laststandonzombieisland

Although the Bell Helicopter OH-58D Kiowa Warriors have been withdrawn (regretfully) from service, the air frame design dates back to Vietnam and had served the Army well for five decades. In its final form the Kiowa packed some serious hardware.

Originally part of the Army’s retired Avenger air defense system, the FN-made M3P .50 caliber heavy machine gun is a thing of beauty. We are talking about a 81-pound 12.7x99mm NATO BMG with a three-foot long barrel. Big deal right? Sounds like the standard M2 Ma Duece, right? Well this bad boy, instead of the M2s sedate and hypnotic 400-ish rounds per minute rate of fire, the M3P runs at up to 1100.

About three times faster…

This made the rapid fire .50, with its effective range on soft targets out to 3,000 meters and lightly armored vehicles at about half that, a sweet option to up-arm Kiowas headed to the sandbox.

In 2004 experiments with the M3P side-mounted on an OH-58 at Rucker were successful, leading to an Operational Needs Statement in 2007.

“The Avenger system was being phased out because there is no current air threat,” said Maj. Kirk McCauley, assistant product manager for Kiowa Warrior, PEO for Aviation in 2009. “They were being turned in and some 800 guns were being taken off and put in storage.

“The guns were in various stages of readiness. But they were also government-owned. Instead of developing something new, we decided to take a proven system and adapt it and save money.”

Once the machine gun was chosen, it needed a mounting system (platform) that would attach it to the Kiowa helicopter. The MOPP Shop competed with two military contractors in developing a mounting system.

“As work on a firing platform progressed, it became apparent to us that we weren’t so sure that the military contractors would have the platform that was needed for the job,” said Gary Henry, chief of the MOPP Shop’s Sustainment Support Division, Integrated Materiel Management Center.

“Through a combined effort, we came up with a platform to mount the gun on the Kiowa’s universal weapons pylon. Our platform design is solely based on the talents of the guys in our machine shop. Without that platform, our gun would not have been selected.”

The Kiowa’s M3P system uses the existing Kiowa Warrior ammo can, the Avenger feed chute and a simple, lightweight mount designed by the MOPP shop. The new mount attaches the M3P directly to the Universal Weapons Pylon (UWP) and eliminates a cumbersome gun cage assembly.

Test data from fielding with the 7/17th showed that the MOPP Shop’s mount and gun system was durable, reduced the noise level by 48 percent and dropped the weight of the system by 65 pounds.

In the end at least 380 M3Ps were fitted to the Kiowa fleet, and fired in excess of 100,000 rounds in theater, helping the Joes at the sharp end go home whole.

Now, the big 50s, like the Kiowa, are history. Hellfire and Griffin-armed UAVs will take their place, but neither of them can drop 750-grain incendiary tracer at 18 rounds per second with eyeballs on target in real-time.