This is not unreasonable to want:
The Marine Corps is on the hunt for an uber-compact rocket launcher system capable of raining down suppressive fire on the enemy, then flying away in a V-22 Osprey or CH-53K King Stallion.
As the Corps prepares for a future fight in which units operate with greater independence and at greater distances apart, portability and power are at a premium. ...
“If we can get a self-contained vehicle that can fire rockets, a box of rockets on a truck that fits in the back of a tiltrotor or a ’53-K, that’s what we’re after,” [MG Coffman] said.
But I think that wanting all of that on a vehicle that drives up a ramp to fit in a V-22 or CH-53K is unreasonable.
The Marines have lots of trucks, big and small. Why not simply use those trucks as the base for a box of rockets? That way when the box runs out you just put another box of rockets on the truck bed rather than reloading a box that is part of a unitary box-truck system.
Follow the example of the mortar in a box. That is in a 20-foot long shipping container.
It sounds like that is considered too big for the Marines. The basic HIMARS pod must be considered too big, too.
But what about using the smaller containers that the Pods company uses (16, 12, and 7 feet long) for storage and moving?
Move the boxes around by air to either sit on the ground in a fire base or on the back of a truck for mobile operations.
There is no need to get overly complicated by unifying it all on a compact vehicle able to drive up a ramp.
And I'm always in favor of more weapons and systems in boxes that can be mounted on a modularized auxiliary cruiser.
But I've long been a fan of rockets in boxes, as I mentioned in this 2002 article (see page 29).
Although back then before even rockets were precision, I wanted guided missiles for beyond-line-of sight firing and for anti-tank work. And I thought of them as 2-missile modules that could either be mounted on a turret or used on the ground as part of a networked force. Now even smaller rockets are guided, so we've got that now.
