Here is a moderately in-depth look at China’s current generation of artillery, and how it stacks up to American artillery.
A lot of this is a fairly detailed order-of-battle breakdown of what and how many artillery pieces are assigned to each level of Chinese military organization, which I’m not going to try to summarize here. But here are some of the more interesting takeaways:
China’s artillery mix seems to be between Russia’s “more is more” giant units of towed artillery and America’s largely mobile, increasingly high tech approach.
There are different mixes of self-propelled artillery deployed to north Chinese units than south Chinese units. The north emphasizes larger systems, while the south features smaller, more mobile systems for more rugged terrain. (Remember, China got its ass kicked in the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979.)
Like the U.S., China supports infantry companies and battalions with mortars.
Towed artillery is on its way out of the PLA. They’re even using self-propelled artillery in light units that look like six-wheeled technicals, so they can shoot-and-scoot. These look like they could be pretty cost-effective.
Like the Russians, China has also gone heavy into unguided rockets.
“The Chinese have also adopted a modular pod-based rocket artillery similar to a larger HIMARS, capable of taking different sizes of GPS guided missiles.”
U.S. artillery tends to be longer-ranged than equivalent Chinese, especially when it comes to guided shells.
Old, big Soviet 152mm and 130mm weapons are being replaced with self-propelled 155mm platforms (PLZ-05, PCL-181).
The PHL-03 is an MLRS firing unguided rockets up to 300km.
The newer PJL-16 fires unguided 300mm, guided 370mm, and 750mm guided missiles using a pod system. The accuracy range on the guided munitions are reportedly 30m, as opposed to the HIMARS 8m.
China has a loading crane system for their advanced MLSR which is better than the Russian system (still loading each tube manually), but not as good as HIMARS self-loading pod system.
The high tech Chinese system isn’t as good as the best U.S. systems yet, but they seem to be catching up. However, I wonder how well they can continue to build high tech weapons guidance system under the new semiconductor sanctions. GPS is an old technology, so presumably China build guidance systems in their older fabs guided missiles using their own GPS-like BeiDou system. But the question is whether they can keep even the older fabs running without U.S. support and inputs, and if they can, how high a priority such munitions will be under the new constraints. There are only so many wafer starts to go around…