Reading History and Propaganda at the moment. Not what I want to see on this thread.
Please move it on and back to actual topic - Thank you Gents....
Please move it on and back to actual topic - Thank you Gents....
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
There's a reason other countries don't use artillery of this size anymore and it's precisely because of that. Back in the days when you're just doing artillery duel you're fine with 200mm+ guns because you outrage the other guy with 155mm and you're safe. Now with all sort of things in the air that might find you and drop a munition on your head it's too unwieldy.
Batteries don't really move away out of counterbattery fire taking everything with them.
They normally(if the situation isn't fluid) have several positions (main, reserve, fake) and move in and out (hiding somewhere around).
If some ready racks will get blown up - well, bad luck, key part is that guns and crews aren't there anymore.
The more modern guns are much less tied to those fixed positions (because they can make topographic and level adjustments on their own), but Malkas aren't among those guns, and even then it's still far easier and more convenient to work with actual established positions.
2s7 doesn't differ in this regard from modern 45-55t 6" self-propelled howitzers. They're more or less equally capable of escaping the return fire.
At least if they had ammo truck beside them... they could leave with their ammo and things would be sorted up a bit... we have seen left over pile-up of lesser caliber than these monster guns. It look like they don't have dedicated ammo carriers, they just dump their ammo from a standard truck on the ground.
The Russian 203mm guns were primarily designed to outrage american m110 and m107 while firing tactical nuclear shells, engaging in conventional artillery duels with fire and counter fire was a very secondary design consideration,
My wife was an artillery sergeant and most of their ammo was in their ammo truck so they can leave with them in small amount of time. It was field guns so they needed truck for moving the guns tho.
Malkas don't have ammor reserves ( 2 shots I think) but are self moving ,if your emplacement get screwed and you don't have ammo carriers, you become useless pretty fast...
Thanks Richard for the precision on the 203mm !
Ammo truck is just that much of ammo in an intermediate vehicle, actual ammo stores don't move with the battery (tend to be hidden somewhere within a few hundred or thousand meters - it's them we see sometimes making big shiny booms in some nameless forests).
But if there are some ready shots already offloaded from the truck but not yet fired, and the battery has to move - those will be just left behind. So are all the fired cases.
p.s. Malka carries 8, but it's still more convenient to offload them from the vehicle first than load them directly. This isn't a 6" gun, shells are beyond that a single human can carry.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
This is a good video on air defence implications from the Ukrainian war, although there is a fair bit on the war itself as well. A few highlights:
- The Russians are using significant recon UAVs as spotters for their artillery when making advances to clear the Ukrainians out of their defensive positions, with the above being a good example.
This is proving to be increasingly useful in massively increasing the effectiveness of artillery, but is slow. Again as the above video illustrates from the low return on dumb artillery shells against mobile enemy forces who can get out of the way quickly.
- counter UAV is a massive issue for both sides. As a drone sitting 5km in front of your position is able to effectively direct artillery while being essentially invulnerable to all but Tor and above grade SAMs.
Using a Tor missile on a commercial drone is bad maths even with the Tor being a really cheap missile, and the launch vehicle only carries 8 missiles with reloading being a pain. So you can easily exhaust the missile supply even where the enemy has Tor coverage and temporarily open up the airspace.
[My own conjecture, but I wonder if this is something the Ukrainians can or are exploiting to help facilitate their TB2 strikes. Fly a bunch of DJIs obnoxiously around Russian forward positions to alert them to the presence of drones to have them waste their Tor missiles on the DJIs and then hit them with the TB2 before they can reload.]
- the Russians really dropped the ball when it came to their field support capabilities for their amour. Back in the day, the Soviet army was the gold standard of battlefield support and logistics, with specialist support vehicles for pretty much every purpose.
The Americans modelled their idealised motorised battalions on the Soviets, and the Chinese modelled their modernisation on the American idealised formation (which they later discovered the Americans didn’t even actually manage to achieve themselves).
When the Chinese exercised with the Russians and they suffered minor calamities, the Chinese just assumed the Russians didn’t bother to bring their logistic support elements to the exercises and that they will do much better in real combat. But now it looks like they have actually really allowed all that capacity to atrophy to nothing, which is a great shame and problem, as amply demonstrated in Ukraine.
Russia could look online to buy some anti-drone equipment and distribute them in the front lines. They are quite cheap imo
For the idealized C3 position, it's not that different.
Depending on how long you expect to fire from the position, you would set up a little tent and unload all the ammo from the MLVW.
In between fire missions, you can chillax in the under the ammo tent on a hot day.
However, I don't ever remember setting up that tent except during Qualification training.
Typical regular field ex, since the #1's will have an idea of the mission, just unload what is needed right away (i.e. 20 HE, 10 smoke, etc.) and the rest is left in the truck.
MLVW was not big, and you have to carry the crew and supplies as well, so actual ammo capacity is quite limited. Ammo carrier like additional MLVW or even HL would be expected. In Reserves training, dedicated ammo carrier is extremely rare because of lack of qualified drivers for trucks.