Artillery goes trucking to survive drones swarming the battlefield
www.defensenews.com
The war in Ukraine has put long-range fires front and center at the Eurosatory defense show that kicks off in Paris on June 17.

“The audacity of the wheeled cannon is the maximum efficiency,” Beaudouin told Defense News. “You sacrifice nothing in terms of firepower, rate of fire, precision and range, and you’ve got a truck, armored all the same, but which is able to be nimble, which is very stealthy.”

Beaudouin was part of the French Army’s decision to buy an upgraded Caesar, so he might be suspected of bias toward wheels. But at least nine other countries, including the U.K. and Germany, decided to invest in self-propelled wheeled howitzers in the past year. Analysts said the Ukrainian experience is driving military planners’ interest.

…

Interest in wheeled self-propelled artillery flows from a desire for a “much higher degree of mobility and survivability” than towed guns, said Daniels. Military staff who see wheels as an attractive option over tracks “often define survivability in a broader way, as opposed to seeing it purely from the physical protection offered by onboard armor,” he added.

…

“Ukrainian use of shoot-and-scoot artillery fire suggests that the future lies in highly mobile artillery, be they tracked or wheeled,” Jones said.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14513149/Russia-nightmare-Ukraine-best-artillery-guns.html

    • Vikthor@lemmy.world
      3·
      13 days ago

      Germans called infantry the queen of all arms, soviets called artillery the god of war. We know who won.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
          1·
          12 days ago

          No… having more countries as allies against a weaker foe wins wars?

          If I had to choose between being allies with someone with a bunch of artillery shells and cannons and someone with lots of troops I would pick the person with the artillery every single damn time if raw power was all I cared about.

          easy

          Especially if those are just conscripts or general military grunts without much combat training, than I will definitely take the artillery instead.

          Also don’t shit on the Russians by making it seem like they won WW2 on blind numbers of troops alone, if you think Russians didn’t at least used to intimately understand the role of artillery in mechanized warfare you are fooling yourself. The entire Russian mechanized blitz is built around there being MLRS trucks hanging around that are waiting for your forces to amasse a resistance to the Russian armored column and take a stand… at which point you and the 1km grid around you no longer exists anymore and the Russian column continues.

          No, artillery is the most important part of mechanized warfare, this isn’t up for debate.

          • Olap@lemmy.world
            1·
            12 days ago

            I think you need to go back and revisit to Sun Tzu. Without troops no war can be won. Now I’m not saying Artillery isn’t important, but Artillery alone will not win a war. Is there any war where a numerically inferior army has won? And I don’t mean individual battles, of which there are most certainly examples, a full campaign. The closest I can find is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War which it should be noted the Red Army got want it fought for, just at enourmous cost

            • cabb@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              2·
              8 days ago

              Franco-Prussian war had 2 million on French side and 1.5 million on Prussian side and resulted in an overwhelming Prussian victory per Wikipedia

              • Olap@lemmy.world
                1·
                7 days ago

                Excellent TIL. A really interesting figure on wikipedia also says the Prussians had a bigger actual peak mobilised figure which tells the tale of why artillery is so effective too. They massacred the French and so they had to mobilise more people

            • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
              2·
              12 days ago

              The British Major General Henry Hugh Tudor pioneered armour and artillery cooperation at the breakthrough Battle of Cambrai. The improvements in providing and using data for non-standard conditions (propellant temperature, muzzle velocity, wind, air temperature, and barometric pressure) were developed by the major combatants throughout the war and enabled effective predicted fire.[56] The effectiveness of this was demonstrated by the British in 1917 (at Cambrai) and by Germany the following year (Operation Michael).

              Major General J.B.A. Bailey, British Army (retired) wrote:

              From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, artillery is judged to have accounted for perhaps 50% of battlefield casualties. In the sixty years preceding 1914, this figure was probably as low as 10 percent. The remaining 90 percent fell to small arms, whose range and accuracy had come to rival those of artillery. … [By WWI] The British Royal Artillery, at over one million men, grew to be larger than the Royal Navy. Bellamy (1986), pp. 1–7, cites the percentage of casualties caused by artillery in various theaters since 1914: in the First World War, 45 percent of Russian casualties and 58 percent of British casualties on the Western Front; in the Second World War, 75 percent of British casualties in North Africa and 51 percent of Soviet casualties (61 percent in 1945) and 70 percent of German casualties on the Eastern Front; and in the Korean War, 60 percent of US casualties, including those inflicted by mortars.[57]

              — J.B.A. Bailey (2004). Field artillery and firepower

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery

              Today in Ukraine, artillery is responsible for approximately 80 percent of the casualties on both sides. Put in raw numbers, that means that around 400,000 troops on the Ukrainian and Russian sides have been killed or injured by artillery fire. (The latest intelligence estimates put the number of Russian losses to about 320,000 and the Ukrainian losses to around 200,000, for a total of more than 500,000.)

              There is a constant artillery duel going on across the contact line, with both sides using counter-artillery radars and techniques to track and take out the other side’s artillery pieces. But this can be a costly game in terms of munitions.

              https://www.sandboxx.us/news/artillery-can-win-or-lose-the-war-for-ukraine/

              You clearly do not understand war lol

              • Olap@lemmy.world
                1·
                12 days ago

                And yet, did the weight of men not decide the day? I fully appreciate the roll of artillery and think Starmer’s latest investment frankly baffling when shell production is the one thing that could actually help Ukraine too. But artillery don’t win wars, men do

                • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
                  1·
                  12 days ago

                  No, you can have all the men in the world and if you don’t have artillery you are fucked, that is my point.

                  I am not saying people aren’t the essential element but they are the essential element because they can learn how to operate artillery which is NOT a lowskill profession like operating a crossbow or something.

                  You can have 100s of infantry and give me 40 infantry and a 155mm battery on call to defend the position, and by the end of the battle even if you do manage to take the position, none of your soldiers are going to want to keep fighting.

                  Oh also the trucks you used to drive all those men up to the staging area for the assault? Those are gone too because they were spotted by a UAV that transferred the coordinates to the 155mm artillery :P

                  …so now you have taken the position with an overwhelming wave of bodies, most of which are lying in terrible piles on the ground… and now if your remaining soldiers move from the position at all they will be similarly obliterated and even if they could their transportation was also obliterated. Congratulations you have won!

                  When news articles talk about the Ukraine war having devolved into small groups of entrenched infantry engaging in dispersed conflicts, that is because that is what happens when both sides have access to decisive artillery, the previous state of the war was an anomaly because Ukraine was conspiciously never supplied with enough big artillery to defend itself from an armored invasion force. Yes the use of drones change warfare but much of the innovation in Ukraine’s use of drones was to emulate the role of artillery because they didn’t have enough artillery… and now Ukraine has both…

                  • Olap@lemmy.world
                    1·
                    12 days ago

                    All good arguments for artillery win battles. I’m glad you agree. Would a side without any artillery win a war against those without? Well, you could ask that about air support, or intelligence, or tanks, or machine guns, or UAVs now. And the answer would be no to all of them. I’m not saying artillery isn’t essential either.

                    How about instead, what would happen in a war of 2 million men with 1k artillery pieces vs 1 million men with 10k artillery pieces? I’m pretty sure the 2m men would still manage to over-run the 1m, artillery be damned. Costs would be high, but 2:1 men on the battlefield would negate a 10:1 artillery advantage I’m pretty sure

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
      31·
      13 days ago

      no, artillery shells win battles and artillery shells win wars, this is something everything artillery expert knows, I don’t need to explain this…

      If you insist on inserting CAS for artillery when you have air superiority sure but… the principle is the same.