2S22 Bohdana Ukrainian 155mm wheeled self-propelled howitzer

At said numbers, it probably will stay ahead for some time to come. That being said, donated western howitzers may run out at current pace of destruction. Bohdana production was probably devised as means of long term replacement for those.
 
According to Oryx, Ukraine had 244 tube artillery pieces hit or otherwise lost in the past 365 days. So this production pace more than makes up for likely losses. In other words, no further artillery donations by third party countries may be needed. Even if real losses are 50% greater than those listed on Oryx, that's still 366 pieces, compared to 432 produced annually.
 
united24media.com

Ukrainian Military Receives First Bohdana-B 155mm Towed Howitzer for Cost-Effective Firepower

The first Bohdana-B howitzer joins the Ukrainian military, providing a robust and cost-conscious solution to enhance battlefield artillery effectiveness.
united24media.com united24media.com
en.defence-ua.com

Ukrainian Bohdana-B Howitzer Proves as Effective as its Mobile Version and is Set to Receive New Carriage in 2025 | Defense Express

The 2H22-BH Bohdana-B howitzer will receive a new Ukrainian-made carriage by late 2025, as demand for towed howitzers continues to grow due to their increased survivability
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONPsZwQkKjw

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho_f72iVB5U
 
Scott Kenny said:
Towed howitzer more survivable? Say what?
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The towed units can be dug in and camouflaged easier than the larger SP guns. Movement is no longer a good mechanism for survival in a high UAV concentration environment.
 
I wonder how many have been lost? LostArmour says 37 are visually confirmed to be destroyed, but that was up to the 21st of July.
 
Josh_TN said:
The towed units can be dug in and camouflaged easier than the larger SP guns. Movement is no longer a good mechanism for survival in a high UAV concentration environment.
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Which says to me that Russia is not doing counterbattery worth a damn.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Towed howitzer more survivable? Say what?
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Dramatically easier to dig in and cover with camo, anti- Lancet/FPV netting, no fuel or ammo onboard to detonate, no wheel marks or tracks to firing positions leading direct to the dugout, fewer trackable logistic missions to sites to refuel....

Towed arty is incredibly hard to actually knock out without a direct hit by a large enough shell (just look at Dien Bien Phu for an example). Ukrainian drone operators repeatedly say this, unless they can get an entire position burnt out, ammo detonation directly on the position (not adjacent) or an FPV with shaped charge to hit the breach and be confirmed as such they don't regard it as a kill.

Even Pzh2000 has gone underground now....the few times you see video of Ukrainian SPG's firing from non-prepared positions it tends to be almost exclusively Archer, Caesar or Bohdana wheeled SPG's...even then most of the Bohdana vids you see now are from closed positions.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Towed howitzer more survivable? Say what?
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@Kat Tsun predicted this for ages and the forum were dunking on them. Oh how the tables has changed! Le.
It's primarily a doctrine thing. You see a gun on wheelies you're moving it around, shoot n scoot, but with no armour comes no protection. What's the first layer of the survivability onion? Don't get detected. A truck moving is displacing the landscape, it will be seen. A camo-ed, dug in howitzer, OTOH, kinda hard to get flipped like that, and with WLR/acoustics alerts the crew is simply moving into the trenches, wait it out, replace the gun, rinse and repeat. And good gun crews are hard to come by,
 
Scott Kenny said:
Towed howitzer more survivable? Say what?
Click to expand...

The "SPGs are automatically better" comes from the paradigm of the 1980s Fuldapocalypse where:

  1. It's going to be short, fast-moving, and confused anyway
  2. Traditional counterbattery was (considered) more of a threat than air power.

Even without drones, any kind of prolonged dug-in battle will favor something more easily fortifiable and concealable.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Towed howitzer more survivable? Say what?
Click to expand...

It's not very complicated, but unless you've used a drone to watch traffic or seen how armored vehicles look at altitude, it's kind of hard to imagine when comparing protection factors alone.

Self-propelled guns are easier to detect because they move, because they're literally shaped unnaturally (they are boxes), and because they generate dust trails. Movement catches the eye, even relatively bad daytime cameras of drones can spot moving vehicles at ranges of several miles, and then you drop weapons on them.

Self-propelled guns are easier to kill because, even though some of them are armored (Pzh 2000), the vast majority of global howitzer inventory is protected against .30" caliber ball ammunition. This approximates a 155mm shell burst at about 100 meters. Modern howitzers and their ammunition, by which I mean anything from the past 50 years so pretty much every howitzer in the world, has an accuracy of about 30-50 meters. That armor is a liability because it's getting punched through.

The other issue is that for any given angle, there is a higher chance of something being hit on a self-propelled gun, because it presents a larger area target than the "stick and ball" shaped towed gun. While a towed gun might be hit in the breech or the barrel, these are much smaller area targets than "side turret" or "top hull", so the chance of a randomly distributed cloud of fragments hitting them is very low at any point.

The addition of drones and self guiding weapons hasn't helped the calculus, but this was visible in 1973, when the self-propelled pieces were dying at higher rates than towed pieces. At the time it was thought that was because the self-propelled pieces were being put in heavier actions, but in reality, it seems to simply be because the self propelled gun is relatively poorly protected compared to the threat, is harder to hide from the enemy, and is easier to hit when targeted.

You can dig a really big hole and have the turret poking out, but this is no different to a towed gun and in exposed area it is still worse. Towed guns also, at a distance when wearing camouflage netting, are incredibly difficult to distinguish from "fallen tree with moss/lichen web" on it until they fire. Put a powder charge on the end of an actual felled tree, fell a few more around it, and you have something the Soviets were doing in 1944 to bamboozle Nazi flash spotters in Fieseler Storches. It still works today.

The antidote to towed gunnery might be terminally guided Excaliburs that hit anything that looks like a revetment from above. At which point artillery will be very sad because their only effective response will be long-range missiles like GMLRS-ER.
 
The enduring genuine advantages of SPGs are actually offensive instead of defensive in nature (ie being able to use heavier mechanisms for ROF/accuracy/etc... right there along with the classical keep up with advancing troops).
 
I'd say it would be more accurate to title that kind of warfighting as "maneuver warfare". You need something armoured and speedy to cross barraging fires, land in the operating zone and start mag-dumping for hours on end all while switching positions with the aux ammo carrier in tow until the chi cools down and infantry starts pouring in. You're seeing this reflected in Ukr v Ru where armour buildup is predisposed to a regional breakthrough as most of the time it's just arty and drone duels and cannon fodders riding bikes into dead zone, radioing back important info for planners and hoping they get a merciful death.
 
Coiler said:
The enduring genuine advantages of SPGs are actually offensive instead of defensive in nature (ie being able to use heavier mechanisms for ROF/accuracy/etc... right there along with the classical keep up with advancing troops).
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A towed gun needing to be put into action is not a significant barrier because guns don't move much these days.

The 20th century conceptualization of "fast mechanized offensive" is dead and will likely never return outside of police forces or Third World conflicts similar to Iran-Iraq. Offensive operations are back to where they were in WW1: highly capable weapons with few countermeasures have reduced combat to a static engagement. When the offensive returns, it will not be on the back of the self propelled armored gun, because the artillery isn't what is making Ukraine a static fight.

Towed guns will continue to be preferred because they're easier to hide from self-hunting weapons like assault drones, and assault drones will continue to make armored vehicle lives miserable, because they can kill anything vaguely boxy and dust kicking within about 20 kilometers of the FEBA.

By the time we make tanks capable of surviving the drone swarms we'll only be able to afford a couple battalions of them.
 
I disagree the current situation is entirely UAV driven. This particular conflict has become static at least partially because both sides have accurate quick response artillery assets that prevent the concentration of mobile forces in the first place. The result is that small vehicle formations can be worked over by successive waves of FPVs. But the Russians did have some success with large scale vehicle assaults in the period when the U.S. interrupted the supply of 155mm - they simply gathered enough AFVs that the drones could not engage them all with sufficient speed and ignored the casualties.

I also think the FPV/loitering munition threat will be greatly diminished fairly soon as the world adapts to this new reality. IMOit is a question of detection at scale, with engagement being a not particularly difficult fire solution for time fused autocannon fire if an accurate course track can be generated.

Finally, both artillery and loitering munitions depend on persistent, prolific ISR. For both sides, these are predominantly class 2 UAVs that need wireless connectivity and modest altitude to find targets (eg the ubiquitous Orlan 10). Engaging this target set successfully en mass would do far more to neutralize the threat of both FPVs and artillery than attacking the guns or munitions themselves, and the need to transmit data and operate at altitude are vulnerabilities that loitering munitions likely outgrow within a couple years.
 
It's also because there's so few actual maneuver forces compared to fire assets (whatever kind) in Ukraine. To the point where I get the feeling of "if not FPVs, it'd be something else stopping these understrength [compared to paper] company attacks".
 
Coiler said:
It's also because there's so few actual maneuver forces compared to fire assets (whatever kind) in Ukraine. To the point where I get the feeling of "if not FPVs, it'd be something else stopping these understrength [compared to paper] company attacks".
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As I said, there were massed Russian attacks about a year ago with modest effectiveness. And Ukraine was capable of invading Kursk, whatever one thinks about the practicality of doing so. I think both sides still have mobile formations they could call on - ZSU still has one armored brigade. But they would probably be observed and chopped to pieces by artillery even before the first FPVs arrived.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Self-propelled guns are easier to kill because, even though some of them are armored (Pzh 2000), the vast majority of global howitzer inventory is protected against .30" caliber ball ammunition. This approximates a 155mm shell burst at about 100 meters. Modern howitzers and their ammunition, by which I mean anything from the past 50 years so pretty much every howitzer in the world, has an accuracy of about 30-50 meters. That armor is a liability because it's getting punched through.
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So the new standard for SPG armoring is .50cal, 14.5mm, or really 155mm shell splinters at 10m.
 
Scott Kenny said:
So the new standard for SPG armoring is .50cal, 14.5mm, or really 155mm shell splinters at 10m.
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Which is what ESPAWS and Crusader was aiming for... If the FCS MGV howitzer variant can also use the super armour kit that's another contender.
 
Scott Kenny said:
So the new standard for SPG armoring is .50cal, 14.5mm, or really 155mm shell splinters at 10m.
Click to expand...
To be exact, it should've been for any maneuver SPG since the end of cold war - arguably, per Ukraine experience, it's far more important than /52 gun. Heavy splinter/light HEAT 360deg, and roof HEAT protection.

Now this is not nearly enough - basic life assumption that any spg out in the open is dealing with loitering munitions and marauding/ambush drones. Moreover, they're by default more vulnerable than towed guns.
Which leads pretty much to booker level protection requirements and local APS/soft kill at the very least. And yes, much like direct fire vehicles, SPGs badly need safe propellant storage.

But all this is maneuver spg with ambitions for armored maneuver ("btg"). Wheeled howis live quite well as is... with caveat that they aren't working as howitzers, they're functioning as old good cannons. And for them reach of the gun is absolutely a priority.
 
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Ainen said:
To be exact, it should've been for any maneuver SPG since the end of cold war - arguably, per Ukraine experience, it's far more important than /52 gun. Heavy splinter/light HEAT 360deg, and roof HEAT protection.
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I wouldn't dismiss the 52 cal (and above) argument so easily. The 52 cal guns (with the exception of Krab due to its deployment) have proven to be more survivable. That, of course, may be a time limited statement as FPV and winged drones push further out, but in general having longer range is crucial, and of course enemy counter battery fire that can do damage tends to be more inaccurate the farther it has to fire (with the exception of PGM's like GMLRS). For example I expect if M777 had a 52 cal barrel ER variant its losses would have been a lot lower...guess we'll find out with the Bohdana towed guns with their 52 cal barrels.
 
Scott Kenny said:
So the new standard for SPG armoring is .50cal, 14.5mm, or really 155mm shell splinters at 10m.
Click to expand...

That is not going to be practical. In fact if anything, SP artillery seems to be going the other way: lighter and on wheels, to simply leave the AO altogether as quickly and efficiently as possible.
 

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