BAE Systems M777 Portee System

Source:
http://www.military-today.com/artillery/m777_portee.htm

The M777 Portee was developed as a private venture by BAE Systems to meet a British Army requirement for LIMAWS (G) or Lightweight Mobile Artillery Weapon System - Gun programme. Another contender for the LIMAWS (G) programme was the Giat Industries Caesar 155-mm / L52 artillery system based on a 6x6 truck chassis.

The first prototype of the M777 Portee was completed in 2005. It is an intermediate design between towed and truck-mounted howitzers. UK requirement was for 30 - 40 artillery systems of this class. Unfortunately the LIMAWS (G) programme was canceled in 2007 due to funding problems. The British Army will continue to rely on AS90 self-propelled howitzers and light guns until these will be replaced by 2023.

The M777 Portee is based on a revolutionary M777 155-mm / L39 lightweight howitzer, adopted by the US Army and US Marine Corps. Maximum range of fire is 30 km with rocket-assisted projectile. This howitzer also fires Excalibur precision guided extended range projectiles with a maximum range of 40 km. Intense rate of fire is 5 rounds per minute, sustained - 2 rounds per minute.

The M777 Portee was extensively evaluated by the UK MoD and over 350 rounds were fired in test conditions.

The howitzer is partially unloaded from the vehicle before firing. A total of 20 rounds of ammunition are carried. The advantage of such design is that the M777 Portee is more mobile than ordinary towed howitzers. Also when the howitzer is loaded onto the vehicle it can go over terrain, that would trap other towed howitzers. Unique feature of the M777 Portee is that artillery system can be easily removed or attached to the chassis. With the howitzer removed the vehicle acts as an artillery tractor and can carry additional ammunition instead of artillery system. In the towing mode the M777 Portee can carry a total of 71 rounds.

Cab of the M777 Portee provides light armor protection and NBC protection for the crew. It accommodates the driver plus gun crew.

The M777 Portee is mounted on the chassis of the Supacat HMT 800 8x6 high mobility truck. Vehicle can be carried by the C-130 transport aircraft. Thus it can be carried underslung by two CH-47 Chinook helicopters.
 
looks interesting, but needs a higher degree of automation, it takes a "bit of time" to deploy and reload.

Why? A self propelled gun has been less survivable than a towed gun in most XX wars, despite similar intensities of action. The Supacat truck portee is a nice combination of not needing to be limbered into position and have similar survival characteristics to a towed gun.
 
looks interesting, but needs a higher degree of automation, it takes a "bit of time" to deploy and reload.

Why? A self propelled gun has been less survivable than a towed gun in most XX wars, despite similar intensities of action. The Supacat truck portee is a nice combination of not needing to be limbered into position and have similar survival characteristics to a towed gun.
G6 RHINO.jpg
I was comparing it to this, the G6 Rhino, it has a high mobility, rapid reload and firing timing, with the protection of the crew, which doesn't need to exit the vehicle to deploy the gun.
 
Needing to exit the vehicle to man the gun is a virtue. It encourages a entrenchment mentality among the crew that increases survivability of the gun in the face of counter-fire.

The reason self propelled guns suffer higher statistical losses than towed guns despite similar combat intensities is probably because towed guns are inherently less likely to be destroyed (smaller top-down surface are and fewer systems to be damaged) and crews will generally entrench themselves in revetments when firing, which makes them harder than any amount of steel plate carried by a vehicle.

This is true for both the dreaded shoot/scoot and conventional type artillery practice where you dig a big revetment around a gun though, so it probably has to do with the cross-section of the gun/mover and the density of systems to be busted versus the amount of fire. Cet par, I guess a self propelled gun will have a track broke, or a optical device or hydraulic line severed, while a towed gun will just get a chip in a limber or a flat tire, simply because the self propelled piece is much bigger and has more actually important things to break.

The worst you can say about the LIMAWS(G)/M777 Portee is that the prime mover might get KO'ed, but it's a 6x6 Supacat, so yes it might get blown up. It's also not near the cannon when firing and in a separate revetment with the other primes so that's less likely and if it does go kaboom then any truck can tow the M777.

G6 is like the worst of both worlds: it's wheeled and thus lightly armored and thus highly vulnerable to counter-fire, but the crew isn't in any rush to entrench themselves for protection, and its only advantage is it had a long range for the 1980's. Nowadays it's just kinda whatever and lame.
 
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Needing to exit the vehicle to man the gun is a virtue. It encourages a entrenchment mentality among the crew that increases survivability of the gun in the face of counter-fire.

The reason self propelled guns suffer higher statistical losses than towed guns despite similar combat intensities is probably because towed guns are inherently less likely to be destroyed (smaller top-down surface are and fewer systems to be damaged) and crews will generally entrench themselves in revetments when firing, which makes them harder than any amount of steel plate carried by a vehicle.

This is true for both the dreaded shoot/scoot and conventional type artillery practice where you dig a big revetment around a gun though, so it probably has to do with the cross-section of the gun/mover and the density of systems to be busted versus the amount of fire. Cet par, I guess a self propelled gun will have a track broke, or a optical device or hydraulic line severed, while a towed gun will just get a chip in a limber or a flat tire, simply because the self propelled piece is much bigger and has more actually important things to break.

The worst you can say about the LIMAWS(G)/M777 Portee is that the prime mover might get KO'ed, but it's a 6x6 Supacat, so yes it might get blown up. It's also not near the cannon when firing and in a separate revetment with the other primes so that's less likely and if it does go kaboom then any truck can tow the M777.

G6 is like the worst of both worlds: it's wheeled and thus lightly armored and thus highly vulnerable to counter-fire, but the crew isn't in any rush to entrench themselves for protection, and its only advantage is it had a long range for the 1980's. Nowadays it's just kinda whatever and lame.
so what you are saying is that, if you compare the G6 Rhino to the m777, the m777 is better?? sorry but i don't agree with that, if the G6 was such a bad vehicle why did it served with the South African forces for so long??
 
so what you are saying is that, if you compare the G6 Rhino to the m777, the m777 is better?? sorry but i don't agree with that,

You don't have to "agree" with it, it's literally something that was observed in pretty much every major war of the 20th century...

"(...)

b. Towed artillery losses to hostile artillery (counterbattery) appear in general to very directly with battle intensity (as measured by percent personnel casualties per day), at a rate somewhat less than half of the percent personnel losses for units of army strength or greater; this is a straight-line relationship, or close to it; the stronger or more effective the hostile artillery is, the steeper the slope of the curve;

c. Towed artillery losses to all hostile anti-artillery means appears in general to vary directly with battle intensity at a rate about two-thirds of the-percent personnel losses for units of army strength or greater; the curve rises slightly more rapidly in high intensity combat than in normal or low-intensity combat; the stronger or more effective the hostile anti-artillery means (primarily air and counter-battery), the steeper the slope of the curve;

d. Self-propelled artillery losses appear to be generally consistent with towed losses, but at rates at least twice as great in comparison to battle intensity.

(...)"


Specific to Israeli observations in the 1973 war: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/055.pdf

For some reason, self propelled guns suffer twice as much gun casualties as towed guns in similar combat intensities. As I said, it's probably because their bigger and have more stuff to break on them, at its simplest measurement. Most self propelled guns are barely armored against machine gun fire, G6 included, so they are just going to utterly wilt when exposed to any substantial counter battery engagement.

The ones that aren't poorly protected are ones literally bigger and heavier than main battle tanks, which are things like XM2001 or Sholef or Pzh 2000. Few of those exist compared to tin cans like M109 or 2S1 though. Even Pzh 2000 is a bit weedy and probably too weakly protected though.

if the G6 was such a bad vehicle why did it served with the South African forces for so long??

...you mean aside from South Africa having no notable victories under its belt? Their most notable combat actions are ones they lost utterly when Angola became a People's Republic and Namibia broke free of their little empire, after all. Not exactly war winners, South Africa is, so they're probably making mistakes somewhere, if you're using them as a yardstick.

Anyway, G6 is bad because it suffers from the problems of all Cold War era self propelled howitzers: weak armor and vulnerable mobility. It masked this by having a huge range that put it out of reach of all but the most serious muscular systems of the day like BM-30, and never facing an opponent who knew how to conduct counter-battery, like Zhukov's 1st Ukrainian Front or Schwarzkopf's CENTCOM.

The South Africans just bought a really big breech gun firing ballistically optimized shells based on a Canadian design and stuck it into a wheeled chassis because their entire combat history has been slapping around poorly armed guerrillas and their similarly inexperienced and weakly supported Cuban advisors with mobile battalion-strength battlegroups. Battlegroups that would be ruthlessly annihilated in any other context by something like a US armored division or a Soviet Combined Arms Army.

No one should look to inexperienced Third World armies for significant lessons in what makes sense in a general aspect viable for combat, otherwise we might start thinking the Swedes had it right with their turretless tank, or that wheeled vehicles are superior to tracked ones in tactical mobility because some Cuban T-54s got stuck in a wadi once, or whatever.

The simple relationship is that most SP guns are too poorly protected to go about surviving artillery duels and towed guns are much harder to knock out. This might have changed recently but I doubt it. It rather suggests that every SP gun is in drastic need of tank-like protection (or greater!) and mobility to function as intended on a battlefield, at least to mitigate losses to merely main battle tank levels rather than twice the towed gun's.

The alternative, which is putting guns on trucks and towing them, is much preferable and cheaper, which is why modern howitzers generally tend towards being lighter and easier to move around by hand than older ones, and why mobile howitzers of the recent decades barring a couple exceptions have generally been mobilized on truck chassis. Archer, CAESAR, Type 19 SPH, ATMOS 2000, various PCL guns, etc.

Armoring a gun, at least anything less than a couple inches (nowadays, perhaps closer to 4-5 inches) of steel and maybe some composite applique on top of that, is more trouble than it's worth it seems. The general concept of guns on a truck is more economically viable and combat survivable than armored guns that can maybe stop a gnat's sneeze but not a shell impact 10 feet away.

It's only counter-intuitive until you realize "armored" in the sense of most howitzers generally means "152-mm shell burst fragments at 50 meters" instead of "152-mm shell on top of the turret", with the latter being a rather more realistic threat than the former. But that's because no one wants to make a 80 tons SP howitzer, although I think Crusader managed to reduce its armored volume sufficiently with a pair of automatic loaders (bags and projectiles) to be "merely" 65 tons with superior-to Pzh 2000 protection.
 
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Did the cursader have better protection then the PzH? I thought they had about the same protection. Also its been only very recently that hitting within 50 meters was a realistic probability, that was very rare before shit like Excalibur became a thing.

There is also a lot of carry picking in that , for example the reasons it gives for greater losses for mobile artillery is the fact the Israelis moved there artillery much ferther forward then a us force would do to the need to take out AA, and

A.Improved artillery counterbattery techniques and resources
B. Improved agcacy of air delivered munitions
c. Increased lethality of modern artillery munitions
D.incressed range of artillery and surface to surface missiles.

Non of which seems to me show that its the armored part that was the issue, especially when it was mostly air and ground attacks that killed the artillery not counter battery.
 
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I don't know if 50 meters is accurate or not. I'm pretty sure good gunners can hit a tank or a foxhole if you have decent position plotting. I was just stating the rough protection of the M109, which was .30 cal AP and 155-mm shell bursts at around 50 meters. Anyway you're arguing against the findings of a Sandia-funded study of the 1973 war lead by Trevor Dupuy, so I can't say I'm hugely surprised.

Suffice to say the only cherry picking is from you, since the study is pretty clear: self propelled units aren't armored enough to survive 1970's levels of firepower. Whether Pzh 2000 or XM2001 are materially armored enough to resist modern levels of firepower is beside the point. They're plainly armored enough to survive the firepower of 1970, and so they would probably survive the counter-battery battles of the Golan Heights much better than M109, which is the point I was making. If that translates to surviving impacts from Copperheads or Daredevils or whatever is for the future to reveal I guess.

Basically, while howitzers have gotten better armored, it isn't clear if they're better armored enough to survive the improvements in gunfire accuracy and lethality of modern conventional munitions. Since 50-ton main battle tanks have some difficulty with this I suspect the answer is no, but...

Naturally, this hypothetical improvement in firepower applies to towed guns as well, but it is always better to lose some limbers and a barrel/breech than to lose all that plus an internal combustion engine, tons of armor plate, and half a dozen gunners. Thus, if artillery has apparently devolved to a Lanchesterian equation, then self propelled guns will just go extinct by vice of being costlier to build and costlier to lose, whereas a towed gun (or a portee) becomes the economically optimal solution.

In the face of overwhelming attack, dispersion wins, and the towed gun disperses the contents of the tightly spaced self-propelled howitzer across a few hundred meters squared of revetments and dugouts, providing greater protection against nearby and direct hits. Now, instead of needing to replace all that complicated and tightly spaced stuff, you can just pull out another towed gun or another 5-ton truck and you're good. Alternatively, the now gunless gunners can be converted to infantry and protect the (-) battery in the security plan. Towed guns win again.

Since we're seeing that happen in real life, perhaps the armies of Israel, France, and Sweden know something Internet laymen don't? Portee trucks aren't that popular, but "self propelled howitzers" are rapidly dropping their armor in favor of using the same truck chassis as the 5-ton utility truck or abouts. I guess self-guiding howitzer munitions with HEAT warheads really will do-in all the Pzh 2000s and XM2001 was a bullet dodged? Who can say.

Do not let the Red Army know that Akatsiya and Gvozdika were mobile mistakes though. I haven't the heart to tell them myself.
 
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The British 105mm light gun has been a survivor because it is easy to move around (a Puma can underslung it and most British Army trucks can tow it).
Cost has prevented the UK from having the excellent M777 but it has also been argued that the Light Gun is easier to deploy and use.
Given the availability of decent trucks to tow them and well trained crews, M777 can move around pretty quickly and are much easier to replace than AS90/PZH2000.
 
The British 105mm light gun has been a survivor because it is easy to move around (a Puma can underslung it and most British Army trucks can tow it).
Cost has prevented the UK from having the excellent M777 but it has also been argued that the Light Gun is easier to deploy and use.
Given the availability of decent trucks to tow them and well trained crews, M777 can move around pretty quickly and are much easier to replace than AS90/PZH2000.
M777 only has a 39 calibre barrel, there's no reason why a new towed gun, liberated from the air mobility requirement, shouldn't have a longer barrel (52 or even 58 calibres long), and hence a longer range.

M777 manages to be the worst of both worlds, the heavy weight of it's ammunition being problematic for mobility, whilst not having the same range as the 52 calibre self-propelled guns.

Something like a towed or porteed KH-2000 or 155 GH 52 APU would be a good idea.
 
To be fair to M777 it was aimed at the airmobile/airborne user.
The UK operated the FH70 155mm gun during the Cold War but it was a bit of an orphan in that it did not fit BAOR armoured divisions (Abbot, then M109 and finally AS90) or the UK based infantry formations (105mm towed).
I think I am right in saying they ended up earmarked to go to Denmark with the UK Mobile Force.
They did not go to the Gulf or Falklands for obvious reasons so were disposed of asap when the Cold War ended.
Ukraine on the other hand might well want a new design (152 or 155mm) to replace its large stocks of towed guns. Sweden and Finland also come to mind.
 
The British 105mm light gun has been a survivor because it is easy to move around (a Puma can underslung it and most British Army trucks can tow it).
Cost has prevented the UK from having the excellent M777 but it has also been argued that the Light Gun is easier to deploy and use.
Given the availability of decent trucks to tow them and well trained crews, M777 can move around pretty quickly and are much easier to replace than AS90/PZH2000.
M777 only has a 39 calibre barrel, there's no reason why a new towed gun, liberated from the air mobility requirement, shouldn't have a longer barrel (52 or even 58 calibres long), and hence a longer range.

M777 manages to be the worst of both worlds, the heavy weight of it's ammunition being problematic for mobility, whilst not having the same range as the 52 calibre self-propelled guns.

Something like a towed or porteed KH-2000 or 155 GH 52 APU would be a good idea.

I disagree that M777 is worse than M119 tbh. M777's L39 manages the same 40 km gunfire range as Crusader's L52, with greater accuracy, using Excalibur rounds, and it's about as easy to move around in the field.

If M777 is bad, then L119 is worse. 105mm is less good than 155mm, both due to the relatively poor nature of the gun (Supercharge to match M777's Zone 3-4? miss me with that barrel wear) fewer ammunition natures. AFAIK there is no equivalent to Excalibur or SADARM in 105mm in production or major stockpiles. They might (actually, certainly) exist in catalogues but that's not important until someone buys 10,000 shells and has them delivered to a warehouse or something.


M777 was perfectly fine in 1982 or whatever when it first showed up in catalogs, because I'm pretty sure Vickers had in mind the M101 six-packs the US Army used to float around Vietnam rather than replacing the M198 in divisional artillery duels.

i.e. Austere use by airmobile forces in support roles from firebases with primarily entrenchments and man-handling being the main form of protection and interaction with the piece. Which is why M777 is so easy to move around by hand.

It's still fine today provided you have good helicopters to deliver ammo (H-47, H-53K) and not wimpy boys like H-1 or whatever.

That said...

M777A2 shoots the same as ERCA. No word on barrel wear though, but long range shooting that doesn't include gliding munitions like Excalibur is gonna demand more barrels delivered. Perhaps fewer rounds is a good thing if only to protect the barrel lives of the guns?

It's also hard to imagine what an APU gives you that sticking the gun on the bed of a truck doesn't. You get slightly more scootability which is more than completely obliterated by the difficulty of airlift. They made sense when guns were heavy as hell back in the 1980's and you needed a H-47 to lift anything, and man handling was almost impossible without half a dozen dudes, but then Vickers made a gun out of titanium that was so well balanced and lightweight a couple dudes could move it around like a 105mm.

IOW at present, 155mm is better than 105mm, but 105mm can be made good by giving it terminally guided rounds and Excalibur-type munitions, but you still eat more barrels with the 105mm than the 155mm due to excessive use of supercharges; and if you can make lightweight guns, which we can these days, then need for an APU evaporates pretty much overnight.

APUs were cool because they could use truck or sedan engines and I guess that would make the foraging for spare parts aspect easier, but that's why most guns on trucks use commercial big rigs I think.

edit: Also LIMAWS(G) aka "M777 Portee" was meant to be air transportable by CH-47 or C-130 or something (I forgot which, I think internal C-130 and slung H-47), so it's not really a ATMOS 2000 either. It's an airmobile gun for paratroopers but with a integrated prime instead of relying on a Humvee.
 
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I was under the impression the the problem with the M777 wasn't the gun itself, but the increased weight of the ammunition created problems from an air mobility point of view.
 
Excalibur reduces ammunition consumption by about an order of magnitude against a known location target, similar to Copperhead. Terminally guided weapons like Copperhead II would allow hitting moving targets with similar accuracy and lethality, but the only moving-target PGM is (was?) the SADARM. Maybe America bought BONUS. These may or may not be effective against roof ERA, but we know that EFPs can be stopped by armor protection (SPz Puma has EFP protection IIRC, as did XM2001) along with ICM bomblets of the 40-60mm class like M85 and M46.

The ammunition is heavy sure, but there isn't much a reason to fire 100 rounds a day, if 10 will do a similar amount of work, and 155mm rounds aren't 10x heavier than 105mm ones, rather it's much closer to 2-3x.

The newest 105mm is the M1130 base bleed HE, which lacks GPS guidance or terminal guidance. IIRC the PGK Increment that was supposed to be able to offer 50 meter/20 km accuracy with the 105mm was paused or something. The Army has only purchased 155mm M1156s, but they may be dual-caliber and just issued to 155mm gunners out of hand, as I don't know what the M1130's fuse well is like.

Other than that, there's no gliding-type munitions. 105mm is pretty weedy as it is and unlikely to support a large payload.

Since there's no Excalibur-type munition, let alone a SADARM or Copperhead, for the M119, the 105mm is consuming more rounds per target. Which means more barrels and general maintenance. Even if the individual ammo loads are smaller, the consumption of miscellaneous equipment probably balances out the payloads lifted.

On the other hand to new Zone 7 charges (for the M119) propellant grains look like jelly candy donuts, and gives the U.S. a supercharge-alike 18 km range with the 105mm like the L119s. Maybe barrel consumption isn't as messy with that as with the L119? I dunno.

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Forbidden apricot jellies.

Either way the main contributor to why M777 is better than M119/L119 is the use of precision munition natures of ammunition. If you had a stable of in-production precision guidance shells, like an Excalibur shell and a STRIX-type anti-moving target round, with a FASCM cargo shell or something, you'd be in a good deal of business of closing the gap and maybe 105mm could eek out the mid-range between 155mm and 120mm. But AFAIK no one has done this yet (yet).

There are certain PGK kits in catalogues that can be used in both 105mm and 155mm (this means the 105mm has a 155mm sized fuse well I think) and obviously people offer these things at trade shows, but AFAIK no one has taken up the deal yet. Most people seem to have either displaced 105mm or treat it less as a howitzer, and more as a mortar, due to its generally sub-20 km range.

PGK wouldn't solve the range issue of lacking a gliding/coasting munition like Excalibur, but it would make 105mm competitive per airlift with Excaliburs by weight at least. So they're still jockeying for position. IMO 105mm of typical variety (L119 or M119 or similar 15-20 km piece) makes sense for a battalion field gun because they're generally in close contact and don't demand massive gun ranges as a result. Stuff like G7 can close the gap in range, but now you have a 4-5 tonne gun that requires half a dozen Joes to man handle due to its limbers and barrel length, and you still don't get the good cargo rounds.

155mm remains caliber king of the division gun park for now.
 
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There are certain PGK kits in catalogues that can be used in both 105mm and 155mm (this means the 105mm has a 155mm sized fuse well I think) and obviously people offer these things at trade shows, but AFAIK no one has taken up the deal yet. Most people seem to have either displaced 105mm or treat it less as a howitzer, and more as a mortar, due to its generally sub-20 km range
The US Army literally just finished feilding the PGK for 155mm few years back.

I know that cause my old unit was the last one to get the upgrades to use the things.

Fuse sizes are the same between the 105 and 155 for logistical reasons.

Basically in both ww2, korea and early nam the supply people kept fucking up and sending 175mm fuse to 105mm guns, 105 to the 203 and 203s to 155 and the like. None of which were compatible with each other at the time. You can see the issue.

Late Nam they fixed that by standardizing on the 175mm size fuses, which was just to big fit in 155 and just too small to fit in 203s. So it was a happy middle ground between the big 3 and the 105 was drag alot cause it was consider cheaper to add it then not. Was an easy fix since it required like 3 tools to be change out at the factories.


Also for survivability.

The US Army consisers the M777 far less survivable than the m109 due to the fact its slower to displace and in general.

Digging in is a death sentence in modern warfare.

There is enough guided and very accurate weapons that digging in is just making you own grave.

No, mobility is life in moderm warfare, as exemplified in Ukraine where the M777s, and towed guns in general, are being hammered to death while the SPG types, M109, pzh2000, CAESARs, Himars, ETC, are just shooting and running like their lifes depend on it.

Which it does.

Modern counterbattery Radar, of the 1990s vintage, can get within 40 meters of a guns location with the first shot it takes.

More shots from the same location just refines that.

All modern guns that been upgrade post 2000 can put a dumb shell in a 20 meter circle the first shot.

Know this cause I was a 13R for 10 years in the US Army.

You shot and dont move?

You dead within within 30 seconds or less from counterfire.

But in some Nineteen century, SHUT. Those studys are from 30 years ago at best, the Militarys the world over have done new ones and found mobility is life on the 2000s battlefield.

Which been proven hard in Ukraine again by both sides. There is thousand of videos of either side Arty firing, and within a minute counterfire is landing with 5meters.s with follow ups getting closer.

Thats before you get into the thousand and one drones buzzing about acting like WW2 spotter planes.

Dont even need to fire to be detected these days.

Mobility is life these days, something that tow guns lack. It takes five minutes for a m777 to go from moving to firing, and another five to displace. It takes 5 seconds for m109 to go from moving to fireing and back again.

Mobility is life.
 
DOD/Sandia/whoever has not done any "new studies" since 1973, partly because it doesn't care, and partly because there are no new data to lean on to actually study. What data we have are similar to what is being photographed in Ukraine right now.

I also don't think snappily edited videos on Youtube or Twitter count as real evidence of, well, frankly anything, though.

Anyway mobility requires armor, because mobility means moving under fire without being deterred or damaged. The only thing which possesses mobility on the modern battlefield are main battle tanks and tank-like protected vehicles, such as IFVs. Self propelled guns are lucky if they can stop heavy machine guns, even today.

What you're referring to is agility, and while that is a point to made, it's not the one you're thinking of.

There is simply not that much of a difference in displacement times. An M109 and a M777 have comparable levels of agility for displacement, both being "less than 3-4 minutes" to displace ~300 meters. Because 3-4 minutes is how long it takes to plot a WLR counterfire mission from initial detection to FFE shells impacting.

In fact the paper drill says 3 minutes seconds for a M777 battery to be displaced 300 meters, and M109's displacement time is long enough that it's being destroyed by standard WLR assumptions of ~3 minutes. Well, that's if you believe a crazy man's Twitter rants. M109 is actually closer to 45 seconds to a minute from last shell firing to travel lock engaged and spades up, but depending on how lazy the crew is it might be longer if they have to get out to engage the travel lock or something..

Naturally you'll be leaving the poncho liners and MRE cases behind because you're taking only serious mission equipment, but that's a minor loss. If you wanted to keep the cuddly blanket you should have eaten it. Of course, not everyone meets paper standards, whether because they're lazy, or because they're poorly disciplined or rowdy lads, or what, but in wartime those people are the ones that end up being on the wall of heroes.

Perhaps GSRs or something will make the old Stone Age use of fire safety lines of berms organized around a central entrenched laager redundant, though they haven't yet.

I suppose if it takes a generic team 5 minutes to limber an M777, one of the lightest, best balanced, and handiest field pieces ever designed, they might actually suffer from being told to entrench and possibly run wires back to battalion. Not because of the shell fire, but from the simple exertion of digging and moving, though. M777s are about as easy to handle as a field gun can be made to handle. Anyone gun crew that struggles to meet the 3 minute displacement with it M777 is more likely just warrant officers having a lark.

The main advantage of the self propelled gun has always been that it can keep pace with main battle tanks cross country, which is something towed guns have struggled with historically. 1930's era solutions, like the half-track and M4 HST/MT-L series tractors, never panned out quite right. The whole "towed" part meant that pieces would get stuck in ditches or lost in mires or at least force the tractor to move slower than the tanks, that kind of thing. That cross-country mobility is why the 2S1 was introduced into the Red Army. They were amphibious, like the BMP, and unlike the ZIL truck and D-30. So they can float across rivers without requiring bridging to be brought up and secure the far bank. M109 had similar cross country mobility until it was brutally attacked by a welder, force fed ballistic steel, and became so fat it can no longer swim.

Towed guns in Ukraine are surviving more often than truck or track-mobile ones, that's for sure. The Ukrainians might be incompetent boobs losing M777s or whatever left, right, and center (according to some people, anyway), but the bulk of the photograph documented losses, and the Russian losses for that matter, are the lightly armored and amphibious self propelled tractors like 2S1. This also applies to BM-21s which are getting slapped pretty hard too.

This massive loss rate of 2S1 (and 2S3, which is the same chassis with a fatter gun) doesn't apply much to the D-30s, which are the standard pieces for the Russian Naval Infantry and for certain brigades of the Ukrainian Army, and have been lost at roughly half the rate of 2S3, the main divisional piece, and 2S1 the battalion piece, despite similar intensities of combat. That's a good point about the spotting drones though. That's another reason to stop moving, cover up, and remain protected. Spotting is much easier when the thing you're looking for is kicking up dust by moving around.

The determination of why self-propelled guns is still an open question, but given that no one has seen the Pzh 2000 being blown up by artillery, it lends credence to the idea that the bulk of SPHs today are simply too poorly armored to be mobile under gunfire, and only very modern systems like Pzh 2000 are sufficiently protected to survive i.e. they have actual mobility.

Well, survive in a loose sense, they are protected to fight the 1973 war i.e. 50 meter shell bursts or further. Which is effectively what Ukraine is since the Russians and Ukrainains aren't exactly loosing dozens of GPS or GLONASS guided smart shells (or maybe they are?) or anything. It's pretty much a bog standard Cold War artillery shootout between a pair of Red Armies.

BM-27s, BM-30s, and HIMARS are surviving mostly because their range puts them out of counterfire distance and gives them a few centuries (in artillery time, it's a real time of about 4-5 minutes) to displace, but not because of any inherent goodness of self propulsion. Against a wide search area munition like Damocles they would be lunch meat, though. 600 meters is a bit further than a HIMARS or BM-30 can displace after firing and counterfire rockets begin landing.

You might ask yourself how the Ukrainians are surviving devastating Russian superiority in artillery firepower though? It's not because they're all Usain Bolts or jetpack wearing super commandos. They literally just dig trenches and hide in them when the shells come. This applies to tanks and IFVs and infantrymen as well as artillery too.

Ukrainians have better survivability of their towed pieces than the Russians, despite having inferiority in firepower, precisely because they are entrenching their guns and taking the time and effort to prepare each pair of alternate firing positions with berms and dugouts for the guns, ammunition, and crew.

When they get caught unawares they can simply go to ground, wait out a barrage, recover the guns, and kludge together new replacement bits. Truly, the old ways live on in Eastern Europe.

Displacement gets you killed in the face of precision guided weapons, because moving targets are easier to spot (thus, hit) than stationary ones. Especially if you don't know exactly where they are. No, 40-50 meters is not that exact, as a berm will still protect you from barrages and you can probably fire back at the observer (with your rifle, not your howitzer) and scare him off. Maybe artillery batteries need MANPADS teams or something in addition to infantry platoons. Once you get rid of the observer you can start moving, of course by then you've been shot at for a bit. Berms are nice?

In the face of non-precision weapons, it doesn't seem to help much either, as self-propelled guns aren't any more survivable than towed ones, and often less survivable. Otherwise they wouldn't be lost at twice the rate of towed guns in medium- to high-intensity combat, would they? It suggests, as I've repeatedly stated, they need more armor or something to displace under fire. Otherwise you're better off hiding behind a berm.

In the face of nuclear weapons, neither displacement nor entrenchment will save you, so you're better off firing by gun and just spacing your tubes a kilometer apart. That's pretty radical though and the human race isn't quite morally muscular (atrophied?) enough for that kind of action yet.

Since batteries are companies and thus occupy approximately a kilometer or two of frontage they can just hop between three to six pre-positioned berm lines and fire from those for a day or so, with each battery of the battalion taking alternate turns to cover their sister batteries as they move aroudn, and when they get caught with tehir pants down (they will, people get tired, sloppy, and whatnot), the berms and other entrenchments will protect them from the consequences of their failures. It will reduce fire though, which sucks a lot.

That's why the Red Army liked regimental artillery groups for what the NATO thinks a battalion can generally handle. That said with shells like Excalibur, a battalion actually can handle things like a fire mission on a reinforced rifle platoon, or perhaps a battery if you're willing to wait a long time.

tl;dr In most cases, parking your guns behind a berm is a good way to protect them from being killed. Driving out with paper thin tractors into shellfire just results in broken tracks and stranded howitzers. Keeping your towed guns behind a berm means they live longer in comparison.

If you don't believe that there are pictures of Ukrainian M777s in the Donbas firing from berms, both sides have lost roughly twice as many 2S1s and 2S3s as D-30s despite having more D-30s than 2S1/2S3, and Pzh 2000 doesn't seem to have been slapped with it being one of the few howitzers in theater that is designed to resist shellfire rather than merely resist stiff breezes.

The few cases I can think of where berms are lame either aren't applicable to modern wars as we know them currently (nuclear weapons) or aren't applicable to the major wars where SPHs predominated as a significant fraction of gunnery and major counter battery duels were fought (1973 and 2022).

Nothing else is terribly relevant because it's either completely unimportant (the entire US military experience since the end of WW2, and arguably after 1944 at that), or it didn't involve large proportionate quantities of self propelled pieces (Great Patriotic War), or there are limited public data online (Cenepa War, Falklands, etc., ???).
 
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I can't help thinking that both SP and light mobile artillery have a place in a modern combined arms force.
 
They do, it's just that most modern howitzers in military inventories are too thinly armored to be survivable in the face of modern (1970's era) counter battery fire. Only the most advanced and expensive self propelled pieces, like PzH 2000 and K9 Thunder, seem to be adequately armored to move around without being disabled or destroyed under late Cold War-era counter battery fire.

That indicates "Bradley level" protection (14.5mm AP and 155mm shell bursts at 30-40 meters all around) is optimal for conventional gunfire like the D-30 or 2S1/2S3 that predominates both 1973 and 2022. Add in bomblet protection for ICM like SPz Puma and you've arrived at PzH 2000 I guess?

Perhaps the T2 armor kits actually do add this though, as they add about 2 tons of mass to the M109A7, while a BUSK ERA kit is 3 tons, so the protection is probably substantial in the kinetic realm as it seems to be a applique similar to the Stryker ballistic tiles, but it's a lot of mass on something that's already pretty overloaded. I imagine that's why the Army intends to keep them warehoused as long as it can.
 
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They do, it's just that most modern howitzers in military inventories are too thinly armored to be survivable in the face of modern (1970's era) counter battery fire. Only the most advanced and expensive self propelled pieces, like PzH 2000 and K9 Thunder, seem to be adequately armored to move around without being disabled or destroyed under late Cold War-era counter battery fire.

That indicates "Bradley level" protection (14.5mm AP and 155mm shell bursts at 30-40 meters all around) is optimal for conventional gunfire like the D-30 or 2S1/2S3 that predominates both 1973 and 2022. Add in bomblet protection for ICM like SPz Puma and you've arrived at PzH 2000 I guess?

Perhaps the T2 armor kits actually do add this though, as they add about 2 tons of mass to the M109A7, while a BUSK ERA kit is 3 tons, so the protection is probably substantial in the kinetic realm as it seems to be a applique similar to the Stryker ballistic tiles, but it's a lot of mass on something that's already pretty overloaded. I imagine that's why the Army intends to keep them warehoused as long as it can.
So many long texts, so many arguments, but you forgot the basic rule of a war: mobility, if you stay static , taking your time to deploy the gun, and manually reload it, leaving your men outside unprotect, well basically you are dead, the enemy is not going to wait, till you deploy the gun and fire it, they will kill insight, so basically if you stay mobile, you have a chance to survive, if you stay inside the vehicle, fire the gun from the inside, and automatically reload it inside the vehicle, and then move to another place to fire again, you have a better chance to survive than being outside the vehicle to reload, and running around like a "fool" unprotected, the G6 Rhino has protection and mobility, that the m777 doesn't and this is stating the obvious, it might not have the Armour protection of the m109, but has mobility, why do you think Ukranian forces are making so many hard hits on Russian slow and static vehicles?? well guess what, they stay mobile, they move from place to place to fire, they don't stay static, waiting to deploy there guns and reload them, just waiting to be killed, my point is the G6 Rhino is miles way better than the m777 and this is a fact, the m777 might be cheaper, but not better than the G6 Rhino, any vehicle, that forces you to be outside unprotected to deploy the gun and reload it manually is always a bad idea in any war.
 
DOD/Sandia/whoever has not done any "new studies" since 1973, partly because it doesn't care, and partly because there are no new data to lean on to actually study. What data we have are similar to what is being photographed in Ukraine right now
This is utterly wrong boss.

The US DOD, Army, Marines, and a few others have done studies, many of them recently cause not only the Army is looking to redo it Arty doctrine, but alot of things that was classified when the study you mention were done been unclassified. Basically new information came out, new tech changing stuff up, snd all that.

Even got those studies on my harddrive, perks of been in the military in a small multirole MOS that deals with this shit. End up seeing all type of things.

Will post them when Im next on my laptop if i remember.

There is simply not that much of a difference in displacement times. An M109 and a M777 have comparable levels of agility for displacement, both being "less than 3-4 minutes" to displace ~300 meters. Because 3-4 minutes is how long it takes to plot a WLR counterfire mission from initial detection to FFE shells impacting
Again 10 years of experience says different boss. General from detection to shots out in my experience is 2 minutes max unless we are shooting into a heavily built up area, which causes everyone who cares bout optics to increase that to where it useless cause shelling a hospital is bad.

This was my day job 10 years and that was the Standard we trained too. Had teams average one minute with a record of 18 seconds between detect and rounds out. Fun times.

In fact the paper drill says 3 minutes seconds for a M777 battery to be displaced 300 meters, and M109's displacement time is long enough that it's being destroyed by standard WLR assumptions of ~3 minutes. Well, that's if you believe a crazy man's Twitter rants. M109 is actually closer to 45 seconds to a minute from last shell firing to travel lock engaged and spades up, but depending on how lazy the crew is it might be longer if they have to get out to engage the travel lock or something

Here let me show you a proper source.

According to the US Army, and support by the M109 TM9--2350--311--10 and the M777 TM 9-1025-215-23.

Gives the Emplacement to fire time of 30 seconds for tge M109A5 up to charge 6 with an added minute for digging in for larger charges, with movement possible within 30 seconds after firing is complete. Compare to the M777s 3 minutes for any charges and a displacement of similar amount. That is the Standard that we train to by TC 3-09.81.

Said TC also states that you should do no more then 10 shot per position to ensure that the enemy cant zero in on you. So in an actual conflict you be jumping alot. Which is were SPGs shine.

I suppose if it takes a generic team 5 minutes to limber an M777, one of the lightest, best balanced, and handiest field pieces ever designed, they might actually suffer from being told to entrench and possibly run wires back to battalion. Not because of the shell fire, but from the simple exertion of digging and moving, though. M777s are about as easy to handle as a field gun can be made to handle. Anyone gun crew that struggles to meet the 3 minute displacement with it M777 is more likely just warrant officers having a lark
Spoken like someone who hasnt have the pleasure of working a gun for over 3 days straight with 5 hours of sleep in total. Trust me after that, even the simplest 60mm mortar takes forever and a day to Emplacement due to fatigue.

Like for as light and easy to handle the M777 is...

Its still a 9000 plus pound chunk of metal that doesn't want to move and still MANUALLY operares. And takes all 8 crew to manually move the thing on concrete, M777 and tow guns crew live in fear of the deep mud, since it still heavy enough to get stuck fairly easily. With it requiring alot of effort to move around since it still 4 tons of metal. No amount of balance work will help you there.

Basically after 3 days of in the field every tow gun be breaking time after wards cause the crews be too tired to make 100 percent. After a few weeks of combats in the field a tow crew will be hating life and be lucky to make 10 minutes. Know that from experience from NTC.

Compare that to the power operated SPGs, which makes the same time day 1 as they do day 31. Since the SPG does everything but load itself, and some do that, the SPG crew stay fresher and more combat ready longer.

Thats before you get into the elements.

A SPG doesn't care if its sunny, night, hot, cold, dry, wet. So long as the vehicle and the gear works they are just happy to run missions in a blizzard as they are on a sunny day.

A tow crew, who at best has a canves cover on their truck... cares ALOT about the elements.

Which is something many people forget.

SPG are far easier on their crews then Tow pieces are since they do most the work.

Hell M777s almost too lightly built, M777s are not allowed to go about charge 7 unless they get the Colonel approval. To much risk of tge gun breaking, either by explosion or by the barrel ripping out of the recoil mounts. The M109 only needed a breech upgrade to allow regular use of Charge 8 and 9. Which is why the M109 has a longer range.

That's another reason to stop moving, cover up, and remain protected. Spotting is much easier when the thing you're looking for is kicking up dust by moving around
funny thing bout that.

An SPG is actaully easier and faster to cover up then a Tow gun due to the fact you can prestage the camo netting far easier. And need to cover up less.
, wait out a barrage, recover the guns, and kludge together new replacement bits. Truly, the old ways live on in Eastern Europe
Yup, Ukraine has Fabbercobbled up a a few SPGs doing that as well.
Displacement gets you killed in the face of precision guided weapons, because moving targets are easier to spot (thus, hit) than stationary ones. Especially if you don't know exactly where they are. No, 40-50 meters is not that exact, as a berm will still protect you from barrages and you can probably fire back at the observer (with your rifle, not your howitzer) and scare him off. Maybe artillery batteries need MANPADS teams or something in addition to infantry platoons. Once you get rid of the observer you can start moving, of course by then you've been shot at for a bit. Berms are nice?
Berms were nice when the Guns were averaging 50 40 meters.

They are now averaging 30-20 meters with DUMB shells. Sub 10 with smart shells. Thats before you get into the fun of airbursts which murder inflantry with out top cover. This is another reason why Ukriane Artillery been doing better then Russia.

Russia Arty needs say 20 shots to kill a target, while Ukraine only needs 5.

This is due to several reasons. Guns more Accurate, better fire control computers but most importantly is that the observers can give a more accurate first time read.

Most modern Army observers now have basically a combo of binocular/laser rangefinder/GPS* that not only are hand held, but can give you a target location with in a few meters of it from a few thousand meters away.

Throw in the fact that most observers ride around in basically ifv level armor vehicles with even bigger version of tge Target Designator for more range.

Using the howitzer might be a better idea then you rifle.

*Honestly the minimization and cheapening of GPS been a lmqjor game changer for Artillery. Tge biggest issue historically with accurate fires was figuring out where you are in relation to the target. Before GPS, you needed survey people to make a point, which you then had to get within like 15cms of, and for every centimeter you were off meant about a meter downrange in additiont to inaccuracies of survey and the observers. Thus why 50 meters accuracy was the goal for so long. It was consider the easiest and most likely for a soldier to do.

Now every gun from 60mm to 155mm has a GPS able to get with a meteaccurately.y anywhere.

And every observer has those Target Designators able to get accurate location of the target themselves from a good ways away.

Its far easier to do the calculations as well, you can get an app for you phone to do it. Allowing you to accurately tell the weapon exactly where to point to get the best accuracy.

All this allows for an averaging of 20 meters error for a shell.

Considering the YOU DEAD zone is a raduis of 10 meters around a shells impact? As in unless you are in a tank or a bunker, and a 155mm land within 10 meters of you you are dieing even in a berm or trench cause of over pressure.

Eyeah... You can see how people feeling the old shot and scoot is the better option then bunkering down.
In the face of non-precision weapons, it doesn't seem to help much either, as self-propelled guns aren't any more survivable than towed ones, and often less survivable. Otherwise they wouldn't be lost at twice the rate of towed guns in medium- to high-intensity combat, would they? It suggests, as I've repeatedly stated, they need more armor or something to displace under fire. Otherwise you're better off hiding behind a berm.
I have one question on this that is not answer bu the Source.

Define Destroyed.

Cause well which would you call destroyed.

The tow gun that took a hit, got its crew spluttered againsted i, but was able to be put back into service the next day since the only thing damaged was the tires and all 8 crew. Two hours with monkey who knows how to turn a wrench and a pressure washing to clean off the guts.

Or is the SPG that took a hit, but crew manage to get out before its powder cookk off. Its a write off but the crew got out.

Basically you should not look at Number of vehicles destroyed.

But Numbers of CREW lost.

So what if the SPG is lost at triple the rate of s tow. If the SPGs loses half the personal compare to the tow systems at the end of the conflict?

The the SPG is better.

Cause you can replace the gun far easier then the experience crew.

And none of the source I have found including the ones listed here, go into that.
 
Yes, people get sleepy and tired? As I said, entrenchments protect sleepy crews from the consequences of the failure to meet standards...

Berms protect the gun from being damaged by inaccurate Russian shellfire and dugouts protect the crew who duck inside them after their supporting WLR warns them of incoming counterfire. What's the problem, again?

There are actually rather few cases where moving under fire is better than staying put, though. One of them is when you have a howitzer that can survive moving under fire. The bulk of howitzers that exist simply can't survive though. Not sure why you're talking about personnel losses also aren't very relevant, considering Ukraine is in a position where replacing crews is vastly easier than replacing guns. Good entrenching protects both though.

In fact, "tank or bunker" is in fact exactly what I'm talking about: The PzH 2000 has tank (well, Bradley) level of protection. Nothing else does in theater.

Most SPHs that can survive moving under fire have tank-like protection though. No reason a D-30 or 2S1 can't be protected like this, except for a paucity of backhoes and bulldozers I guess. Probably not an issue for Ukraine. The PLA built overhead cover for their towed guns in Korea. The U.S. Marines typically gave a couple D7 bulldozers to their gun batteries to build berms which came from the Artillery Regiment's organic engineering units.

Moving around mostly makes sense when you are not being observed, and not being attacked, but not as a response to either of these.

You don't normally teach infantrymen to run through mortar fire, you teach them to go to ground. Why would you teach gunners to drive through shellfire instead of jumping in a dugout or moving behind a berm? That only makes sense if their vehicle is armored enough to withstand the fire. Few SPHs are that well protected, especially in Ukraine.

Since Ukraine's battlefield is basically a conventional 1980's and the current middle leagues match is basically two Soviet armies clubbing each other without using nukes (yet?), you're really needing something like XM2001 to be able to "properly" shoot/scoot. Of course no 1980's conflict would have assumed to be 1) conventional 2) positional, as the use of thousands of tactical nuclear weapons prevents formation of coherent defensive lines that create positional combat. Thus we arrive at the true reason the thinly armored "self propelled howitzer" existence: to better fight nuclear wars while creating a protected environment against fallout and stopping the occasional machine gun or rifle round as the howitzer follows the motor rifle and tank troops. Had the Red Army in 1973 wanted to fight a conventional WW3, and not a general nuclear war, it would have stuck with the towed pieces it already had.

Future SPHs will probably need something like 4" of steel armor equivalent all around to survive more accurate gunfire, so I think you're right about that. That would be inline with the protection of the most advanced ICVs like the Boxer after all.
 
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DOD/Sandia/whoever has not done any "new studies" since 1973, partly because it doesn't care, and partly because there are no new data to lean on to actually study. What data we have are similar to what is being photographed in Ukraine right now
This is utterly wrong boss.

The US DOD, Army, Marines, and a few others have done studies, many of them recently cause not only the Army is looking to redo it Arty doctrine, but alot of things that was classified when the study you mention were done been unclassified. Basically new information came out, new tech changing stuff up, snd all that.

Even got those studies on my harddrive, perks of been in the military in a small multirole MOS that deals with this shit. End up seeing all type of things.

Will post them when Im next on my laptop if i remember.

There is simply not that much of a difference in displacement times. An M109 and a M777 have comparable levels of agility for displacement, both being "less than 3-4 minutes" to displace ~300 meters. Because 3-4 minutes is how long it takes to plot a WLR counterfire mission from initial detection to FFE shells impacting
Again 10 years of experience says different boss. General from detection to shots out in my experience is 2 minutes max unless we are shooting into a heavily built up area, which causes everyone who cares bout optics to increase that to where it useless cause shelling a hospital is bad.

This was my day job 10 years and that was the Standard we trained too. Had teams average one minute with a record of 18 seconds between detect and rounds out. Fun times.

In fact the paper drill says 3 minutes seconds for a M777 battery to be displaced 300 meters, and M109's displacement time is long enough that it's being destroyed by standard WLR assumptions of ~3 minutes. Well, that's if you believe a crazy man's Twitter rants. M109 is actually closer to 45 seconds to a minute from last shell firing to travel lock engaged and spades up, but depending on how lazy the crew is it might be longer if they have to get out to engage the travel lock or something

Here let me show you a proper source.

According to the US Army, and support by the M109 TM9--2350--311--10 and the M777 TM 9-1025-215-23.

Gives the Emplacement to fire time of 30 seconds for tge M109A5 up to charge 6 with an added minute for digging in for larger charges, with movement possible within 30 seconds after firing is complete. Compare to the M777s 3 minutes for any charges and a displacement of similar amount. That is the Standard that we train to by TC 3-09.81.

Said TC also states that you should do no more then 10 shot per position to ensure that the enemy cant zero in on you. So in an actual conflict you be jumping alot. Which is were SPGs shine.

I suppose if it takes a generic team 5 minutes to limber an M777, one of the lightest, best balanced, and handiest field pieces ever designed, they might actually suffer from being told to entrench and possibly run wires back to battalion. Not because of the shell fire, but from the simple exertion of digging and moving, though. M777s are about as easy to handle as a field gun can be made to handle. Anyone gun crew that struggles to meet the 3 minute displacement with it M777 is more likely just warrant officers having a lark
Spoken like someone who hasnt have the pleasure of working a gun for over 3 days straight with 5 hours of sleep in total. Trust me after that, even the simplest 60mm mortar takes forever and a day to Emplacement due to fatigue.

Like for as light and easy to handle the M777 is...

Its still a 9000 plus pound chunk of metal that doesn't want to move and still MANUALLY operares. And takes all 8 crew to manually move the thing on concrete, M777 and tow guns crew live in fear of the deep mud, since it still heavy enough to get stuck fairly easily. With it requiring alot of effort to move around since it still 4 tons of metal. No amount of balance work will help you there.

Basically after 3 days of in the field every tow gun be breaking time after wards cause the crews be too tired to make 100 percent. After a few weeks of combats in the field a tow crew will be hating life and be lucky to make 10 minutes. Know that from experience from NTC.

Compare that to the power operated SPGs, which makes the same time day 1 as they do day 31. Since the SPG does everything but load itself, and some do that, the SPG crew stay fresher and more combat ready longer.

Thats before you get into the elements.

A SPG doesn't care if its sunny, night, hot, cold, dry, wet. So long as the vehicle and the gear works they are just happy to run missions in a blizzard as they are on a sunny day.

A tow crew, who at best has a canves cover on their truck... cares ALOT about the elements.

Which is something many people forget.

SPG are far easier on their crews then Tow pieces are since they do most the work.

Hell M777s almost too lightly built, M777s are not allowed to go about charge 7 unless they get the Colonel approval. To much risk of tge gun breaking, either by explosion or by the barrel ripping out of the recoil mounts. The M109 only needed a breech upgrade to allow regular use of Charge 8 and 9. Which is why the M109 has a longer range.

That's another reason to stop moving, cover up, and remain protected. Spotting is much easier when the thing you're looking for is kicking up dust by moving around
funny thing bout that.

An SPG is actaully easier and faster to cover up then a Tow gun due to the fact you can prestage the camo netting far easier. And need to cover up less.
, wait out a barrage, recover the guns, and kludge together new replacement bits. Truly, the old ways live on in Eastern Europe
Yup, Ukraine has Fabbercobbled up a a few SPGs doing that as well.
Displacement gets you killed in the face of precision guided weapons, because moving targets are easier to spot (thus, hit) than stationary ones. Especially if you don't know exactly where they are. No, 40-50 meters is not that exact, as a berm will still protect you from barrages and you can probably fire back at the observer (with your rifle, not your howitzer) and scare him off. Maybe artillery batteries need MANPADS teams or something in addition to infantry platoons. Once you get rid of the observer you can start moving, of course by then you've been shot at for a bit. Berms are nice?
Berms were nice when the Guns were averaging 50 40 meters.

They are now averaging 30-20 meters with DUMB shells. Sub 10 with smart shells. Thats before you get into the fun of airbursts which murder inflantry with out top cover. This is another reason why Ukriane Artillery been doing better then Russia.

Russia Arty needs say 20 shots to kill a target, while Ukraine only needs 5.

This is due to several reasons. Guns more Accurate, better fire control computers but most importantly is that the observers can give a more accurate first time read.

Most modern Army observers now have basically a combo of binocular/laser rangefinder/GPS* that not only are hand held, but can give you a target location with in a few meters of it from a few thousand meters away.

Throw in the fact that most observers ride around in basically ifv level armor vehicles with even bigger version of tge Target Designator for more range.

Using the howitzer might be a better idea then you rifle.

*Honestly the minimization and cheapening of GPS been a lmqjor game changer for Artillery. Tge biggest issue historically with accurate fires was figuring out where you are in relation to the target. Before GPS, you needed survey people to make a point, which you then had to get within like 15cms of, and for every centimeter you were off meant about a meter downrange in additiont to inaccuracies of survey and the observers. Thus why 50 meters accuracy was the goal for so long. It was consider the easiest and most likely for a soldier to do.

Now every gun from 60mm to 155mm has a GPS able to get with a meteaccurately.y anywhere.

And every observer has those Target Designators able to get accurate location of the target themselves from a good ways away.

Its far easier to do the calculations as well, you can get an app for you phone to do it. Allowing you to accurately tell the weapon exactly where to point to get the best accuracy.

All this allows for an averaging of 20 meters error for a shell.

Considering the YOU DEAD zone is a raduis of 10 meters around a shells impact? As in unless you are in a tank or a bunker, and a 155mm land within 10 meters of you you are dieing even in a berm or trench cause of over pressure.

Eyeah... You can see how people feeling the old shot and scoot is the better option then bunkering down.
In the face of non-precision weapons, it doesn't seem to help much either, as self-propelled guns aren't any more survivable than towed ones, and often less survivable. Otherwise they wouldn't be lost at twice the rate of towed guns in medium- to high-intensity combat, would they? It suggests, as I've repeatedly stated, they need more armor or something to displace under fire. Otherwise you're better off hiding behind a berm.
I have one question on this that is not answer bu the Source.

Define Destroyed.

Cause well which would you call destroyed.

The tow gun that took a hit, got its crew spluttered againsted i, but was able to be put back into service the next day since the only thing damaged was the tires and all 8 crew. Two hours with monkey who knows how to turn a wrench and a pressure washing to clean off the guts.

Or is the SPG that took a hit, but crew manage to get out before its powder cookk off. Its a write off but the crew got out.

Basically you should not look at Number of vehicles destroyed.

But Numbers of CREW lost.

So what if the SPG is lost at triple the rate of s tow. If the SPGs loses half the personal compare to the tow systems at the end of the conflict?

The the SPG is better.

Cause you can replace the gun far easier then the experience crew.

And none of the source I have found including the ones listed here, go into that.
Very well writen text "firefinder", you made my point, thank you, best regards.
 
Excuse my ignorance, but where does the U.S. source its Titanium from? I can't help reflecting the building of the Lockheed SR-71 and how the U.S. had to source it's quantity of Titanium from the Soviet Union, without the Soviet's knowing that the material was going to used against them militaraly....

Regards
Pioneer
 
Excuse my ignorance, but where does the U.S. source its Titanium from? I can't help reflecting the building of the Lockheed SR-71 and how the U.S. had to source it's quantity of Titanium from the Soviet Union, without the Soviet's knowing that the material was going to used against them militaraly....

Regards
Pioneer

The PRC doesn't really restrict trade like that, at least not yet, but I suspect BAE is getting scrutinized to source from Japan and the ore is likely coming from Australia. These are the runners-up over PRC in both refining and mining, respectively, and important U.S. regional allies secondly.
 
The PRC doesn't really restrict trade like that, at least not yet, but I suspect BAE is getting scrutinized to source from Japan and the ore is likely coming from Australia. These are the runners-up over PRC in both refining and mining, respectively, and important U.S. regional allies secondly.
Ah, you read my mind Kat Tsun, for I was just thinking that Russia and PRC might be inclined to play the U.S. at it's own game of sanctioning such exports of Titanium....I know I would.

Regards
Pioneer
 
Ah, you read my mind Kat Tsun, for I was just thinking that Russia and PRC might be inclined to play the U.S. at it's own game of sanctioning such exports of Titanium....I know I would.

Regards
Pioneer

Russia isn't a tremendous producer of ores anymore, but it does refine Kazakh ores, and it has a meaty refining capacity. I don't think they're high on the list of U.S. imports. I don't know for sure if Xi has started melting titanium exports, but the U.S. has been trying to re-develop domestic production and refinement of titanium as of late, though more for the potential rather than actual sanctions.

Civil aviation is probably still buying from the PRC. They can make great titanium, so long as you keep them pointed at it, and ditto steel. Airbus is the ones that rely/relied on Russian titanium for their planes AIUI.
 
Excuse my ignorance, but where does the U.S. source its Titanium from? I can't help reflecting the building of the Lockheed SR-71 and how the U.S. had to source it's quantity of Titanium from the Soviet Union, without the Soviet's knowing that the material was going to used against them militaraly....

Regards
Pioneer
Lots of options in allied countries:


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Ore "reserves" aren't important since they require many years to develop, are slow to dig out of the ground, and still need to be refined.

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The PRC has about a third or so of the global share of production of titanium. This will not appreciably diminish in terms of mine output and might actually grow. Refining capacities might recede, only in select sectors, although Japan has a pretty sizeable titanium refining capacity and they can produce very good titanium. Unlike the Chinese firms, Nippon Steel does this without managers needing to breathe down their necks about it, and since they already own U.S. Steel now it's a domestic American firm at this point. It should be pretty trivial to establish refinement and sponge production in the U.S.

America will still rely on majority imports of titanium obviously (Boeing), but it may be enough to save select defense programs, such as the B-21 or F-35 or M777, from requiring sourcing of foreign titanium in the future. Prior to the Ukraine War, the United States imported about $100 mn worth of titanium sponge from Russia and $50 mn worth from PRC.

I suppose it imports almost exclusively from Japan, who will likely import almost exclusively from Australia, given Mozambique and South Africa are firmly wedded to the Chinese future, and Senegal is leaning there. That's not really good enough considering they're also both within submarine and bomber base range of the PRC, though.

A Nippon Steel-owned titanium sponge plant in Tennessee or Mississippi is a possibility in the defense industrial base's near future. Since Ti is produced from either powdered/shredded scrap or raw ores run through either the Hunter Process or Kroll Process (the main difference is the use of magnesium or sodium to react with the TiCl4 gas AIUI), they can substitute one another, too.

Most raw Ti produced in America is done by recycling imported scrap right now. The only Kroll Process sponge plant left is in Henderson, Nevada, run by Titanium Metals Corporation, and using Japanese machinery. Honeywell uses the Hunter Process to make certain types of integrated circuits at a plant they own, but they aren't really important for artillery pieces, since they don't make the cheap kind of Ti that goes into F-22s and M777s.
 
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Ore "reserves" aren't important since they require many years to develop, are slow to dig out of the ground, and still need to be refined.

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The PRC has about a third or so of the global share of production of titanium. This will not appreciably diminish in terms of mine output and might actually grow. Refining capacities might recede, only in select sectors, although Japan has a pretty sizeable titanium refining capacity and they can produce very good titanium. Unlike the Chinese firms, Nippon Steel does this without managers needing to breathe down their necks about it, and since they already own U.S. Steel now it's a domestic American firm at this point. It should be pretty trivial to establish refinement and sponge production in the U.S.

America will still rely on majority imports of titanium obviously (Boeing), but it may be enough to save select defense programs, such as the B-21 or F-35 or M777, from requiring sourcing of foreign titanium in the future. Prior to the Ukraine War, the United States imported about $100 mn worth of titanium sponge from Russia and $50 mn worth from PRC.

I suppose it imports almost exclusively from Japan, who will likely import almost exclusively from Australia, given Mozambique and South Africa are firmly wedded to the Chinese future, and Senegal is leaning there. That's not really good enough considering they're also both within submarine and bomber base range of the PRC, though.

A Nippon Steel-owned titanium sponge plant in Tennessee or Mississippi is a possibility in the defense industrial base's near future. Since Ti is produced from either powdered/shredded scrap or raw ores run through either the Hunter Process or Kroll Process (the main difference is the use of magnesium or sodium to react with the TiCl4 gas AIUI), they can substitute one another, too.

Most raw Ti produced in America is done by recycling imported scrap right now. The only Kroll Process sponge plant left is in Henderson, Nevada, run by Titanium Metals Corporation, and using Japanese machinery. Honeywell uses the Hunter Process to make certain types of integrated circuits at a plant they own, but they aren't really important for artillery pieces, since they don't make the cheap kind of Ti that goes into F-22s and M777s.
Still looks like there's plenty of production outside of China for the purposes being considered. Production generally conforms to the market, at least it does in free market economies anyway.
 
Getting back to the 777, seems to me that it belongs to a prior era, where you could out-range and better target your hapless opponent. Now, you have drones, counter-battery radar, even aggrieved citizenry in distant hedge-rows with GPS and a 'spotter' app...

IMHO, more akin to 'Faerie Chess', all open to view, than trad 'Battleships' and 'Security by Obscurity'..

If you're lucky, return fire comes as a salvo from a similar weapon, fused to air-burst and catch gunners
Else, 'Wipe The Grid-Square' rocketry...

The lack of prompt 'Shoot & Scoot' is akin to the otherwise nice machine guns deprecated on eg 'Forgotten Weapons' for lacking a field-changeable barrel. IIRC, ordnance calculus ran that you'd need an extra belt rather than spare barrel. Which did not allow for SHTF 'exigencies' such as damaged guns being 'harvested' for their part-used barrels, along with any surviving belts...
 
Getting back to the 777, seems to me that it belongs to a prior era, where you could out-range and better target your hapless opponent.

This is not true though.

Towed guns are easier to repair, easier to recover, and easier to put back into action than self propelled guns. They are harder to damage by near misses, can be dug into positions faster, and are usually more survivable in close combat. Consider the updated Oryx list: https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-ukrainian.html

You only need to look at the Ukrainian losses of the AHS Krab compared with the CAESAR or the M109s compared with the M777s.

Of the 170 M777s donated, about 42 have been destroyed by direct impacts, for a loss rate of around 24%. The rest are damaged, but recoverable, and put back into action. We can assume the same for any other system. Of the 54 AHS Krab donated, 33 have been destroyed, for a loss rate of around 60%. Of the ~167 M109s donated, 48 have been destroyed, for a loss rate of around 28%. Of the 33 functional AS-90s donated, 7 have been destroyed, for a loss rate of 21%. Of the 43 CAESAR 155mms donated, 6 have been lost, for a loss rate of 14%.

Notice that the loss rates for the lightly armored, thin skinned self propelled pieces is higher than the loss rates for the towed and truck-borne pieces. They're being destroyed at greater rates and recovered at lesser rates.

"Shoot and scoot" merely seems to be the artillery equivalent of an infantryman breaking out of his trench or foxhole to escape the pounding of shells, and being enveloped by a cloud of splinter and shrapnel, and that rarely ends well. That's not really surprising considering "shoot and scoot" was developed out of theoretical lab tests and gunnery range shoots in the 1970's and '80's by weird artillerists in NATO.

Yet as it's being tested in the real world, in Ukraine right now, it's coming up short. If it were so great to be self propelled, you'd see fewer losses, because they would have mobilized their way out of fire and not been killed. The opposite seems to be occurring: towed guns, and truck mounted towed guns, are being killed less often in Ukraine than similarly available self-propelled pieces.

These are not because the Ukrainians simply aren't using the towed or truck mounted pieces, either. It's because they're hiding them in revetments and berms, and because if a hollow charge ZALA Lancet hits a M777 then it might punch a hole in a hydraulic line or a limber or a barrel, but it won't destroy the gun by causing an internal ammo or fuel fire. Vehicles are only destroyed when they are ruptured completely by ammunition detonations or when fire causes the metal to become so warped that they are unusable. If you have neither internal ammunition, nor large fuel tanks as a structural element, then you are much harder to "destroy" but easier to "damage".

Towed gun batteries probably have a chronic 2-3 gun shortage from parts being unavailable or damaged from splinter, but they aren't losing those guns forever unless a shell happens to land directly inside a berm or something. Even then it might still be recoverable. Much less the case with a self propelled piece that might detonate because of spalling or catch fire and burn down because splinter penetrated it.

Pzh 2000 is the exception here, not the rule, when it comes to performance of self-propelled pieces. It has the armor necessary to go into the cloud of splinter and shrapnel, survive, and not be killed. That's when "shoot and scoot" becomes viable I guess. A shame then that it's practically a unicorn among the fleets of various flavor of M109 and 2S1/2S3 tin cans in the world's armies.

The U.S. Marines might be onto something about replacing all their towed guns with HIMARS though.

tl;dr Shoot and scoot would be fine, if only people had invested in the necessary howitzers to make it work, which never happened. So it's bad.
 
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Astute analysis....
A thought: perhaps mobile howitzers are taking more harm because, being mobile, they are going further into 'harm's way ?

Where-as towed, open ordnance deployment requires much more caution as more exposed ??

Argument resembles the armouring of bomber tails due to the number returning, riddled to sieves. Flaw was that tail-riddled got home, but cockpit-riddled did not...

IIRC, the argument over machine gun barrel replacement invoked need for an armourer to align any new barrel, adjust the sights. Forgetting that a machine gun may be 'walked' onto target...
 
Astute analysis....
A thought: perhaps mobile howitzers are taking more harm because, being mobile, they are going further into 'harm's way ?

Yeah, they're taking more harm by going into a cloud of splinter that can penetrate their armor, in order to escape CB fire.

Where-as towed, open ordnance deployment requires much more caution as more exposed ??

It requires more man-hours to emplace, I suppose, but once it's fully positioned a towed gun unit is harder to kill to a point. The levels of accuracy of munitions in Ukraine are not sufficient to be fully lethal to towed guns when properly dug-in, which is why they are surviving in the environment that the self-propelled pieces are dying in.

Argument resembles the armouring of bomber tails due to the number returning, riddled to sieves. Flaw was that tail-riddled got home, but cockpit-riddled did not...

IIRC, the argument over machine gun barrel replacement invoked need for an armourer to align any new barrel, adjust the sights. Forgetting that a machine gun may be 'walked' onto target...

You don't need to use poorly fitted analogies.

The solution is literally STANAG 4569 Level 4 protection, or higher, which is not something that most SPHs in existing arsenals have. Pzh 2000, XM2001, and possibly a literal couple more howitzers, have this. Protection against 155mm shell bursts from 15-30 meters corresponds to 14.5mm BZT protection. It's why M2 Bradley can drive through casual artillery fire.

This is how "shoot and scoot" was supposed to work, but these new type armored howitzers were either never produced (XM2001) or produced in very few numbers (Pzh 2000), so you're trying to fit 1980's artillery tactics with 1960's howitzers. If all of Ukraine's self-propelled howitzers were Pzh 2000s, and their towed guns were M777s or whatever, then yeah, the self-propelled pieces would be more survivable.

They're not, though. They're mostly M109A4/A5/A6/L, 2S1, and 2S3, with STANAG 4569 Level 2 or Level 3 protection equivalences.

If Russia had nothing but Excalibur shells in its inventory, though, then you'd expect towed guns to be getting popped more often as shells would be casually landing within the berm and wrecking them.

They're not, though. They're mostly 3OF56, and similar 1970's vintage munitions, with an accuracy of around 20-50 meters or greater.
 
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"You don't need to use poorly fitted analogies."
My apologies...
 

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