, Pandur II,AMV,..)

The only times politicians in Belgium are interested in defence is when the economic compensation orders have to be divided (60% Flanders, 30% Wallonia and 10% Brussels) and when a German army crosses the border. 

 

[George Wallace]

The 105 mm gun has been mounted on a LAV/Piranha chassis and fired for over five years.  It has been in the prototype stages for longer, but as yet has not been put into mass production.  Our Regiment sent our Regimental Gunnery WO and three Troopers down to do those trials.  They did not give it any positive reviews.  In the late 90's I saw promotional film at the GM Diesel facilities in London, Ontario, showing the MGS firing 105 stationary and on the move (Not over the side though).

 

[big bad john]

I was just at GDLS in London on Thursday last, where a MGS was put through its paces for us.  We took it around the test track.  The gun was not fired and we were not shown any footage of the gun firing on the move.

 

[a_majoor]

They are still trying to square the circle?

90mm cannons were popular years ago with the French on various Panhard Armoured Cars, but this calibre wasn't adopted by anyone else in NATO that I remember, and only by French client states outside. In theory, a 90mm cannon has less recoil impulse than a 105mm, and the ammunition is smaller, allowing more rounds to be carried. In practice, there isn't any real advantage to be had going down to 90mm, and as the Rooikat, Centurio and prototype LAV III with CV_CT turrets have proven, 105mm is doable.

The political aspect of this is pretty scary at the troop level (they are buying WHAT?), but the Canadian Forces should be used to this situation. After all, the MGS keeps receding on the horizon since the technical issues cannot be resolved, but is anyone at a level to make the call going to say "enough", and substitute a LAV III with a different turret, or even revisit the basic requirement and see if a gun armed vehicle is really what is needed for the role?

 

[Armymatters]

The headaches I have heard about MGS is the fact that they are trying to stick a normal 105mm gun on a LAV chassis when everyone else is placing a low-pressure system, hence the problems with recoil.

 

[xxtruthxx]

Not sure if everyone has seen this vid of the mgs. but it shows it fireing while moving, at moving targets, and from the side while moving. No audio tho.
http://www.armee.forces.gc.ca/lf/Video/2_0/MGS.mpg

 

[Praetorian]

I have seen the footage of the MGS and I have mixed feelings
the thing looks cool and can obviously fire on the move, but it always looks on the verge of tipping over.
Ive also heard that any problem with the gun requires a crewman to get out of the vehicle to fix.
considering our fleets (air+maritime) can not lift the damned thing, why not keep MBT's?
I am sure sealifts are much easier to get in emergencies (just press a commercial ship into service like the brits did in the falklands)
and with sealifts there is no limit on weight or size so why not have the combat capability of tanks.

One question, The MGS is supposed to be part of a 3D team, including TUA and ADATS.
In a piched battle what happens to them when they run out of missiles? (ADATS only carries 8 missiles and TUA carries, I believe, 4)

Personally give me a Tank  :tank:

 

[Praetorian]

With all the bad reviews this MGS has been getting (this website reeks of it) why hasnt someone stopped it?
Now that the great bureocratic wheels are in motion, can they be stopped?
The conservatives would be more then justified in cancelling the order, Cretien halted an order on Helos for the Navy
We are now purchasing ones that are inferior to those.

Lets just say that conervative gods smile and cancel MGS, what would we replace it with?
Albeit the Leo is superior to the MGS, it still needs to be replaced.
Leopard 2 (not C2, just 2), M1, Challenger 2, Merkava, LeClerc, or what else?

I am strongly considering join Armoured, but Im not comfortable joining a force that is, for all intents and purposes, a Recce Force

 

[Lance Wiebe]

The MGS can fire on the move.  No arguments.

What the MGS cannot do, at present, is reload on the move.  So, it can fire one shot, and that's it, until the vehicle stops.  Hardly ideal, you would think.

Also, for some dumb reason, Canada insists that any wheeled 105 platform must mount the L7/M68 family of barrels.  No light weight, low recoil barrels for us!  No sirree!

Seems that we have a surplus of spare barrels, that nobody in Ottawa wants to sell with the surplus tanks.  Short sighted thinking again...

I still like the idea of the LAV 105 as built by Cockerill, over the MGS, though.  At least the LAV 105 can be moved and fought with heads up, if so desired.

 

[Kirkhill]

Hey Lance - How much does a new barrel cost anyway?  Would the entire stock cost more or less than the cost of refurbishing a DDH and then decommissioning her early?

 

[xxtruthxx]

^^^^Im in the same boat. I voted conservitive with the hope they might be able to turn around the "s*&tstorm" the liberals got us in. My money is on the lep 2, but the US has made a very generous offer to us in the past reguareding the M1's. Following suite with the Aussies may not be such a bad idea. 

 

[oskarm]

Correct me if I am wrong. The last decades over 8.000 Piranha's I,II; III's were sold world wide. At this moment none of them are equiped with a (working) 105mm gun. The only (working) MGS on a LAV platform (-20 ton) have a 90mm gun, used by Quatar, Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia. (I don't know but are the Centauro/Rooikat considered in the same category as the Piranha III, Pandur II,AMV,..)

Hello Solidarnosc, your nick sounds very familiar

You have forgotten AMX-10RC. They are undergoing modernization (new communication devices and some add-on armor) and will serve until 2020 when new 8x8 cars are going to replace them.

Centeuro and AMV are capable of having 120mm gun (at least their producers claims so) . Both can use this  http://www.otomelara.it/products/products.asp?id=prod_land_hitfact

As for 105mm gun IMO it is not enough to deal with future or even present threads. It can defeat T-72 (up to B standard so M, M1). Some information about what can be done with old T-72M1 you can find here:
http://armor.kiev.ua/fofanov/Tanks/EQP/kontakt5.html

and here in my and Revenant's posts (pleas notice the ERAWA capabilities):
http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2892&page=10
http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=52330&postcount=18

If CA is thinking about keeping its capability of dealing with enemy tanks (without own tanks), you should think about placing something like KEM on LAV.


Now some info about Polish 8x8 APC. We have bought 690 Finish designed AMV-360P (in Poland it’s called Rosomak). All vehicles should be delivered till 2013. 3 brigades (9 battalions) will be fully equipped in this cars. Planed versions are:
313 IFV (30mm ATK cannon in FitHist-30P, 96 of them with double Spike launcher)
135 APC (RCWS-12,7mm)
74 command  (RCWS-12,7mm)
38 ARV (RCWS-12,7mm)
27 engineering veh. 
41 MEDEVAC
17 NBC recon
23 Fire Support (no one knows is it spotters car, or something else)
32 6x6 Recon     

Some proposed structures of Polish Medium Mechanized Brigades you can find here starting from p.24  http://www.army.mil.pl/strona_pl/publicystyka/pwl/pwl12_05/dod12_05.pdf (KTO=APC; PPK=ATGM; kz=mech. coy.; plz=mech. plt.; pl=plt; drz=mech. team; kwsp=weapons coy.)

 

[solidarnosc]

Belgian military introduced a new concept called "adequate minimum" with means that the AIV's (Dingo II's and LMV) will be switched between the units acording to mission needs. Last year, adequate minimum was 300 AIV's. Now it apperently is 242. Money is used to buy 10 NH90's. ( I am Belgian not Polish by the way. Ok my name could be misleading.  )

 

[Lance Wiebe]

OK, in fairness, barrels are certainly not cheap.  However, if we kept that way of thinking, the Centurions we bought would have been equipped with the 17 pounder barrels from the Firefly as opposed to the brand new 20 pounder barrels.  And the Centurion would never have been upgraded to 105.

We're paying close to 10 million bux per MGS anyway.  An exorbitant amount, to be sure.  I'm sure that equipping the MGS with a lightweight, low recoil force barrel, and adding a few dozen spare barrels wouldn't affect the total price by more than another 10 or 20 million bux.  So the price for the MGS buy goes from 600 million to 620 million.  Small price, one would think, for a vehicle as capable as the  MGS, right?  At least, our betters in Ottawa would seem to think....

Further, anyone in a position to verify if the MGS project has been zero manned, even if the project still officially exists?

 

[Kirkhill]

20/600 = 3.3% of the project cost.  As you suggest, a fairly marginal incremental capital cost but I am betting one comes out of somebodies capital budget while the other comes out of somebody else's operating budget.

Interestingly enough I noted elsewhere that when the Conservatives laid out their platform they were careful to state that the budget for the forces was one thing but capital acquisition was something else.  IE when capital acquisitions were necessary they would be funded out of the Treasury at the time of acquisition, transferred to the CF then the CF would pay back the Treasury over the lifetime of the kit.  So if a ship or a tank were expected to serve 25 years then the CF would pay back 1/25th of the cost each year.

I was looking for clarification as to whether this was a change in procurement policy because if I look at the CPF purchase, for example, it looked as if the CF was required to purchase the equipment out of its annual budget when the supplier came knocking.  That meant that every time a new capital project is instituted it eats up all of the capital budget for a period of years.  In turn that means that everybody else has to sit and wait their turn for an opportunity to buy new kit.

 

[mainerjohnthomas]

Now that we have a govt that admits that we need guns, perhaps they will not shy from getting us ones that we can actually use.  The MGS needs a low recoil system to be useful for us, pretending that you can strap a Leo I 105 to the top of a LAV III and expecting it to fire effectively would be about as useful as trying the same trick on our old Cougars.
    I shy away from any kit that can't reload on the move, but lacks the armour to stay still while firing.  It sounds like we've bought the weak sister of the old Swedish S tank, and THEY replaced that with the Leo II.  Either fit the MGS with an autoloader that can reload on the move, a gun that can fire offline, or scrap the whole project and follow the Swedes to the Leo II.
    The last I read of the Stryker MGS variant, the US army had required a written explanation about why this item was needed and/or sufficient before any potential deployment overseas.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement as to its utility and survivability.

 

[Eland]

Now that we have a govt that admits that we need guns, perhaps they will not shy from getting us ones that we can actually use.  The MGS needs a low recoil system to be useful for us, pretending that you can strap a Leo I 105 to the top of a LAV III and expecting it to fire effectively would be about as useful as trying the same trick on our old Cougars.
    I shy away from any kit that can't reload on the move, but lacks the armour to stay still while firing.  It sounds like we've bought the weak sister of the old Swedish S tank, and THEY replaced that with the Leo II.  Either fit the MGS with an autoloader that can reload on the move, a gun that can fire offline, or scrap the whole project and follow the Swedes to the Leo II.
    The last I read of the Stryker MGS variant, the US army had required a written explanation about why this item was needed and/or sufficient before any potential deployment overseas.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement as to its utility and survivability.

I agree fully with your argument that the current government should proceed to buy a fleet of Swedish-pattern Leo 2's. In fact, just about any current MBT would do, because they are the only platform that has sufficient mobility, speed, firepower and the survivability needed to provide fire support for the infantry AND deal with enemy tanks and IFV's if they should pop up.

I sometimes wonder if the proposed MGS buy was the result of a government that sought to:

i) stay in the GDLS fold and keep as many jobs/industrial spin-off benefits in Canada as they could

and

ii) find a politically saleable way to get rid of those *ugh* tanks <sarcasm intended>

If there really was a bona fide requirement for a wheeled fire support vehicle, then better choices are out there. Namely the
South African-built Rooikat, which is battle proven and has been around quite a while, and the Italian-built Centauro, which seems to be
a fairly-well put together piece of kit. It is interesting to see that neither the South African, nor the Italian armies are prepared to use these  wheeled vehicles as anything other than a complement to (but not a substitute for) the tanks they already have.

Canada is seemingly unique in purchasing the MGS in place of tanks. I hope that PM-elect Harper sees the MGS for what it is and cancels the deal.