The PLAGF need better howitzers. The PCL-181,171,161, and 09 are way out of date and way too slow to do shoot and scoot reliably.
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- Thread starter Jeff Head
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lol, those are 2 years old replacing towed howitzers, wtf are you talking about?
Talking about the designs, not the age. They are still not fully automated and require the crew to leave the vehicle to deploy them, load them etc. This takes enough time to risk counter battery fire. Compared to other designs by far poorer states, these lack greatly in deployment speed and automation.
Fully automated truck based SPHs are usually a fair bit heavier and less mobile, not to mention more expensive, than semi automatic truck SPHs.
To be honest the PCL-181/161/171 are all fairly well optimized designs for their specific mission, weight and price profile.
If anything, fully automated truck based SPHs that do not require any crew to facilitate reloading are rather few and far between. Archer is the most well known of them, and other systems like RCH-155 do exist. But equipping a military the size of the PLA with those kind of systems is unrealistic.
They are expensive for Europeans because they don't produce them in large numbers and they love complicating things, like the Archer extends the barrel and a double door that closes once the barrel is retracted. That system is great but can be made simpler and cheaper and can be made to go faster, too. All the PLA had to do was take the turret of the PLZ-05 and place it on a truck. This would have made for a design that shares almost all its parts with other products, introducing next to no new complexities to the supply chain and cutting development costs greatly. It would also have reduced training cost and time, and the number of the crew would have been reduced, and most importantly, it would have greatly increased the survivability due to two factors, one being the crew still inside an armoured platform protecting them from many variants of loitering munition drones and shrapnel, and the second factor being that they can leave before counter battery arrives. Then theres the element of deterrence and sales through prestige. Developing high end designs tends to attract global respect and increase sales.
The PLA is not rich enough to go for an all "fully automatic SPH" fleet while retaining the orbat size of SPH that they want, or without having to significantly cut back on either other domains of the PLAGF or other PLA services, or without increasing the budget. But if you're going to increase the budget to go for an all "fully automatic SPH" fleet, then that money is probably better spent elsewhere.
Of course, the weight (and thus mobility) consequences of putting an automated turret on a truck compared to the current semi-automatic mechanism also is very important.
We know that an automated 155mm turret for PCL-181 was seriously investigated, but ultimately they chose to go for the semi-automatic version, and in context of PLA needs at the scale of the PLA, I think it makes sense even if on a one to one basis a semi-automatic reloading system is "less capable". Because you pay for the additional capability, it is not free.
Frankly, the fact that the PLA is currently on track to replace virtually all of their existing towed 122mm and 155mm/152mm howitzers with truck mounted self propelled fleets that have automated gun laying, and semi-automatic reloading, at the sheer scale of the PLA, is already able to outstrip what virtually every other nation has in terms of large calibre and medium calibre tube self propelled mobile artillery.
As for "global respect" -- in case you haven't noticed, it is not uncommon for the PLA to produce and export some ground systems that are more capable than domestic counterparts.
They might do it for export reasons, but the whole point of the wheeled howitzers is to add more firepower cheaply while other artillery/air engages in duels. They're not meant to be fired at in a high pace duel, and there's no enemy (maybe only US, but if we're fighting on land at Japan or Ryukyu, that implies significant air superiority has already been attained) that can pose those threats. The only other one would be Russia, but they're not a potential enemy anymore and won't be for decades.
A platform should not be engineered to do everything, unless it's somehow cost effective to do so. Having the largest all automatic wheeled howitzer fleet or something doesn't add much power to the army, which already has overwhelming strength in pure land conflicts. The money from that can give better return when invested on drones, the air force, missiles etc. which also increases the situational awareness of the army.
Then they should give up a destroyer or even the 004 for this and jamming resistant guided artillery munitions. Artillery superiority should be a priority for the PLA, they aren't as blessed geographically as the US is for example. Look I'm not saying they should throw away the PCL series in the dumpster, but simply deploying the howitzers we are discussing in conjunction with the PCL series, can make life much more difficult for hostile counter battery fire.
I haven't been able to find any videos demonstrating the shoot and scoot capabilities of the PCL series. If they don't have this capability to a certain degree, then they arent that much of an improvement over towed howitzers and all the upgrade does is simplify transportation and redeployment speeds.
Thats the opposite of what I described as this is equipment they themselves don't operate.
India is kind of hostile here and there, and from what I'm seeing in the Russia Ukraine war, artillery is king when fighting a land connected neighbour
India is one such opponent where air/high end artillery would be more than sufficient to heavily suppress, with wheeled howitzer only providing cheap volume fire.
There are so many more higher yield ways of attaining fires superiority than making all of their self propelled artillery have automatic reloading.
This sounds like a you problem. They are not going show a full demonstration of a shoot and scoot fire mission just because we want to see it, in the same way that they aren't going to show us a full video of J-20 firing a volley of its BVR missiles just because we want to see it.
Directly from official PLA media, one of the earliest stated advantages of PCL-181 over its towed predecessors is the speed of employment, carrying out a fire mission, and moving on. And it's even been translated to English, in a manner which isn't how I would select the specific diction but it conveys the point rather obviously.
If you are unable to even do some basic research into the rate of fire, mobility, fire direction, of the 155mm PCL-181, and 122mm PCL-161/171 series relative to towed howitzers, then maybe you shouldn't be posting before doing your own investigations.
Yes, because what you described is rare for the PLAGF.
There is a reason why the PLAGF doesn't typically buy the most high end of potential capabilities and platforms or variants that exist, because the PLAGF have such a scale that they have to balance additional capabilities versus what is good enough to find the right balance between cost and diminishing returns, in context of their overall strategic military modernization opportunity costs.
I think you have allowed observation of events in Ukraine shape your perceptions of how a modern war (including a modern land war) would be fought by China, including if they were fighting in an India scenario.
Furthermore, even if you do want to focus on the importance of artillery in a high altitude conflict in the PLA's western strategic direction, mobility and mitigating weight are vital because you actually need the ability to get your assets into theater and employ them to begin with.
In reality, in a hypothetical conflict against India, having massive superiority in tube artillery is not going to be the decisive factor -- air power/air interdiction, MLRS and SRBMs will be the fires of importance --- and even then, if one wants to look at the balance of tube artillery, in terms of actual gun platforms and SPH the PLA's orbat and distribution of brigade and corps level artillery is among the most capable in the world, especially if one looks at the networking and organic ISR they have access to.
Among the various elements of ground relevant fires, and even in terms of tube based artillery, obsessing over an automatic reload capability really isn't that decisive.