"Matt Wiser" wrote in message
...
As the air war over NVN heated up in 1966-67, why didn't the Navy adopt
the SUU-23 gun pod
on its Phantoms? The AF's 366th TFW certainly did, and got several MiG
kills as a result of
the pods' usage. What was the reason? NAVAIR not approve or what? Navy F-4
crews were
screaming for a gun all through the war, but had to wait until the F-14
arrived with its internal
Vulcan. It's been said in several books that if VF-96's Phantoms had guns
on 10 May 72,
there would've been several more MiG kills that day. Any ex-F-4 drivers
able to clear this up?

Wasn't this posted before? The gun pod was notoriously unreliable in the
shipboard environment. The aircraft lacked a lead-computing gunsight. If
the F-4J had an internal gun and an appropriate sight, and if the aviators
trained for it, the additional kills might have occurred.

USMC shore based F-4's did carry the pod for CAS, etc.

R / John