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Aviation History
1964
1964 - 0262.PDF
flJGHT International supplement, 30 January 1964 Air-Cuthion Vehicles MILITARY APPLICATIONS OF HOVERCRAFT BY CAPT GUNNAR GRANDIN, Royal Swedish Navy As recorded in our December issue, a paper entitled as above was delivered at a recent symposium in Stockholm. The author was Capt Gunnar Grandin, to whom we are indebted for the text and illustrations re- produced herewith. Capt Grandin gradu- ated from the Naval College in 1940 and took the Staff Course and Technical Course at the Naval Staff College between 1946 and 1948. Since 1960 he has been chief of the Planning Section at the Naval Staff, Stock- holm. This section is responsible for long- range planning and operational research. THE SUBJECT OF MY LECTURE is "Military Applications of Hovercraft." To start out with 1 must confess that I know absolutely nothing about it. There is no military Hovercraft yet. Now, having settled the level of what I am going to say, I intend to go ahead and give some points of view on military purposes for which Hovercraft might be used. -";—;• Definition of Combat Value i ^ The combat value of a weapon system can be said to be composed mainly of two factors, i.e., striking power and power of resistance. By "effectivity" we mean the possibilities of getting the system into action as well as its capacity for developing fire-power. By "power of resistance" we mean on one hand the power of avoiding hits, on the other the degree of protection against hits. Con- sequently, mobility can affect effectivity as well as power of resistance. A mobility contributing to increase effectivity, to bring weapons to bear, we call offensive mobility. A mobility rendering it diffi- cult for the enemy to use his own wea- pons we call defensive mobility. Basing my arguments upon this division of combat value, I will try to examine the military possibilities of Hovercraft. Offensive Mobility - 3~ I begin with offensive mobility, i.e., the power to get a unit or weapons to work. The techniques of transport, where the combination of mobility and trans- porting capacity decide the matter, has been a factor which has attracted mili- tary interest for thousands of years. The question is whether it is not really the transport problem which is the principal problem of strategy as well as of tactics. I will mention some examples of revolutionary solutions of this prob- lem from a military point of view. An invention, the importance of which it is perhaps a little difficult to understand today, was the two-wheeled war chariot drawn by horses. When it replaced the slow, four-wheeled ox- wagon, about the year 1500 BC, the armies of the Near East obtained quite another kind of mobility, strategically as well as tactically. That was one great military transport invention. A later, but perhaps more obvious, parallel to the subject of the symposium today, were the ships of the Vikings. As you know, people have always won- dered how the Vikings could operate The West land SR.N3 operating as a landing craft with such great success for such a long time with their pirate expeditions. How was it possible that, being only very few, they could bring about so much damage in the populous countries on the Con- tinent? The secret may lie in their ships. Their design was quite excep- tional. They were very light, of strong and, at the same time, flexible construc- tion; they were fast and at the same time shallow-draft ships; they could be sailed or rowed close to a shallow shore. Those who have made a more thorough study of the expeditions of the Vikings have found that generally their raids upon the coasts were made on places far from fortified places. The navigating conditions were such that ships with ordinary draught could not arrive there. Furthermore, the raids were carried out so quickly that there was no time for defenders from fortified places to inter- vene. The ships could withdraw by sailing, or, when there was no wind, they could be rowed. As a matter of fact, there was no defence against them. The advantages that these ships showed over their contemporaries are perhaps what, from a military point of view, we demand from the maritime means of transport of today, though on another scale. One application of the offensive mobility of Hovercraft is the same as for the Viking ships—to transport troops with or without heavy weapons. Speeds of up to about lOOkt, or perhaps more, do not seem impossible. This speed is high compared with that of conventional ships, though not very high compared with aircraft. It is, however, speed in combination with a high load capacity that renders Hover- craft something new. In this regard they may have a place between ships and aircraft. Their next quality, affecting offensive mobility, is relative independence of the medium over which they are driven— water, ice or whatever it may be. This is perhaps of still more importance than the high speed. A Hovercraft does not require a harbour or a landing-ground in a conventional sense: it may be "parked" within a very limited space. In this way the loading of troops may
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