[DRG]

brummbaer said:
There are few informations about this system on the net:
http://www.forecastinternational.com.../or/vo0080.htm
and a discussion on an italian forum
http://pub10.bravenet.com/forum/795583276/show/920704
The first states that 10 FIROS have been supplied to Italian Army from 1984 on, and further 20 FIROS 25.
I tend to not believe this, since no evidence can be found about the former in service, while about the latter the FIROS 30 (not 25) was tested by Italian Army, it seems between 1989 and 1990. It was initially planned to equip three groups with it, then two and shortly after it was abandoned. Number of testing systems are either 2 supplied by the manifacturing company, and 20 (!!) which should be the said two plus a Group of 18. But I never found no evidence of such Group when I was compiling the Italian OoB 1989, though the system was showed to the public on the Republic Day parade in 1989 or 1990. My suspect is that it is company propaganda to "push" the system on the market, and that the news still survives here and there.

What I have been able to find ( and I'm still looking when I'm not looking for other things ) is it seems this system was evaluated in the early 80's ( maybe 1980 but it seems no earlier than that ) and 1 group of 22 was formed but once the cold war ended the cost of these things could not be justified so the project was abandoned. That's as far as I've traced. What does seem clear is there were SOME floating around italy during the 80's and had some conflict erupted during that time it seems likely they would have been used

Don