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
      0·
      2 months ago

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

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOP
          0·
          2 months 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
            0·
            2 months 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·
              2 months 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·
                2 months 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
              1·
              2 months 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