north atlantic treaty organisation

Although the excellent AH1 Cobra was deployed to Europe in the 1970s and received TOW missiles to help it kill Soviet armour, noone else in NATO could afford it. That left W Germany sticking six HOT missile launchers on its Bo 105 light observation helicopter and the British Army SS11 missiles...

I should have posted this yesterday (the birthday was actually the day before but I only saw it on Thursday). Group Captain John 'Paddy' Hemingway DFC: https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2024/0717/1460456-raf-hemingway-birthday/...

Nothing in military history has given the RAF such a hold on the public imagination as the gallant Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of the Battle of Britain. Sadly in the postwar nuclear world their successors have only been tasked with wartime defence of key military infrastructure in the UK. It...

The fledgling Lufftwaffe and Marineflieger appeared to be interesting in buying British in their earliest days. Of course this was the worst possible time to deal with the British, so every effort fell over. Wiki referencing Wood. The German Defence Ministry first expressed interest in the...

Currently, the Italian Carrier Strike Group "Gruppo Navale 31" after a short stop in Singapore is participating to the "Pitch Black" exercise with the Australian Navy. The CSG 31 is composed by the aircraft carirer (and flagship) ITS Count of Cavour and by the FREMM Alpino, the Cavour has a...

Stumbled across some early 1950s NATO documents concerning the defensive arming and equipping of Merchant Ships. SGS.1 and the 4" Mk 25 are briefly mentioned, although unsurprisingly the vast majority of equipment intended for DEMS was supposed to come from US stocks. There are more documents...

https://www.twz.com/land/norways-nomads-short-range-air-defense-system-unveiled

The time has come for Europeans to look into the abyss. (US Friends forgive this, but we in Europe have to plan for whatever you decide. We know its your call not ours) In the next year or so the US may decide to withdraw from NATO. Since only France has nuclear weapons which do not depend on US...

When the UK gave up carriers in the 60s the alternative was supposed to be a family of helicopter, ship and sub launched missiles. In the event while Wasp helicopters did get AS12s it took nearly a decade before Exocet equipped some destroyers and frigates. Sea Skua for Lynx did not arrive...

Anybody know anything about this?

A few days ago I stumbled across this ASROC training video from Periscope Films and I was surprised when I checked the board that no specific thread for the ASROC has been posted so hear goes: Now for some stats from the RUR-5 ASROC wikipedia page: Detonation of W44 warhead launched by an...

There have been several discussions about the British aircraft of the 60s since I started here a few weeks ago, apparently it's a never ending topic. They appear to start out technically and end financially and politically in a viscous circle of failure. In the process some interesting and...

The US Huey Cobra was a formidable gunship helicopter. Unlike the later Apache which has found widespread use.with NATO, the Cobra did not get much NATO use. West Germany should have been a major user. TOW equipped Cobras would have added much to Bundeswehr units. Instead the Boelkow B105...

According to McNab (2012), the Stabilimento Militare Armi Leggere Terni or SMALT had produced a conversion kit to adapt the MG 42/59 GPMG (Italy's license-produced version of the MG 42 / MG 3) to 5.56×45mm NATO ammunition (p. 25). Uncited entries on Wikipedia claimed that the conversion kit...

LCAW was a NATO program for an small torpedo, cheap/expendable enough to be use against unidentified/unverified sonar contacts. It was supposed to have both rocket-launched and helicopter-dropped version. At first it was a trilateral US, German Norwegian project, but some point ~1990 The US...

This was idea I had reading the merage IV threads, the idea being the the lockheed bribery scandal breaks in Germany befor the deal goes though leading to anything American becoming politically toxic, this leads to Germany (and though them the rest of the nato f-104 block) to buy the Mirage III...

I just found a very interesting picture on wikipedia, and i dont know where else to post it. All information i have for now is from wikipedia so take it with a grain of salt. i found it on the LRAC F1 article so maybe it was an alternative proposal for that program. In the image the rocket...

Thread for unbuilt RAM launcher concepts (aside from the standard Mk 49 and SeaRAM launchers) This morning, I reminded myself of an unusual concept to mount Rolling Airframe Missile launchers on the sides of a Mark 45 gun turret. The idea was to use the gun drives and gun fire control to point...

These are well worth a look. I wonder what FIXEDIT could do with a bigger budget! View: https://youtu.be/VVjdFBZCRQc View: https://youtu.be/zo8FhChnyq0 View: https://youtu.be/rTov2oSXR8M View: https://youtu.be/4irbMNQc8As