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DIVAD Wasn’t a ‘Cure All,’ After All
At the height of the Cold War in the late 1970s, the U.S. Army wanted a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG) to guard American armor and infantry from Soviet air threats – aircraft, helicopters and missiles.
Of special concern was the “pop-up” aerial menace posed by the Soviet Mil Mi-24 “Hind” helicopter that could briefly expose itself above terrain and launch a 9 K114 Shturm (AT-6 “Spiral”) air-to-ground missile.
The cure-all seemed to be the M247 Sgt. York Division Air Defense (DIVAD) gun system. A tracked vehicle on a tank chassis mounting a formidable twin Bofors 40 mm cannon armament, DIVAD would protect U.S. ground forces from any and all air threats. The system drew its name from Sgt. Alvin C. York, the sharpshooter who was one of the most decorated American soldiers of the Great War of 1914-1918.
Promising Portent
It looked good, it sounded good, but in the end it turned out to be a brilliant mistake. The comparable Soviet ZSU-23-4 Shilka system (named for a river) was effective and widely used by Warsaw Pact forces. DIVAD was neither. DIVAD couldn’t do the job it was created to do and became an open-ended drain for tax dollars.
The DIVAD system was to be a replacement for the geriatric M163 Vulcan SPAAG, which was viewed as slow, clunky, vulnerable to standoff weapons, and virtually useless on a modern battlefield where everything happened in large numbers at high speed. DIVAD was expected to track up to 48 aerial objects in rapid motion, determine which were hostile, and shoot at them in priority, firing first at the closest, shooting it down, and proceeding to the next, all in the midst of a fast, mobile air-ground battle. High-tech was very much in favor in the early 1980s when the Reagan administration was building up U.S. forces: The Army planned to buy 618 units, considered enough for effective division air defense on the plains of Europe and in Korea, where massive air-ground battles were a constant possibility.
Because the Pentagon was already heavily invested in its “Big 5” procurement programs (M1 Abrams tank, Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, Black Hawk utility helicopter, and Patriot air defense system), its ground rules for the DIVAD program called for using as much off-the-shelf technology as possible. This meant that the new SPAAG would be built using the chassis of the M48A5 Patton 48-ton medium tank. In the competition for a DIVAD source selection, officials narrowed their prospects down to two designs, one from General Dynamics using twin 35 mm Oerlikon cannon, and the other from Ford Aerospace and Communications Corporation which utilized twin 40 mm L/70 Bofors guns.
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https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/divad-wasnt-a-cure-all-after-all/