The M2 Bradley can it be armed with a 20mm gun instead of a 25mm gun?

[TomS]

Conversely, my grandfather came back from WW2 in the Pacific with recurring bouts of malaria. The fact that his Army disability pension could just about cover a monthly trip from Jersey City, dinner, and a show in no way compensated for the periodic attacks that often left him bed ridden for a couple of days at a time.

 

[Kat Tsun]

I trained on a m3a3 Bradley and it had a 20mm chain gun. Others were modified and had certain characteristics we needed....but it was absolutely a 20mm. Down-range we also had a m3a3 25mm version with ap and HEDP rounds. Don't reply to people unless you have a full view of what the army had on hand.

Could you point us to the relevant FM or ATP manuals about this 20mm Bradley? Especially pertaining to the conversion of barrel, ammo feed, and fire control system?

I was being a bit harsh, so I'll tell what I can. Although you give the Army too much credit by thinking they gave us field manuals on everything we used even as 19D

Different barrel in appearance, different motor, slightly different feed system. The manual controls/push buttons were all the same as the standard 25mm. The electronics and other bits and pieces were classified when I trained on them over a decade ago, and for all I know still are, so you'll have to dig on that for yourself.

Odd thing is everything was 100% brand new when we got it, so maybe it was a trial run as I never used or saw one again.

I do have to say those 20mm rounds fucked up armor plating better than the 25mm, by far, and pretty sure it had a different explosive payload than class B, RDX, or PETN based on what we saw.

The Enhanced M242 has a different barrel (fluted barrel, with a chrome or nitrided bore), a different motor, and a different chamber, to handle the hotter loaded M919 APFSDS versus the old M791 APDS rounds. It's still a 25mm, but the M919 was too spicy for the Desert Storm-era guns and the Enhanced gun doubles its lifespan when firing them. The old ODS barrels had the eight baffle muzzle brake and the new ones for the Enhanced guns are four.

Perhaps that's what you're referring to? Or did you run with the Enhanced Bushmasters on your CFVs?

 

[TomS]

Interesting sidelight related to the Bradley:

Next in line we have the GE127. This was a real nice dual-feed cannon in 27.5mm. This gun, the EX29 and the AMG all were the same basic design, a triangular accelerator, Browning short recoil cycle and a very small distance from the front of the feed to aft of the weapon. This was considered for the MIFV the Mechanized Infantry Fighting Vehicle. This was the gun that we were going to propose. Stoner was in there with his TRW 25mm gun: we competed and he won out.

(MIFV is a mistake, probably someone conflating the AIFV with the MICV)

Both guns are also described in Chinn Vol 5.

The fun thing is that in the end, neither was actually adopted in the Bradley -- the M242 Chain gun is not the Stoner TRW gun

 

[riggerrob]

Conversely, my grandfather came back from WW2 in the Pacific with recurring bouts of malaria. The fact that his Army disability pension could just about cover a monthly trip from Jersey City, dinner, and a show in no way compensated for the periodic attacks that often left him bed ridden for a couple of days at a time.

Moderators: Perhaps they this debate (anti-malaria medication) deserves its own dedicated thread. This past year I had some long conversations with veterans of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. These conversations started at the 2024 Parachute Industry Association Symposium (Reno, Nevada) and concluded at Operation Pegasus Jump (Campbell River).
The dominant theory is that the CAR was ruined by the anti-malaria drug merloquin. The problem started when they CAR was chosen for field-trials just before they deployed to try and quell the civil war in Somalia. The program got complicated when various batches of mefloquin got mixed up. Some batches were intended to be weekly doses, some were monthly doses and some were 6-month doses. Some soldiers accidentally received repeated 6-month doses in only a few weeks. Side-affects (nightmares) drove some soldiers to the edge of sanity. When the CAR returned to Canada, Ottawa swept that “comedy of errors” under-the-carpet by disbanding the CAR.

As an aside, while waiting for my flight home from Reno, I chatted with a Kenyan doctor who was returning home from a conference on malaria. He replied “We don’t use mefloquin anymore because it is too toxic. It should never have been tested on soldiers.”

In another aside, my brother is a veteran of the First Gulf War, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He said: “Half the returning soldiers have a mysterious, parasitic disease that only a handful of Canadian doctors have heard about. They are the lucky ones.”

 

[Moose]

Interesting sidelight related to the Bradley:


(MIFV is a mistake, probably someone conflating the AIFV with the MICV)

View attachment 718053Both guns are also described in Chinn Vol 5.

The fun thing is that in the end, neither was actually adopted in the Bradley -- the M242 Chain gun is not the Stoner TRW gun

True, but the TRW gun would eventually evolve into the Oerlikon KBA, which has gone on to be the second most produced NATO 25mm after the Bushmaster.

 

[TomS]

True, but the TRW gun would eventually evolve into the Oerlikon KBA, which has gone on to be the second most produced NATO 25mm after the Bushmaster.

I actually didn't know that. I had assumed that KBA was a scaling of the Oerlikon 20mm KAA, like the 35mm KDA.