Worst Weapon?

[George Hill]

The worst weapon the US Army ever had? I was asked what I thought the worst weapon the Army has ever had. Two conditions: First, no M-16's. Second, no weapons forced upon US troops by the French, aka the Chauchat. This is difficult to say because really the US Army has been gifted with so many very good weapons. However there is one that stands out in my mind. I hated it with a passion. It was heavy, awkward, unreliable, and completely freaking dangerous to fire. But it was fun and cool... just wouldn't have wanted to fire a shot with it in a shooting war. I'm talking about the M-47 Dragon. I was trained initially as a Dragon Gunner. What the Dragon is, is basically a prenatal TOW missile. A tube launched, optically wire guided battlefield anti-tank missile. It had two fatal flaws. First, the weapon produced a huge firing signature. And when I say signature, I'm talking about a huge plume of smoke highlighting the gunner. The second fatal flaw is lack of speed. The Dragon was painfully slow. It felt like forever from firing to when the missile actually reached out and hit the target. At max range, the Dragon would have an 11 second flight time. The main problem is that the target – a Soviet Tank – could see the firing, swivel the turret, and hose the gunner down with coax mounted machine gun fire in only 4 seconds. Using the Dragon in a war is suicide for the gunner. Tactics evolved to rear attack ambushes. Now this is where it becomes all the more complicated. You see, the Dragon was designed to counter the Red Tide, the flood of Iron Curtain armor pouring in from Russia advancing across Europe. Now if you are in a defensive battle and you are supposed to ambush the enemy from the rear? That means you have to hunker down and let the enemy overrun you, and that means you get all the sudden like in enemy territory. Then you send up “here I am” smoke signals. Suicide. The weapon system was fundamentally flawed this way. But it did make a huge boom. I got to shoot over 25 of these bastards. Most of them were the Dragon II versions with the improved warhead. Considering the weapons limitations, we decided to use them more against other hard targets such as bunkers or other such structures. Quite often, instead of packing a Dragon, we would pack a bunch of M-72 LAW rockets... which everyone liked much more even if it didn't hit half as hard. At least we could shoot one and live. So, yes, the Dragon is the worst weapon the US Army has ever fielded.

 

[Pilgrim]

I suppose the U.S. troops in the early months of the Korean War were really unhappy with the 2.36" rocket launcher (Bazooka) when they found out that it wouldn't stop NKPA T-34 tanks head on.

Pilgrim

 

[Regolith]

I think I read somewhere that a good way to commit suicide was to launch a Dragon from an enclosed space like a bunker...

 

[RNB65]

M14 in FA mode.

 

[Freelance Tax Collector]

M249 SAW. Thing weighs too much for what it does, has a crappy M145 that sits way too high to get a good cheek weld, and loves to jam. I could get pretty high off whatever they must have been smoking when they added the port to accept M16 mags too.

Then in the Marine Corps' boundless wisdom, they felt it best to assign three per squad. Not one, a la "Squad Automatic Weapon", but one per fireteam.

Now we got these flak jackets that have SAPI plates on all sides, not just front and back, and we carry more weight than ever. Screw maneuvering and agility right?

Did I mention that standard combat load is 600 rounds, or 3 boxes, not to mention the spare barrel?

And Mothers of America pout about troops not having enough armor...

 

[telomerase]

Second, no weapons forced upon US troops by the French

How about the totally rusted-out French muskets bought by "Agent no. 72" during the Revolution? OK, OK, no French stuff...

For the Navy, it would have to be the dud torpedoes they used for the first year of WWII. The Air Force has too many candidates. For the Army... How about the Sergeant York DIVAD?

 

[yesit'sloaded]

I'm going to go with the Lewis machine gun for runner up because the heavy cooling shroud didn't actually cool the weapon and made the gun extremely heavy. I'm going to go with the Mark 14 torpedo pre-fix as the worst weapon ever.

 

[telomerase]

No, no, you just need a few more plates, like this.

You guys already yell "exterminate", and mindlessly follow any order, so you're 99% of the way to perfection

Seriously, you have a good point about the slowing down of the squad. Maybe I should disqualify the York DIVAD since it was barely fielded (but if it had been, it would have slowed down the armor units... it was an overloaded M48 chassis).

 

[Prof. A. Wickwire]

How about the M-29 155mm Recoilless Rifle firing the M-388 projectile. More commonly known as the Davey Crockett Atomic Rocket Launcher.

The fallout radius was greater than the launch range.

Gets my vote.

Sincerely,

Prof. A. Wickwire

 

[[email protected]]

easy answer

George Bush 1 and george bush 2. hahaha


No hate mail please,just a silly opinion.

 

[telomerase]

The fallout radius was greater than the launch range.

Hey, the prevailing winds do go the right way in Europe... given the tactical situation in the Fulda Gap you were more likely to be killed by Soviet tanks than fallout. And for that matter, the fallout from the pre-emptive strike would have killed you already, so a little more of your own wouldn't make any difference.

(But it was a pretty lousy weapon by most accounts).

 

[41magsnub]

George Bush 1 and george bush 2. hahaha


No hate mail please,just a silly opinion.

That doesn't even make sense..... nor is it on topic

I do second the Dragon posting..... what a miserable dangerous weapon. As an experiment my Combat Engineer battalion had them and some genius thought they would be usefull mounted on top of an M113 as if we would have anything like the time to use it before a tank would blow the hell out of an APC. That did not last long, though I heard later on after I got out they tried Javalin missiles which make a little more sense, but mostly everyone went back to the .50 cals and mk19's.

 

[Nolo]

Worst weapon?
Uhhh...
Brewster Buffalo or TBD Devastator. Terribly outmoded at the start of the war.
If you allowed French stuff, I'd definitely say Chauchat off the bat.
The Delta Dagger sucked something awful as well, I hear.
It's not really American, but the turbocharger-less P-38 Lightnings that we exported to the Brits during WWII were pretty much useless.

 

[Jeff White]

I'll add my vote for the Dragon. I was there when it was fielded and McDonnell Douglas sent tech reps out to mount the tracker on the round when we live fired them to make sure everything worked. I asked one of these NET guys if McDonnell Douglass had a tech-rep for every squad in the Army to deploy and got a blank stare.

Then the night tracker was introduced. A big (and I do mean big, it came with a large ALICE pack to carry it) heavy thermal sight. And the Army bought this monstrosity as a one man weapon. By the time you gave your H series MTOE Dragon gunner the round, the day tracker and the night tracker he was carrying about 90 pounds...before he had any other equipment.

New gunners easily lost control of the round because of the huge weight shift when the round left the tube. They devised a trainer that used a 7.62 grenade launching cartridge to push a weight forward to simulate the missile leaving the gunner's shoulder. It helped some, but at approx. $5600.00 a round, we didn't get to fire a lot of them in practice.

Let's not forget the fact that you couldn't shoot them in restrictive terrain, (might break the wire), high wet grass (might short the wires out), or across water (would short the wires out). Then there was the large firing signature and the 11 second flight time for a max effective range of 1000 meters. IIRC the minimum range was 65 meters (you couldn't control the missile closer then that).

All in all I'm very glad that we never had to face enemy armor when that was our basic antiarmor weapon at the squad and platoon level.

I don't think we sold it to any other nation.

Jeff

 

[oneshooter]

ONTOS, would YOU want to reload this in combat?

Not to mention the clean up afterwards!


Oneshooter
Livin in Texas

 

[Freedom in theSkies]

Although not exactly a U.S. device, our boys in the Canadian Expeditionary Force that went to France in 1914 to fight the Kaisers' Army used the MacAdam shield Shovel for a very short time in the trenches of France.
These were the days when there was little or no practical testing of the equiptment that troops were given.
Here is what they say about it.... Modeled on a Swiss invention this device was intended to be used as both a shield and a shovel. Patented in the name of one of Sir Sam Hughes private secretaries it was a complete failure in every respect. The handle was to short, the shovel to dull to dig with, the hole in the blade was to low to shoot through unless mounted on a low pile of dirt and worst of all it was not bullet proof. The entire shipment of 22,000 shovels witch had cost the government over $29,000 was sold off as scrap in 1917 for $1,400.

 

[oneshooter]

Sergant York, It NEVER worked!

Oneshooter
Livin in Texas

 

[default]

Slightly off-topic, but...

TBD Devastator

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree, at least to some extent. The much-unloved Devastator was not much worse than the Nakajima B5N2 "KATE" as a plane. It was somewhat slower, especially when lugging a torpedo, but, at the time, torpedo bombers were not generally fast planes, and the TBD was no worse than the B5N2 in terms of armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, or general durability. And, unlike the Nakajima aircraft, at least the rear gunner had a belt-fed machine gun.

The problem was more with the torpedoes it carried, and the fact that the torpedo squadrons did not have effective fighter cover at Midway, and were unable to make a coordinated attack with the dive-bomber units. On an occasion when the torpedoes functioned and the attack was executed correctly, TBDs helped inflict mortal damage on the Japanese light carrier Shōhō at the Coral Sea.

More on-topic: I'm enjoying these Dragon stories. I've never heard anything good about those things, and it's entertaining to hear them trashed by people who actually had to use them.

 

[Nolo]

After I posted on the Devastator, I I realized that the Devestator doesn't really qualify as a bad weapon, just an outdated one. A bad weapon is one that doesn't perform it's function adequately even without duress. So, yeah, the TBD was fine, if a little (more than a little?) obsolete.
I also didn't realize he said "Army".

 

[theken206]

"M249 SAW. Thing weighs too much for what it does, has a crappy M145 that sits way too high to get a good cheek weld, and loves to jam. I could get pretty high off whatever they must have been smoking when they added the port to accept M16 mags too."

I dunno, one of my best friends is running around Iraq reaking havoc with one as I type, ill have to ask him what he thinks about it but he seems to like it from what I hear ;p

 

[Gunnerpalace]

The M-1873 Springfield Carbine, it jams, and three words: Custer's last stand.

 

[Kalashnikov]

I dunno.... I'd put my vote in for the Mk19. The thing is too damn ammo sensetive, too heavy, useless on a tripod, and breaks too easy.

 

[Timthinker]

One of the worst weapons in terms of reliability was the Reising submachine gun used in limited numbers during World War II. When dirty, it became a real jam-o-matic and was replaced quickly by better weapons.


Timthinker

 

[Harry Paget Flashman]

The spam key for opening the filter cans for the Mark V gas masks. Try opening one in Desert Storm when the chemical alarm goes off. It's like you have 10 thumbs and the key is spring loaded.

 

[SouthronBoy]

Was going to say the Davy Crockett weapon, until I read the Dragon entries and remembered just what a POS it was.

+1 on the Dragon. I'm really glad we never had to use it.