People hyperfocus on the distance numbers these howitzers are capable of, but to be honest given all the other long range strike capabilities Ukraine has, I am not convinced this is the most relevant use of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M110_howitzer
Where 203mm artillery comes in handy is when you need to make defensive fortifications obsolete categorically, such as in counteroffensive clearing operations. Good thing for russia this is something Ukraine DEFINITELY isn’t doing RIGHT NOW… /s
I don’t think there is much advantage to mounting a massive howitizer on a tank chassis vs building something like PZH2000, Krab or RCH 155, even if the range of a smaller artillery shell theoretically makes the artillery more vulnerable to drones or counterattack, in practice the wholistic protection of a vehicle like a PZH2000, Krab or RCH 155 far outweighs that and on the otherhand in my opinion the mechanical and logistical ease of maintaining a fleet of 6x6 trucks or 8x8 trucks mounting Bohdanas makes far more sense if you aren’t going to protect the crew with the tank armor when they are actually utilizing the howitzer.
That doesn’t mean these howitzers are useless, it means in modern combat they are combat engineering tools rather than traditional artillery pieces. I am sure they will be used for long range artillery barrages as Ukraine isn’t going to be choosey about stuff, if a thing can do it, it is likely used to do it by Ukraine (and besides they have crews experienced on the Pion which uses shells with the same diameter), but ultimately the capacity of these cannons to make the idea that a russian can keep hiding in their concrete pillbox or remains of a basement clearly absurd to the russian inside is FAR more strategically valuable.
Compare this artillery system to the Soviet M1931 which uses the same diameter shells, and note how people talk about how decisive its destructive power was.
It was nicknamed “Stalin’s sledgehammer” by German soldiers. These guns were used with success against Finnish pillboxes at the Mannerheim Line, heavy German fortifications and in urban combat for destroying protected buildings and bunkers. These guns were used until the end of the war in the Battle of Berlin, during which the Red Army used them to smash German fortifications at point blank range with their heavy 203mm shells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/203_mm_howitzer_M1931_(B-4)
Expecting Ukraine to be able to decisively and without atrocious attrition of friendly troops clear areas of russians without tools like this is to ignore the entire history of modern combat, so it is very good that Ukraine is fielding these even if their innovation in drones and also domestic artillery production has made up in many ways for a lack of artillery given to them by foreign partners.
It ain’t a museum piece if it can make the idea of a heavily fortified position a cute little lie you tell yourself for comfort right up until you are inevitably flattened by a 203mm shell…
Note Another major use of artillery this large that is easy to miss (and still could be argued is in some way “combat engineering”) is that it creates holes so large in the ground that a barrage of 203mm shells before a ground assault can tip the scales in favor of your troops and forces by creating cover in the open area leading up to the enemies trenches with 203mm shell craters.
Every time a 203mm shell lands a new foxhole is born basically.
it has only 25km range, 2s7 has 1.5x that, and 203 is only 2x as destructive as 155 with design of similar age, and the difference is smaller for new 155s
i don’t envy ukrainian logisticans either even if pion fires the same ammunition
Do you understand how horrifying the phrase “2x as destructive as a 155” is?
An 155mm shell landing close to you is an already apocalyptic experience, especially if more than one lands near you.
Yes I would definitely take 155mm artillery over this heavier stuff for the reasons you brought up, but there is a nonlinear anvil drop effect going on here where the only thing that can really do what a 203mm howitzer can do over and over again are glide bombs dropped from fighter-bombers.
We are talking a serious amount of force here, we can’t really capture it in words.
I don’t envy ukrainian logisticans either even if pion fires the same ammunition
If it wasn’t for exoskeletons I would say artillery this large is a deadend because of the logistics challenges, but yeah once the shells become too big for a single person to realistically move around logistics must become so much more of a nightmare especially when mud comes into the equation. Worst comes to worst you can have a human move a 155mm artillery shell across a space (although this is really where the advantage of 105mm artillery comes in), you cannot make that same assumption with a 203mm shell or even a 170mm shell like on the NK Koksans.
This is why it frustrates me that the L119 doesn’t get more attention in Ukraine because it looks boring and isn’t futuristic like drones, an artillery crew is going to be able to get a L119 into position in muddy conditions and supply it with an arbitrary amount of ammunition FAR before heavier machinery and trucks will be able to get into the area and establish a working foothold. A humvee can go basically anywhere and it can tow an L119 there.
Can you imagine how much more exhausting it would be dragging a fucking D30 into place over muddy shitty conditions vs. an L119 bopping along behind a humvee? If you compare the two weapon systems on paper you completely miss how much more beat and worn down the D30 crew is going to be before they even get to the fighting part.
This is a dynamic that is maximally easy to miss as an armchair observer.
i mean, mostly i wanted to say that what you can do with 203 you can also do with two or one 155. there’s many more of the latter, these are generally more modern, more accurate, have longer range and higher rate of fire, are newer, have better logistics supporting them already; and one soldier can be expected to handle a 155 but not 203. all of these are reasons why major militaries switched to single calibre like 155
in terms of warhead weight, other 90kg-ish weapons are sdb and gmlrs, of which gmlrs has a bit more explosive because of newer materials used and lower mechanical constraints (less acceleration during launch) and sdb has less for other reasons. these are more expensive, but also guided. there are also shaheds with similar size of warhead
i was also under impression that western 203 supply was depleted by ukrainian 2s7s. presumably it was relatively more available when 155 shortage happened, including cluster variants
there are also shaheds with similar size of warhead
You can’t just compare the warhead size, the kinetic energy of an artillery shell cannot be ignored, an airplane by design of being a flying thing cannot achieve that same degree of energy in a dive.
It is a difference between a brick being dropped on something from a story up and a brick hurtling from high out of the sky in a ballistic trajectory at the same thing.
Probably the best analogy is that the force applied to it becomes so great that the liner effectively becomes flexible like plasticine to the explosive, forming a long, stretched shape akin to a long spike or lance, with a thinner tip, and becoming progressively wider toward the rear end. This jet moves incredibly quickly, but has an uneven speed along its length, with the tip moving the fastest (in modern examples, it can travel in the order of 8-10 km/s or more)
[Artillery shells can easily approach 1km/s at impact so the velocity of the shell is not trivial to a HEAT mechanism, they are within the same order of magnitude of velocity thus the velocity of the shell is DEFINITELY relevant not just explosive yield of the munition in question]
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/GabrielaBis.shtml
Another unhelpful factor which has muddied the waters around the true nature of HEAT jets is that in English-speaking nomenclature, these weapons have often been categorised as ‘Chemical Energy’ (CE) weapons, in contrast to Kinetic Energy (KE) weapons. This distinction is not a particularly helpful one, nor is it particularly accurate.
For HEAT rounds it holds true only insofar as the initial energy imparted onto the liner is chemical energy, however the actual armour defeat mechanism is through the kinetic energy of a solid penetrator.
Yet the exact same is true of traditional KE weapons, such as armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot (APFSDS) rounds; the main difference being that APFSDS rounds have chemical energy imparted onto them while the penetrator is still inside the barrel, while HEAT rounds impart chemical energy onto the penetrator in the moment of the warhead’s initiation. In both cases, chemical energy is being converted to kinetic energy, yet by a quirk of convention, HEAT warheads have retained the ‘CE’ label.