Michael's Dispatches

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Published: Friday, 15 January 2010 14:04

Headlamps of the Cobra Battery soldiers emanate an eerie glow.  At other times they might use red lights that are more difficult for the enemy to see, but we are pretty safe on FOB Frontenac, so the greater danger is making a mistake around the gun, such as dropping a hundred-pound HE projectile on your foot.  The round will not explode—but you can scratch one foot off the inventory sheet, which takes a soldier out of action.

There’s lots of ways to get hurt here even while the enemy is sleeping.  The gunners talked about a time up in Alaska, or maybe it was Washington State, when someone fired a cannon during the winter.  They said the cannon broke from the ice and slid away and hit a truck.

The cannon’s computer and can run on battery or generator, or the soldiers can compute by hand using charts and other aids, just short of an abacus.  You’d have to be a gifted mathmatecian with a great physics background to hit within a half mile of the target without the firing aides.

Here, Cobra battery dug a circular firing pit with shovels (this ground is not quite as hard as Stone Mountain, but it’s getting there), so they can swing the cannon around 360 degrees.  The gunners are very fast, and using the computer could switch from one fire mission to another within about a couple minutes.

Computations before firing.

There are many sorts of fuzes.  The most commonly used in Afghanistan will airburst, explode on impact, or slightly after impact.  Airbursts typically are used for Taliban in areas such as uncovered trenches.  While delay fuzes might be used for enemy who are in bunkers or positions with overhead cover, such as inside an earthen Afghan compound.  Fire missions often include a mix of fuzes.

Sometimes the crew needs about a minute between shots.  The dragon breath from the muzzle during these shots was not so bright; the target area was only maybe a few miles away, and so the charge was small.  As one illum descends and is about to burn out, another is fired behind it.

The artillery shots are not like a normal rifle bullet wherein the projectile is crimped to brass that contains gunpowder.  Instead, the 155mm projectile is selected and the fuze is set.  On the ultra-accurate (and expensive) GPS-guided “Excalibur” projectile, the coordinates are set in the fuze using a handheld electronic gadget that is placed over the fuze like a little snowcone, which wirelessly transmits the data to the guidance system.  There is no exaggeration saying that an Excalibur round could destroy a parked car twenty miles away on the first shot.  The accuracy is incredible, given all the unpredictable winds and other factors the round will encounter during its flight through the sky – which literally could be shot on from a crystal clear mountain, taking the round far higher than the summit of Mt. Everest where it could pass through winds going different directions and at very high speeds, snow, and then down through a hailstorm and finally through rain.  Imagine the quick temperature changes from a hot-shot in the desert up to airliner altitude.  The tracking and guidance computer must be able to handle all that – and fast – after being shot from a cannon.

The projectile with set-fuze is rammed up into the breach, and behind that the soldiers stuff the propellent.  The breach is locked and a primer emplaced, and finally a cord is pulled and there is no turning back.

Some countries, like the United States, have “counterbattery radars.”  The US has Q36 and Q37 radars, for instance, and they can spot birds or incoming mortar or artillery fire.  Rockets and low trajectory mortars often fly below the radar.  Our bases have radars to alert for various attacks, but the alerts are often farcical.  Sometimes the attack is over before the alarm sounds, and over in Iraq there were so many false alarms that people stopped paying attention.  Especially when the ground was muddy.

Counterbattery radar, though, is actually very useful and can be used to pinpoint the POO (Point of Origin) of enemy shots before the first round even detonates.  In some situations, our people would immediately counterfire, unless of course the enemy launches from next to a school or a built up area.  KAF (Kandahar Airfield) gets hit now and then, with some casualties, but the attacks are uncommon compared to what the Brits got in Basra.  You’d get hit more times in a week with Brits than in an entire year with U.S. forces.

We’ve also got a sytem called C-RAM (Counter Rocket and Mortar), which can acquire incoming rounds and shoot a stream of bullets so dense that it looks like a laser.  Sometimes on KAF they wake me up, but apparently they are shooting at the moon or calibrating the guns.  They sure are loud.

When Cobra battery fired at high angles, they had to fire and then lower the gun to reload, and since the camera was set on these shots with 30-second exposures to catch the stars, the gun can be seen firing, then lowered for reloading.

Though the Taliban had an Air Force at one time, they don’t have counterbattery radar.  If they did we would kill it quickly.  But if we were fighting a more capable enemy, we’d have to protect our guns, such as by firing and moving very quickly.  Imagine being in an artillery duel.  As a commander, you don’t want to lose your guns and leave your infantry at the mercy of enemy guns, and so a good enemy commander will probably shoot at where you shot from, and everywhere he thinks you might have gone in that amount of time.  This causes Taliban some headaches because sometimes they fire at us and run, but our guys are already launching shots at where we thought they might go.  It’s got to take nerve to shoot at an American base.  You’ll probably get away with it for a while.

And that’s about it.  Next time our soldiers need a fire mission, Cobra Battery is one of many who are ready to deliver the goods.  Rest assured, when our people get into a serious firefight, or hit by an IED, the Medevac crews know about it within about a minute, and they are watching the narrative scroll on their screens while they toss coffee cups in the trash.   When a casualty report scrolls, they don’t even wait for orders—they just run to helicopters and crank them up and the rotors start whirling.  Meanwhile, the A-10s and other available warbirds already have turned that direction.  If the fight is unfolding in Cobra Battery’s sector, the crew will be standing by this gun.

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