“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.
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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.
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“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
Interesting, the article somehow presents this as something new and groundbreaking, but wheeled self-propelled howitzer was introduced by Czechoslovakia and South Africa already in the 80’s. And indeed Czech and Slovak howitzers derived from the original DANA are used by AFU since at least 2022.
While I think the Bohdana is an effective weapons system and the engineers who made it happen deserve to be proud, I am not arguing this actually anything new, actually I think in a way it is kind of bitterly funny how not new this is.
The question one has to ask, since before even the beginning of the Ukraine war whether it was wise not to arm Ukraine with 155mm artillery systems and ammunition?
I won’t pretend to know Cold War politics that well, but I know this much, even after it became clear Russia wasn’t playing around with a limited military incursion into Ukraine nobody in the west seemed to want to talk about supplying 155mm artillery at all… which I guess I give a pass to the brainwormed techpress that can only pay attention to drones and AI and will predictably look right past the simple truth any artillery operator could tell you… yes all of those things are great especially as a companion to artillery… but really nobody was talking about it even military types and it is just odd to me.
I know this sounds like I am exaggerating, but until a couple of months ago Ukraine had no capacity to threaten across a large area large 155mm barrages that could come from positions that will be abandoned by the time Russian forces catch up to respond.
Sure Russia has kamikaze drones… but once a truck gets onto a road it can travel fast enough to easily start to make it a headache to guess where it disappeared to by the time Russian assets come screeching over the airspace above.
Again the operative question isn’t why is the 155mm Bohdana so effective in Ukraine, it is why did nobody in the west supply the Ukranian military with modern artillery and artillery stocks before? I don’t really know the answer to that question but it is the one in my mind here.
Though I will say I think the Bohdana’s design is near perfectly suited to the war it is hoping to help end (the compromises chosen seeming worth it), particularly the cab armored against light drone fpv attacks. One can imagine the natural counter to a truck based artillery system is a sedan 2 miles away with a couple of fpv drone operators who ambush the artillery as soon as it starts booming and gives away it’s precise location, that armored cab is critical to surviving small ambushes and giving the crew time for nearby forces to clear the area. It is less about whether the gun gets damaged on the artillery and more that the artillery crew can leave that situation more confident that at least if they get attacked their vehicle provides some practical safety.
For the artillery crew, they understand of course that artillery is about how the area of circles grows greatly with each increase of radius… and that any ambush like that will be rare if they continue to move randomly throughout the backline of the battlespace, but again when it comes down to that 5% of the time when friendly forces thought they had fully cleared and area and they hadn’t… the target on the minds of the enemy WILL be the artillery crew AND THEN the artillery piece.
You just aren’t going to get people to man an artillery cannon anymore without an armored cab or deep trench system nearby, I think that much is clear and it is good that the Bohdana’s designers understood that before most of the rest of the world seems to have.
I think the unwillingness to switch Ukraine to 155mm caliber prior to 2022 has less to do with the west trying to not provoke russia and more with Ukraine’s desire to use existing stocks and tooling in domestic ammo factories. They themselves ordered DANA M2 in 152mm caliber in 2020. Only after the invasion they realized they will need much more ammo then they can produce domestically and west started providing 155mm systems. Already in 2022 Ukraine has been given German PzH 2000, Slovak Zuzana 2, French Caesar and eventually Swedish Archer. The ammo problem simply took time to solve, but it seems European productions is ramping up and the Czech initiative is still ongoing.
The need for armoured cabin is now well understood and I would say that Swedish and Czech solutions go even further with autoloaders and targeting computers reducing the crew needed to as little as 2 and removing the need for the crew to leave the cabin during a fire mission.
I think many of us in western democracies have not studied Russian history well enough to understand that the recent behaviour is not new at all, and it was always going to come to this.
I think many of us really believed that a Russia that seems to be playing the game our way would not simply revert to bloody-handed tyranny against the world and all reason.
An America that really understood Russian culture would never have signed the Budapest Memo, imo. Call me Russophobic if you want, but they’re a grim and cynical folk and it’s been that way long enough to confirm the diagnosis.
When France turned into a republic it had been a monarchy for more than a millenium, yet it did happen. Historical precedent can only tell you so much.
What you’re saying plays right into Russian state propaganda that says their culture requires a strong leader and dedication to a common propose as opposed to Western individualism. In truth, Russian liberalization is possible, but it will be much harder if the west does not extend their hand.
That wasn’t my intention - I don’t know what is possible for Russia in the future, only that they don’t show any signs that they’re trying to change.
Obviously it takes two to tango and the US has not done enough to smooth things over. The world is too imperfect for tidy solutions or easy answers. All I’m saying here is that nobody who knows Russia is raising their eyebrows at the way they’re acting.
Ukraine, it is why did nobody in the west supply the Ukranian military with modern artillery and artillery stocks before?
Probably because EU trusted us Finns to keep the eastern border with our artillery, and we couldn’t give it to Ukraine because we need it to keep Russia away.
Very different landscapes though, 75% of Finland is covered by forests, whereas I think it’s less so for Ukraine. Ya, 16.7%. There’s pros and cons to the differences.
Yeah, the problem with Ukraine is you can slam armored columns through the landscape a lot easier.
As soon as things start to slow down in tougher terrain like you are describing in Finland artillery just becomes even more decisive because the coordinated movements of concentrated mechanized forces becomes more and more bottlenecked to having to pass through very obvious and predictable artillery targets you can precompute if you want.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5bhRe5oVBbY&pp=0gcJCb4JAYcqIYzv
This video just came out of Ukraine and demonstrates an example of how artillery becomes even more powerful with bottlenecks, a signficant vigorous Russian armored assault here is snagged up by fierce resistance… in the form of mines, dragons teeth but then the critical devastating weapons system is the… dirt trench.
The dirt trench makes the Russian vehicles sit there for just long enough to figure out what to do for artillery to fire a salvo and rain down on their vulnerable, static position. Once the artillery locks onto the position pushing that avenue of assault becomes essentially a lost cause though the Russians seem to have a hard time realizing that in this case. The motorbikes may be a brutal way to attempt to gamble being able to pass through the artillery zone fast enough not to die to shrapnel, and if you don’t value your life that may work for awhile…but there is a reason armored vehicles aren’t going anywhere, assaulting somebody with artillery and artillery spotters like this is a daunting prospect and you better be ready to do so or you will get obliterated.
Without the artillery that dirt trench was just an annoying somewhat confusing delay, with the artillery it spelled the end of the entire operation and worse the entire existence of the people involved in this folly of an assault. That is how artillery changes things.
French artillery engineers had a simple idea: Take a big gun, mount it on a truck, and you’ve got self-propelled artillery at relatively little cost.
Horses have been moving artillery pieces around basically since mobile cannons were developed.
Yes and the point of the article is that being able to drive the cannon itself is better than towing it.
They reinvented the artillery tank
Other point of the article is that drones are still gonna blow up a tank so moving fast is better than armor.
Horses have been moving artillery pieces around basically since mobile cannons were developed.
Now that is a thing horses would do isn’t it.
Shells win battles. Troops win wars
Germans called infantry the queen of all arms, soviets called artillery the god of war. We know who won.
Never let a good line get in the way of statistics
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1342260/wwii-mobilization-by-country/
The Red Army was double the Germans, who had to fight on two fronts. Troops win wars. Artillery wins battles.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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…
Is there any war where a numerically inferior army has won?
wait what?
Has there ever been a war where the army with the fewer troops has won the war?
This honestly feels like a trick question is all
This statistic alone doesn’t tell you anything because according to a Land forces production overview table here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
USSR had Germany beaten in artillery pieces production 5:1.
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.
