I see another WoT enthusiast, yes artillery is borderline OP,
The topdown view and laser accuracy is nowadays achievable with aerial surveillance and guided shells.
And no vehicle survives a 152mm HE direct hit
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The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
The topdown view and laser accuracy is nowadays achievable with aerial surveillance and guided shells.
And no vehicle survives a 152mm HE direct hit
yeah, I agree, air force is one of the counters to artillery, if you have the planes
what I meant is that artillery has kinda lost some of its importance, at least in NATO nations, while it's still a perfectly viable system if you know how to use it and train extensively with it; it seems to me that NATO nations tend to favour other expensive assets like f-35s, carriers, subs and stuff like that; maybe they think that artillery is obsolete or too cumbersome on the battlefield, idk
heck, I think I read that an american retired officer disparaged russian creeping barrage tactics, calling them ww1 warfare; sure, it might be, but this shows how used NATO officers are to having overwhelming air superiority that they find that tactic obsolete
I used to think like that too since I live in a NATO nation, but this conflict made me rethink this stuff. For example, I never really understood why south korea is so afraid of war with north korea, since their technological superiority is obvious, but now I understand. it's not fun having your capital obliterated in a couple of hours
going forward, if I were the head of a procurement department I'd buy thousands of french cesars, or foster the development of a homegrown option, that stuff seems flexible enough to let artillery shoot & scoot at a fraction of the cost of a pzh-2000
I wonder if the PLA will need to reconsider some of its options going forward; they seem to have ditched soviet tactics with the modern reforms in favour of NATO-style ones, but they still develop flexible stuff like the PCL-181
It has a lot to do with money and lobby and always pushing for the fancy new thing.
Artillery is less fashionable than big ticket items like the F-35, which you can bloat and help pay for a few political careers in the process.
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There's more to it than that. It's basically the result of the 1990s-2000s move away from the Cold War "heavy" component and towards the French model of armed forces serving basically as expeditionary forces only. Everything has to be lighter, wheeled, air mobile, and artillery generally isn't something one would describe as particularly nimble. The last big artillery project would be what? Pzh 2000? That's like 25-30 years ago, and even that (until recently) Germans were trying to offload theirs wherever they could. The only army in NATO which was intensly pursuing expanding its artillery component was the Polish Army, as a direct response to Russia, and even that decision came under criticism of "don't you have better things to spend your money on".
The reason Ukraine can't count on a ton of SPGs rolling over the border as reinforcements, no matter how much they whine, is that... there aren't any to spare. Unless the US starts sending their M109s en masse, though I doubt they'd be terribly eager to part with theirs, and even then, I'm willing to bet that those have been ridden hard already.
Artillery barrels don't have infinite life... Most of the reserves and aged systems need new barrels to be effective. US will not spend token on old artillery systems that have been mothballed so to be effective they have to send their active ones or refurbishes the old ones before sending. Old system that are not used anymore will take even more time because stock of new barrels are probablty exhausted and tools to make them mothballed or sold to scrap.
China is neither a Soviet style army nor a modern western style army. PLA never received either Anglo western or Soviet military training outside maintenance. Most PLA senior staff were ex KMT leftists. Many were Whampoa graduates ie Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, etc. or other KMT graduates like Liu Bocheng. much of the junior officers and soldiers were KMT defectors.
Whampoa doctrine was indeed heavily Soviet based but filtered through a Chinese lens early on and pre dating deep battle doctrine, and combined with the other major influences in Imperial Japan and Imperial Germany. Other troops were trained by surrendered Imperial Japanese.
After the civil war Soviets never sent doctrinal advisors to China. Indeed China was the one sending out doctrinal advisors in Chinese doctrine to Vietnam. Meanwhile North Korea got Russian doctrinal advisors. Hence why Vietnam has a very different military, doctrine and outcome vs North Korea.
The work of Russian special forces in Ukraine was caught on video. The purpose of the special forces was to find a mobile Ukrainian crew with a mortar. According to the results of the battle, two servicemen of Ukraine were destroyed and one was taken prisoner, the wounded was provided with medical assistance.
Russian troops have discovered the first abandoned examples of new Western weapons in Ukraine. The first caterpillar armored vehicle YPR-765 delivered earlier from Holland to Ukraine was found abandoned. The reason why the crew abandoned the YPR-765 armored personnel carrier is not clear, visually the equipment is intact. It is possible that the armored vehicle broke down, since the deliveries were not of new models, but of equipment from storage, or the crew abandoned it to avoid death. Armored vehicle YPR-765 is equipped with aluminum armor, which provides protection against small arms. The 267 horsepower Detroit Diesel Allison 6V-53T engine provides a top speed of 61 kilometers per hour and a range of 490 kilometers.
Russian troops have discovered the first abandoned examples of new Western weapons in Ukraine. The first caterpillar armored vehicle YPR-765 delivered earlier from Holland to Ukraine was found abandoned. The reason why the crew abandoned the YPR-765 armored personnel carrier is not clear, visually the equipment is intact. It is possible that the armored vehicle broke down, since the deliveries were not of new models, but of equipment from storage, or the crew abandoned it to avoid death. Armored vehicle YPR-765 is equipped with aluminum armor, which provides protection against small arms. The 267 horsepower Detroit Diesel Allison 6V-53T engine provides a top speed of 61 kilometers per hour and a range of 490 kilometers.
Artillery is definitely not obsolete when one goes against an opponent that lacks aerial dominance or over which one is aerially dominant, but especially whose ground to air defenses are decent, as is the case of this war of Russia against Ukraine. Russia does possess air dominance, but it respectful of Ukrainian aerial defences. It also definitely has a very clear advantage in terms of its artillery firepower over Ukraine.
I have read and heard dismissive talk about Russia's grinding method of attritional warfare, deriding it in being slow, even if steady in producing results, with critics saying that Russia fights that way because it does not have the sophisticated means of technology to fight other ways, as in combining heavy aerial bombardment with so-called surgical air strikes against enemy clusters and fortifications, followed by rapid assaults of armour and infantry.
"It has been one [two, three] months and Russia hasn't taken the whole of Ukraine [Donbass]. Look how quickly the United States seized Baghdad..." that is of the comparative comments that is often made. Another one is "it took more than two months for Russia to take Mariupol which is right to its border...". Those commenting are almost all ignorant of the fact that it took 5 months from the start of the Second Chechen War for the Russians to take Grozny, which is also very close to other parts of Russia. But the end result was that Russia did decisively win that phase of the Chechen War.
Nah, the PLA is good and the PLAGF have always prioritized indirect fires (artillery, rockets etc.) due to various reasons (one used to be that they couldn't really produce good enough tanks back in the 70s-80s, although nowadays they aren't very heavily prioritizing tanks).
Besides that there's also the PLARF for more firepower lol.
Supposed video of Cossack ambushing Ukrainian troops on patrol (probably)
Also wanna add something, does Russia has any plans to standardized their artillery arsenal with only requiring a single calibre of shell instead of multitude of calibre?
Also wanna add something, does Russia has any plans to standardized their artillery arsenal with only requiring a single calibre of shell instead of multitude of calibre?
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