https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/towed-artillery-has-reached-end-of-the-effectiveness-army-four-star-declares/
“I personally believe that we have witnessed the end of the effectiveness of towed artillery: The future is not bright for towed artillery,”
Is he right and so whats next for the future of precision fires?
Just like WWII with towed AT guns vs SPGs...
None said that moron. ATGs made up the bulk of tank kills.
Nothing about this is wrong.
Counter battery is far easier than ever. The same can be said of static AA. Mobility is now a necessity not a luxury
>The same can be said of static AA.
Except static AA still has a purpose as city defenses. M51 Skysweepers, updated with OTO 76 STRALES guns, DART ammo and modern sensors, are quite viable defenses against flying moped spam.
M51 would eat Sneed-$136,000 drones alive given they fly like they're anemic Cessnas.
>The Army also still needs a “better armored howitzer” that can possibly hit targets 70km away.
muh long range arty
what does this even mean? Are you saying long range artillery isn't better? It has many obvious advantages
Well look at the Soviet 2B1 Oka a Soviet 420 mm self-propelled heavy artillery. 2B1 is its GRAU designation An experimental model was ready in 1957. Its chassis (Object 273), was designed and built by the Kirov Plant. Its 20 m (66 ft) barrel allowed it to fire 750 kg (1,650 lb) rounds up to 45 km (28 mi). Due to its complexity of loading it had a relatively low rate of fire—one round every five minutes. Field tests showed various drawbacks of the entire design (the recoil was too strong for many components: it damaged drive sprockets, ripped the gear-box away from its mountings, etc.) and the sheer length rendered it incredibly difficult to transport.
It's not towed artillery. It's GUNS GUNS GUNS for threats below roughly 100km away. And it's the US refusing to just do a normal procurement program for a long-range towed gun.
I'll be frickin pissed if they don't adopt the L52 patton in the future. We cant have himars and prsm have all the glory .
forget 100km, i'd go so far as to say that it's not worth using guns past 40km+.
Too damn costly, might as well use missiles/glide bombs at that point.
>artillery shells
>too expensive
one 155m shell costs around 3000$ and the m1156 precision guidance kit costs 13500$ so a total of around 16500$
How Many other PGMs are in this price range?
for comparison, a Lancet drone costs around 35000$ and a JDAM kit plus bomb costs around 30000$
precision artillery up to around 40km is cheaper than any other PGM while also being uninterceptable, with a great fire support response time
2022 army ammunition justification book puts m795 at $800 and PGK at $6000-8000
prices have increased since the ukraine war and I took the highest estimates so nobody can say I was biased towards arty
but yeah your right
Thank you I know I read somewhere that basic US 155mm was $800. I also read the fancy high-tech manufactured ones by Nexter were like $4k a pop.
add the cost of the tube divided by the average number of shots before it gets destroyed and multiplied by the average number of shots required to hit the target compared to the required number of ai powerd drones to do teh same
>add the cost of the tube divided by the average number of shots before it gets destroyed
sadly there is no such statistic that I could find about how many shots on average a SPG fires before being destroyed
but considering that Ukies have claimed to have fired 20k rounds out of a single pzh2000 with only one barrel I will just assume the average is 1k which adds another 7000$ but the other PGMs also have a launch platform that costs a shit load of money so this would roughly equal out
>multiplied by the average number of shots required to hit the target compared to the required number of ai powerd drones to do teh same
I chose the m1156 precision guidance kit for a reason in my post since it will hit within 5m of its target at any range 90% of the time and considering the payload of a 155m shell that's perfectly fine
so this calculation is irrelevant but it seems like you didn't actually know what it fricking was
also
>AI buzzword up to 40km range
lmao
M109A5-A7 (M84 barrel) - 2.5k rounds
M777 (M776 barrel) - 3k EFC rounds, M203A1 charge
Source: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA370772.pdf
Pzh 2000 - 4.5k rounds
>Suicide drones
Competetive in price and more accurate, but smaller charge, slow to get to target and vulnerable to EW.
>bombs
Orders of magnitude more expensive once you take cost of flight hours and maintenance into account.
>missile artillery
Better range, bigger boom, more expensive, less magazine depth, larger logistical footprint.
For the foreseeable future tube artillery will have it's place.
It's not trying to acvurise them that's the huge cost, it's trying to push their range beyond 40km.
You may as well just use rockets past a certain point, because you'll need extra propellant power anyway, and the acceleration profile of a shell is such that you need to ruggedise whatever electronics you try to cram into it much more than you would need a rocket. Of course the drawback of rockets is that while everyone has a 155 these days, not everyone has a missile launcher.
I'm pretty sure there are also some rule wrangling reasons.
>m1156 precision guidance kit
PGKs kinda suck. Xcals are great, but the PGK fuses are both barely more accurate than well-directed dumbfire 795s and (this is simply anecdotal experience) can't handle being fired at charges past 4. They break.
>PGKs kinda suck. Xcals are great, but the PGK fuses are both barely more accurate than well-directed dumbfire 795s
I've heard that a few times before. Does this apply to the newer revisions of the PGK as well?
Couldn't tell you. Only ever get about five at a time, if that, in training.
>all weather
>rounds on deck
>simple logistics
The USMC reconsidered the artillery downsize plan within FD2030 after seeing how effective M777A2s were in Ukraine.
useless without shells
Towed artillery still has the advantage of weighing less and having better strategic mobility
thats true. if you want to put them up on a mountain they can be chopperd in where self proppelled units cant drive
Why not place a 105mm gun on a JLTV?
Algeria built a cheap home-made Soviet 100-mm MT-12 towed anti-tank gun mounted on a Mercedes-Benz Zetros 2733A truck
https://en.topwar.ru/119480-alzhir-predstavil-artsistemy-sobstvennoy-razrabotki.html
I must admit, it does look cheap.
105 is dead. Not enough range potential and range is all they seem to care about.
It was moronic anyway. A 58 caliber barrel is the low IQ solution to pushing more velocity and the resulting guns were quite frankly unmanageable for general handling and transportation.
The only real solution is to dust of Gerald Bull's work and make just make more aerodynamic shells if they want more range on conventional tubes. Anything further (RAPs as standard, etc) is trying to shoehorn cannon artillery into being rocket artillery and we all know how well that ends up working out.
>It was moronic anyway. A 58 caliber barrel is the low IQ solution to pushing more velocity and the resulting guns were quite frankly unmanageable for general handling and transportation.
This. it was a brainlet "hurr, make more bigger" attempt to brute-force a solution. The fundamental issue is that there are hard limits on how much shit you can add to the bucket. You can't go over 25 liters chamber volume (pressure/barrel wear issues), you can't go over ~53 calibers barrel length (handling/transportation issues, as you noted), you can't use RAP as gen-purp (really shit per-round economics).
The only real path ahead is cumulative evolutionary improvements. Better propellants, better shell aero (I'd say base-bleed as standard could work, since it's considerably cheaper than full-on RAP), better barrel geometry (maybe gain-twist poly rifling?) for reduced wear, that sort of thing.
>base-bleed as standard
Already a thing with the M795s. It's what pushed the max range on dumbfire from 18k to 24.5k without going into the super overpressure charges.
>It was moronic anyway. A 58 caliber barrel is the low IQ solution to pushing more velocity and the resulting guns were quite frankly unmanageable for general handling and transportation.
ERCA was supposed to shoot VLD projectiles too.
Its not just barrel length for range its many things at once: VLD projectile, barrel length, larger chamber volume, supercharge (unitary charge with optimized burn curve instead of several modules)
All true
>"The lack of very heavy artillery such as the siege weapons of World War I and II means that strongly constructed fortification will have to be reduced by air attacks. And this can be an advantage for a force which can provide adequate air defense over its fortifications. Hardened air defense in prepared fortications which can reduce the accuracy of air attacks would reduce the need for air superiority by the defender."
>"Obviously fortifications can not make up for surrendering the air completely to the enemy, but with fixed permanent fortifications, which employ available technology appropriately. it is possible to offset an attackers air force with hardened air defense sites. This must be possible or the Navy's aircraft carriers will not survive the next war."
Welp the Army cancelled the ERCA 2 weeks ago, saying they want to look at existing tech to get at those ranges. M1299 they had in prototype passed the test but they didn’t like the barrel wear. This is sort of idiotic because no matter what you need a certain amount of energy to push a certain mass to a certain range and more energy = more wear. I wonder if that’s just an excuse to budget cut while not wanting to make it sound like that they’re too poor to afford it.
>Welp the Army cancelled the ERCA 2 weeks ago,
>make Crusader 20 years ago, it does everything but cancel it because we only fight insurgency now and everything needs be to LIGHTWEIGHT and be deployable within 24 hours (to 19 years long insurgency war)
>make LIGHTWEIGHT SPG in FCS program, cancel it because all money went to 24 hours (19 years) insurgency war
>Russians are invading, quick do something! Order most powerful 155mm ever... cancel it because it burns barrels (cancel instead of toning down charge a little)
Well after billions spend look like America stuck with outdated M109 forever
Army procurement is massively moronic and has a boner for old shit please understand.
Are the 109s really that outdated? I saw a video recently of Ukrainian crews talking about operating the 109L and the 109A6. They seemed to love them.
The M109 is the single oldest family of SPG still in service in NATO. It's had a lot of upgrades but upgrades tend to add up to an overweight amalgamation of separate systems that only kinda work together in the long term. Eventually it starts to make more sense to start from scratch and integrate all those tacked-on features into the base unit so you can make room for the next series of tacked-on upgrades you haven't thought of yet.
Speaking of arty, why aren't they building firebases in Ukraine?
>the frontlines aren't moving
>both sides lack air superiority
>scared of drones? just use SPAAGs
>scared of missiles? pussy
Counterfire's a b***h. Stay mobile, stay hidden.
They had counter arty and firebases back in Nam you know
Russia still has big ass missiles and stationary targets are something they can actually hit sometimes.
They can hit a stationary base with enough HE to level it, they can't hit a truck.
>ERCA cancelled
>railguns cancelled
>SLRC cancelled
long-range guns are just not worth it anymore. Even Excalibur with it's dinky 25 mile range is just too expensive compared to PGMs.
I'd even go so far as to say that gun-based artillery and SPGs aren't worth it anymore.
Nah guns still have their place. The problem is trying to make howitzers do rocket things gets really expensive really fast. Likewise trying to make rockets do howitzer things gets really expensive really fast. But rockets are flashy and get all the media attention despite their drawbacks.
A very very funny joke.
things will forever be towed
This. Trying to argue that artillery must always be self propelled is like arguing that every soldier should drive a tank. Hypothetically that'd be very useful, but realistically that'd be moronic.
The big difference is a tank can't capture a building while the only thing towed arty can do that SPGs can't is be light enough for chopper airlifts.
One can be solved by engineering, the other can't.
>the inherent tradeoff of weight will just be "solved by engineering"
Opinions on this thing?
60 Caliber Barrel
around 75km effective range with current Based Bleed or rocket-assisted munitions and a total max range of 83km
considering the US achieved better performance with a 58 caliber barrel probably means that Rheinmetall decided not to overstress the shit out of its guns
the gun doesn't actually extend past the Trucks cab but that also comes with all the negatives of being a truck
forgot picrel
Sorry, but the war in Ukraine has proven tracks
.
The most successful ranged precision weapon of the war for them has been HIMARS which lacks tracks. Speed on roads and less maintenance has been valuable. On the other hand for guns which need to be a lot closer to their targets and more in the mix nearer the front lines I can see tracks being a better choice.
this can also be mounted on boxer and tracked vehicles. probably the best right now.
Artillery is at a crossroads with traditional tubes vs rockets / missiles. On the one hand they want to be light, air-mobile, and capable of rapid and sustained fire. On the other hand they also really want to reach out and touch the enemy at much greater distance than what was once normal. The massive proliferation of rocket artillery has become a primary target for what an artillery battalion really wants to strike at (in addition to other things). There’s rocket artillery for that — BUT it’s not optimal because are a lot slower to deploy, have a heavier logistics / cost and so don’t have the sustainment or rapidity of tube artillery. So they want to have tubes that will deal with medium-range rockets. That’s probably not possible without sacrificing something unbearable like dealing with the giant barrel which has to be lugged around and replaced all the time with the ERCA. There’s new propellants but those will have the same wear issue because no matter what the energy to throw a 155mm 60-80km has to be used up in the barrel shooting it. Then there’s adding propulsion to the shell — then it’s basically a missile and no longer makes. Only if you MUST have tubes handle those ranges for some reason and can’t bring up your own rockets / missiles do powered shells become something desirable but it’ll always just be inferior to a missile. There’s base-bleed tech which has been around for ages, but that’s just for improving drag and only has a minor impact on range. There’s rocket-assisted shells which improve range but not tremendously as you can only fit so much of a rocket into a shell. That’s really all there is to it. It could very well be that there’s no alternative to rockets and everyone will just have to suck it up and accept that. Maybe just give up on the 25-40km gun altogether and go all-in to rockets. Maybe short range fire should just be left to mortars and rockets deal with everything else.
good. now give them to the cmp patriots need them just in time for civil war 2
>50 years after counter battery radar became common people finally realized staying where you shot from is bad
No shit, we have seen all kinds of things called obsolete by morons in the last 2 years but this is a rare case where it's actually true.
Sure you can use they against insurgents that don't have arty but against a semi-competent military with fast air and arty you aren't going to live long.
just outrange them and all you have to worry about are their longest range missiles and stuff that are in short supply and set up a lot of static positions and they can't hit most of them
Just put them on a truck
Implessive
>Is he right?
No, increase volume of fire
>What's next for precision fire?
Nothing, it's a meme, increase volume of fire
WW1 pilled and maxxed
Over-the-top boys
>Towed artillery is at its end
it's artillery in general so it's better to have a fast moving platform for dedicated tasks
Since the M1299 was recently cancelled, I hope the US Army just adopts the M109-52, L/52 gun from the PzH 2000 mounted on the Paladin.
It's the smart choice, which is why they won't do it.
I don't understand the US Army. The L/52 barrel has become the de facto standard in pretty much every other military across the world (which uses the NATO 155 mm caliber), yet they still keep those antiquated L/39s around. Why? Are they really so unwilling to melt down the L/39s and reforge them into L/52s?
no difference when there's no shells
It's the NIH-syndrome. You can observe it in every ARG thread.
It's part NIH, but the US wants to leapfrog ahead, while the US arty branch is emotionally attached to tubes in a way they aren't to rockets.
The logical answer would be using rockets to leap ahead while maintaining boring parity with 155s.
>Since the M1299 was recently cancelled
Again? How many self-propelled howitzer programs have they cancelled by now?
Crusader
NLOS-C
ERCA
Probably some other program.
you cant just have precision artillery and you cant not have precision artillery
Missiles, shells, towed and sp or armored, long and short barreled, we need them all.
They should send M198 howitzers to Ukraine.
Hear me out: 155mm towed artillery mounted upside down in an AC-130
Two, even.
meanwhile, in Ukraine towed artillery can be camouflaged to become invisible and cope-netted to become immune to Lancets and FPVs, because Russian counter-battery is shit.
what the frick would a four star know about how wars are fought
>muh counter battery
can't you just spread out your artillery pieces everywhere? Its trivial to get 3000 or so towed artillery pieces and they dont need to be in the same spot to hit the same target and even a few hitting an area in a tactical fire support strike is effective at a local level
Is 3000 towed pieces more or less expensive than the 30,000 shells it would take to blow them all up?
The machine gun will render war obsolete just two more weeks guys
> General James "Mary" Rainey called out his throbbing desire to build and field autonomous, robotic cannons.
So, not something that exists and you can use now, but another Army PowerPoint Project to get cancelled after wasting years and billions.
JFC not again.