XBradTC

Even as the A-10 Warthog was entering service, the Air Force was beginning to worry about the ability of the low/slow airframe to survive in contested airspace such as that predicted in the event of war in Western Europe. The proliferation of radar laid anti-aircraft artillery and radar and infrared guided surface to air missiles in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany meant that any low level operations would require speed and maneuverability to survive, in addition to significant electronic countermeasures.

Casting about for a platform that could survive, and yet still fulfill the A-10’s mission of killing tanks, the Air Force decided to repurpose a portion of its existing F-16 fleet for the ground attack mission. Now, all F-16s have always had ground attack capability, of course. But one thing the A-10 had that the F-16 didn’t was the awesome GAU-8 Avenger 30mm cannon. The lethality of the 30mm gun against tanks was vastly greater than that of the 20mm M61A1 the F-16 was equipped with.

And so, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, General Electric, designers of the GAU-8, took the basic mechanism, and designed a much smaller variant, with only four barrels, and those much shorter, with a rate of fire of about 2400 rounds per minute. The gun itself was known as the GAU-13.* This shrunk down gun was stuffed into a pod about the size of an external fuel tank, known as the GPU-5.**

Original plans to hang a GPU-5 on about half the F-16 fleet slowly faded, especially as the Air Force fielded the infrared guided AGM-65D Maverick missile to the Falcon wings. The Maverick was just the thing to kill a tank, and its good standoff range meant the launching aircraft (either an F-16, or an A-10) greatly reduced its exposure to Soviet air defenses. That made the 30mm gun somewhat superfluous.

Still, once a procurement program gets started, it is often hard to stop. And so while not many GPU-5s were bought, enough were to equip an Air National Guard F-16 wing. And come January 1991, this wing found itself deployed to Desert Storm, and tasked to go kill tanks of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and southern Iraq.

The results were rather disastrous.

First, the gun pod wasn’t properly integrated with the F-16’s Heads Up Display for accurate aiming. Second, the shorter barrels of the gun meant greater dispersion of the rounds. Third, the enormous recoil forces on the pod caused it to vibrate and misalign, spraying shells all over the place. The accuracy of the pod was dismal. And so after the first day, the pods were dismounted,  never to be used again. Instead, the F-16s would attack armor with dumb bombs, cluster bombs, and Mavericks. Like they should have been doing from the start.

 

 

*GAU- Gun, Aircraft Unit

**GPU- Gun Pod Unit