“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
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…
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
Nope, you have no clue how much more powerful artillery is than this. Throw all of your numbers away they are totally off, instead think about someone trying to convince you to charge an entrenched enemy and then think about someone trying to convince you to charge an entrenched enemy when you know as soon as you do artillery is going to turn your universe into a nightmare.
Before, it was you against them, guns vs guns. Now it is the sky that is against you, waiting to drop the artillery shell that will end your life. Maddeningly it is totally random, there isn’t any pride to have in warrior spirit to dying to an enemy soldiers weapon in mid combat during a melee… just an artillery shell erasing you from the earth because your number came up and it was your time.
There is no fighting that force, there is only a period of delusion a society can sustain before it reckons with that.
How many more men do you think you would need to overturn a 10:1 artillery advantage then?
I would not want to see it, that is for sure, that is one of the worst questions one could imagine desiring to answer…
…if you really want to know… look at some of the battles between colonizing european forces and much much much much larger and more powerful indigenous forces that didn’t know how badly cannons dismantle your previous idea of war…
It isn’t pretty history and it resulted in the wrong people winning, so let’s not forget the lessons of history ok?
To put this another way, while the US military has quite extensive artillery capability and experience, one obvious innovation that changed artillery forever was the helicopter both as a spotting device and as a delivery device for CAS and troops. The introduction of the helicopter to warfare has totally and irrevocably changed warfare, especially along the periphery and backline of conflicts where the necessary infrastructure of your war machine lays exposed.
Note then, that figures in the US army made sure to name US military helicopters after indigenous tribes from the US, and it wasn’t just to be cute or honor history, it was to remind white europeans that the US army had to learn terrible lessons about how they did not understand war as deeply as some of the native tribes of the so called United States do.
I think US army leadership understood at some level that fascist europeans intuitively understand how to use a tank, but will never understand what someone can do with artillery or a helicopter (preferably both, talking to one another) if they are willing to abandon the rigid thinking of a fascist and use the tool to its full capacity to surprise and deny. Ukraine has proven this again in their own way through the use of UAVs/drones and history repeats and echos itself.
A pair of Apache helicopters can delete an entire column of mindless troops armed to the teeth riding in disgusting visions of armored oppression in a span of time it really isn’t that fun to quantify because what is the point, all of that violence shouldn’t have needed to be used in the first place and now we are in a reality where it has shrugs.