re: #188 William Barnett-Lewis

Heh. The 113 series was good, but I really preferred the 113A3 version - a steering wheel in place of the lateral levers and they moved the fuel tankage outside the armored envelope making it a far more survivable vehicle for the infantry on board. It remains the quintessential battle taxi and is arguably a better idea than the IFV concept of the BMP/Bradley type vehicles. Perhaps if we had a 14.5 mm version of the M2 ala the KPV that provided a bit more anti-armor performance, the Army might not have felt the need for the 25 mm of the Bradley.

The Army in the 1970’s had limited budgets and was reluctant to attempt development of a new type of machine gun that might risk displacing the many thousands of M2HBs in service. Use of the Soviet 14.5mm round was impossible for political reasons, so a new caliber would also have been needed and that would have been very expensive. 25mm was already being planned for service on the AH-64 Apache, so using that was a development shortcut.

But what was the M1 “Giraffe”, anyway?