Kat Tsun
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- Joined
- 16 June 2013
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"You don't need to use poorly fitted analogies."
My apologies...
I didn't mean it to be insulting, I just meant that the problem of "how to make 'shoot and scoot'" work has been known for decades.
There's nothing wrong with towed guns in a 1980's artillery environment, which is what we see in Ukraine, except that present models of howitzers in service or entering service were under-protected. The howitzers that were supposed to show up in the year 2000 would have adequate protection, then the Cold War ended, and all those programs except Pzh 2000 faded away or never got started.
Self-propelled howitzers' problems seem to be related to their vulnerable areas presenting to a shell burst are substantially bigger than a tube gun on limbers (or a commercial semi-truck chassis) and their vulnerable areas are inadequately protected to stop the shell fragments from penetrating. The density of components inside the vehicle almost assuredly means something will be destroyed if it is penetrated, too, and often that something is vital like a hydraulic motor, fuel line, or oil reservoir. That's without talking about crew casualties.
On a towed gun, these can be replaced within a few hours, while a self-propelled gun needs an entire recovery team and maybe closer to a day to fix itself, if it can be fixed. Of course the crew on a towed gun can simply dip into a dugout, and avoid casualties altogether, unless they are unlucky enough to be directly hit.
That's all there is to it. The solution is to armor the self-propelled howitzer better, like Pzh 2000, but that requires a new vehicle.
So how many decades away are we from fully modernized howitzers capable of surviving on a 1980's battlefield? Pzh 2000 isn't for everyone, and perhaps designing a vehicle that is survivable and capable like it might take 20 years or longer for most NATO countries, so there's still room for stuff like CAESAR and Archer (which are towed guns on trucks) to eat that space. They seem to be reasonably survivable by CAESAR's performance in Ukraine at least.
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