What’s Happened to Ukraine’s Artillery?

Denmark Gives Up All of Its Artillery

Denmark recently gave Ukraine all of its artillery. ALL of it. The armories are bare. Ditto Estonia, ditto the UK, ditto France. UK armories are so bare the rats have no place to hide. Germany hasn’t given away much in the way of artillery, but it’s given away all its Leopard II tanks to the point it is sending an “elite” armored brigade to the Baltics without tanks. The UK has only 40 Challenger II tanks remaining. The UK refers to its cavalry squadrons as “squadrons of troop strength.” The US and Canada have given away dozens of M-777 howitzers. With all this assistance, Ukrainian guns are falling silent. Why?

One reason is a shortage of artillery shells. We’ll leave the economics of artillery shell production to another post, but in simple terms, Russia is capable of firing 60,000 rounds a day. Ukraine, at its peak, was firing 6,000. Ukraine couldn’t keep up, and neither could NATO.

M-777  Wearing Out

Another reason is the fragility of the NATO systems. The M-777 155mm howitzer is an extremely accurate gun that can outrange the Russian D-20 152mm field pieces. The M-777 was not designed to fire hundreds of rounds a day. Under continuous firing in Ukraine, barrels overheat, warp, lose accuracy, and burn out. They need to be changed, and can’t be maintained by Ukrainian gunners in the field. The parts of the carriage and breech wear out.

Compare Figure 1 to Figure 2, and you can see how the M-777 has a lighter and less dense construction than the D-20. It was built for a different kind of war. It’s designed to be light, airmobile, long-range, and highly accurate. It is less rugged, less resistant to the wear and tear encountered under sustained firing on the Ukrainian battlefield. Wear and tear can lead to catastrophe. The high chamber pressures of these guns can result in burst breech failures.

The More Rugged D-20

The Russian D-20, which hasn’t changed much since the 1950s, is far more rugged. It traces its lineage to World War I. In fact, 152mm has been a standard Russian caliber since the early 20^th century. It is also the standard caliber of North Korea. Until recently, it was the standard caliber of China. China has transitioned to 155mm. That means both China and North Korea have warehouses full of 152mm ammo they can sell to Russia. Russia is producing up to 5 million rounds a year on its own, and continues to expand production. The US and NATO are having difficulty producing 1 million. It will take a major effort to ramp up.

Russian doctrine has always regarded artillery as the king of the battlefield. Those dramatic massed artillery barrages Zhukov delivered in Operation Bagration were dealt by the father of the D-20.

But there is one more reason Ukrainian guns are falling silent. They are being destroyed by counterbattery fire.

A Colonel of Artillery

My grandfather was a colonel of artillery, trained at Fort Sill. When I was about six years old, he let me pull the lanyard on a field piece. I used to read my grandfather’s field manuals. Yes, I was a bit nerdy. I was fascinated by the endless tables and trigonometric diagrams. Artillery has always been a fairly technical branch of the service. Nowadays, radar, computers, and GPS add another layer of complexity.

The development of counterbattery radar made artillery duels a deadly game of cat and mouse, shoot and scoot. An artillery unit has to lay its guns, execute its fire mission, and displace before enemy radar can lock onto its shells in flight, determine the battery’s position, and destroy it.

NATO provided Ukraine with counterbattery radars to go with gifts of artillery. For a while, it worked. Despite a 10:1 overmatch in artillery, Ukrainian gunners were destroying Russian guns. Then something changed.

Russia introduced an innovative counterbattery system called Penicillin. NATO systems use active radar to lock onto enemy shells in flight and calculate their parabolas. Penicillin is a passive system. It uses a combination of infrared/thermal and seismic/acoustic sensors to detect gunfire and shell splashes. This data is used to locate enemy guns. Because it is passive, it cannot be detected and knocked out by anti-radar systems. It can, however, be spotted by drones – but that’s another story.

This video shows a Russian unit deploying a Penicillin system. You can use YouTube’s auto-translate feature to get English subtitles:

This Penicillin Can Kill You

Penicillin can calculate a firing solution in five seconds. That leaves the enemy guns no time to scoot.

The disadvantage of Penicillin is that it only works at close range – usually inside 25 to 35 kilometers. But if the Penicillin system can remain undetected, it allows Russian D-20s, drones, and air power to lay waste to Ukrainian field pieces and mortars.

If countries like the UK, France, Denmark, and Estonia are giving one hundred percent of their equipment to Ukraine, and it’s not enough, there has to be an explanation. The explanation for Ukraine’s loss of its artillery isn’t simple, but it comes down to a combination of three factors. First, NATO field pieces are not as rugged as Russian field pieces. Second, Ukraine and NATO are not able to out-produce Russia in the ammunition space. This will be true in the short and medium term until production capacity can be expanded. Third, Russian counterbattery technology like Penicillin is allowing Russian gunners to destroy Ukrainian guns in straight-up artillery duels.

We must realize that this is a death spiral. While Ukraine was able to deliver effective counterbattery fire, Russia was unable to mass its artillery for concentrated barrages. As Ukraine loses counterbattery effectiveness, Russian artillery comes into its own as a true king of the battlefield. Russia becomes more and more able to mass its fires and annihilate Ukrainian defenses.

The first two problems are not easy to fix in the short and medium terms. The third is principally a technology problem. NATO currently relies on active counterbattery radar. It must be possible to mount a crash program to develop an analog to Penicillin. We have the engineers and labs to produce a solution, but they must be funded and tasked.

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Cameron Curtis has spent thirty years on trade floors as a trader and risk manager. He was on the trade floor when Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait, when the air wars opened over Baghdad and Belgrade, and when the financial crisis swallowed the world. Having written fiction as a child, he is the author of the Breed action thriller series, available on Amazon.