When I worked at Aerojet Ordnance, we made 30mm GAU-8/A ammo for the A-10 Warthog. The government originally planned to manufacture this ammunition in a government arsenal and the Army’s projected cost per round was $85 in mature production. The A-10 ammo had a warhead with a depleted uranium warhead and an aluminum sabot in one round (that was the armor piercing incendiary round), a high explosive incendiary in another (that was the “soft target” round), and a target practice tracer round. It was all potent stuff. Each had more muzzle energy than a World II 75mm Howitzer round.
Our president (Ed Elko, a wonderful man and brilliant business leader) tried to convince the Army to buy its 30mm ammo from a commercial outfit (that would be us, Aerojet Ordnance), but Ed couldn’t get past the stale minds in the Army (the Army buys munitions for all of the services). So he bypassed the Army’s civil service dinosaurs and went to the US Congress. Congress knew a good deal when they saw it and they directed the Army to buy the ammo from Aerojet. The Army didn’t like that, but they did what they were told. And that was a good thing. The last year I was at Aerojet we were selling 30mm ammo to the Army for $6.30 per round and making a 30% profit. This, on ammo the Army thought would cost $85 per round in mature production if it was made in a government load plant (your tax dollars at work). I can’t make this stuff up, folks. They really were (and their successors probably still are) that stupid.
That 30mm cartridge, incidentally, was one that we sanitized for an Afghan project back in the 1980s. “Sanitized” means it had no markings identifying it as being made in the US. We were doing this for a charismatic Congressman named Charlie Wilson. Old Charlie was sponsoring a deal that involved a shoulder-fired rifle chambered for the GAU-8/A cartridge. You backed the rifle up to a tree or a rock and got underneath the thing to fire it. Charlie and his Mujahideen amigos wanted to use it to take out the Soviet Hind helicopters, and here’s where the plot thickens. Our government didn’t want to sell the Afghan rebels Stinger anti-aircraft missiles because they had guys like Osama bin Laden in their ranks. But we wanted the Afghans to be able to take out the Hind helicopters. They needed something, and the thought was that maybe a 30mm elephant gun was the answer. And wow, did that effort ever go south.
The guy who led the 30mm rifle development effort here in the US somehow managed to fire a cartridge in a Washington, DC, gas station. Yes, folks, he had an accidental discharge of a 30mm rifle in a DC gas station. That event lit up the gas station and injured four people. It’s one of the first things I think of whenever I read comments about the inherent wisdom in carrying a concealed weapon with a round chambered. But I digress. To get back to the 30mm story, the GSI (that’s gubmint-speak for gas station incident) was hushed up by the folks in trench coats (you know, Boris and Natasha types), everyone recognized the innate and incredible dumbness of a shoulder-fired 30mm rifle, and a short while later President Reagan approved selling Stingers to the Afghans. And within weeks of that decision and the Stinger’s Afghan debut, the Soviets decided maybe Afghanistan wasn’t such a good idea after all. The movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” is based on those events, but it left out the 30mm rifle and the DC gas station debacle.
I met Charlie Wilson a couple of times (that’s Congressman Wilson in the photo above). He was a hell of a man and I’ve written about him before here on the ExNotes blog. But back to the 30mm accidental discharge event…that story is here:
Ex-Pilot’s Quest for Better Weapon Goes Awry – The Washington Post
As usual, the Washington Post got the story wrong. The guy who had the rifle in his pickup truck wasn’t “trying” to sell the rifle to the government; he was being paid to develop the weapon so it could be used by the Mujahideen, and he was doing quite well until the gas station incident. The thing about all of this that is interesting to me is that the real story never reached the public. You won’t find any photos of that rifle floating around on the Internet, or of the gas station fire (believe me, I tried). Imagine that. A guess station catches fire in Washington, DC, and there are no photos. My, my.
More about the A-10 and its 30mm Gatling gun? Hey, it’s all right here:
Good job Joe, a very interesting read.
Those were fun days.
I imagine those days ain’t over.