In all the other various weapons being shipped to Ukraine to fight off Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression, I missed that the U.S. has shipped 18 M109A6 Paladins.
The United States has announced a new military aid package for Ukraine, which includes the provision of 18 M109A6 Paladin 155mm tracked self-propelled howitzers.
The M109A6 Paladin is a modern version of an older unit that has been used in various conflicts worldwide, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Its 155mm gun has a maximum firing range of 14.9 miles (24 kilometers) with standard artillery ammunition and 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) with assisted rounds. This range makes it a valuable asset for the Ukrainian army, allowing them to strike enemy positions from a safe distance.
One notable feature of the M109A6 Paladin is its ability to fire M982 Excalibur extended-range precision guided projectiles. These projectiles have a range of up to 40 kilometers and are capable of hitting targets with a high degree of accuracy. This capability can be particularly useful when targeting enemy artillery positions or other high-value targets.
The M109A6 Paladin is also equipped with a secondary armament consisting of a roof-mounted 12.7 mm heavy machine gun. Some vehicles were fitted with a 40 mm automatic grenade launcher in place of the machine gun. This additional firepower can be used to defend the howitzer against enemy infantry or light armored vehicles.
To support the M109A6 Paladin, the US is also providing the Ukrainian army with the M992 ammunition supply vehicle. This vehicle can carry up to 93 rounds of ammunition and transfer them to the self-propelled howitzer via conveyor. This ensures that the howitzer has a steady supply of ammunition and can continue firing for extended periods without needing to reposition or resupply.
These are not the first M109s sent to Ukraine, as they’ve already received older variants from Italy, Norway, Latvia and the UK. Plus the Polish Krab, the French CAESAR, the UK AS-90, and the German PzH 2000, all of which are self-propelled 155mm howitzers. Plus Sweden has announced they’re sending their Archer system.
All of those systems can use Excalibur.
Russia doesn’t lack self-propelled artillery of its own, but last I checked they hadn’t fielded any smart artillery shells, and when (or if) they do, I would bet good money they won’t be nearly as capable as Excalibur.
Tags: Archer (artillery), artillery, Foreign Policy, M109A6 Paladin, M982 Excalibur, Military, Russo-Ukrainian War
The Russians field the 2K25 Krasnopol laser-guided 152mm shell.
This is a semi-automatic laser-homing round that requires someone downrange to be lasing the target. The US had something similar, back in the day, with Copperhead.
Copperhead didn’t quite live up to its promise, and went very rapidly by the wayside when Excalibur came in. My take on the whole thing would be that the Russians can’t pull off effective serial production of something like Excalibur, and if they did, then actually fielding it and using it with their knucklehead soldiers wouldn’t work worth spit. If you’ve seen how they handle their ammo…? LOL. Yeah. Sure. That’d be a worthwhile expenditure of resources…
The difference we’re seeing here in these battles in Ukraine is that of old-school mass-effect armies vs. the modern Western ideal of precision weapons used by (comparatively) highly-trained semi-professional soldiers. The end state of all this remains to be seen, but I suspect that once the casualties are around 300,000-500,000 on the Russian side, something is going to give. As in, the whole shoddy edifice.
The fact that the Russians haven’t fielded a GPS (or, GLONASS) version of this round is telling. I think there’s a Chinese equivalent, but they did theirs in 155mm, which means that Russia ain’t likely to be able to use them in their existing weapons systems. Which is hysterically funny, because they type-standardized on 152mm rounds in the first place so as to prevent any enemies of theirs from using them against Mother Russia. Now? That means that while they don’t need to worry about that, they also can’t take advantage of the world market which has type-standardized on 155mm weapons…
Russia is pretty much f*cked, at this point. I suspect you’re going to be seeing a whole bunch of “unfortunate” things happening to them in Ukraine, over the next few months.
The only Russian tank that can fire the latest version of tank shells is T-14, which Russia definitely have 8 (because that’s all we’ve seen in parade) and as far as anyone know, never fielded in combat due to the fact that it was build around the derivative of Nazi diesel engine famous for being unreliable. It’s been 9 years since they debute the tank, and that reliability issue is still not solved. They cannot put another engine there because nothing else will fit. T-72, T-80, T-90 cannot fire the latest shell, and T-14 cannot be fielded due to engine unreliability.
[…] deserve more luxury goods and services, and NPR now stands for Not Popular Radio BattleSwarm: Have 155mm Gun, Will Travel Behind The Black: Hakuto-R1 snaps first picture of Moon from lunar orbit, Israel launches spy […]
Excalibur rounds cost $70k a pop. Good thing we’re giving them to them. The more popular (with the troops) option is the M1156 PGK fuse kit, which screws into a standard 155mm round, and gives 95% of Excalibur’s accuracy with 1/5 of the price. They even make it as the M395 120mm mortar fuse. Excalibur does have laser target option, but in practice nobody uses it.
The Swedes can also supply Excalibur; it was a joint US-Sweden project.
Strategypage has a load of Excalibur data. Put ‘excalibur’ in the search box and read away.
Problem with M109A* / M777 is that you’d need the AFATDS to shoot it, radio coms to link it and for that…you’d need the black keys (all this stuff is Top Secret / SCI). Once all that stuff falls into enemy hands, you’re up the creek without a paddle as if they are smart, they can reverse engineer it (and Ivan got some of the smartest hackers out there.). And on a battle field, losing equipment will happen / has happened….
It’s another case of “mass vs. precision”, and on this turn of the wheel, I don’t see plain “mass” having much in the way of value.
There are always inflection points when these “revolutions in military affairs” come around, and they apply in weird little ways.
During WWII, the sheer mass of Soviet arms overwhelmed Nazi precision. The Soviets took a lesson from that, and ever after relied on the things that they identified as “winning”. Everybody else looked at the sheer size of the Soviet forces, and decided that the Germans must have been on to something, which is one of those odd military moments when everyone looked at the losers and decided to emulate them. Given the dramatic mis-match in casualty-generation by the various sides in WWII, that might not have been an entirely bad idea.
By this point, we’re fully into the “revolution in precision” and are seeing how that plays out in Ukraine. Everyone has seen the massive damage done to Ukrainian territory by Russian artillery, but what they don’t recognize when they see all those shell craters scattered about the place is that the vast majority of them fell into places where the Ukrainians… Weren’t. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are dropping rounds directly on Russian forces one at a time, taking out command posts and ammo dumps one after another. They’re even targeting individual tanks with single rounds of artillery, which is devastating.
So far as artillery is concerned, the Ukrainians are deep into the precision revolution. The Russians mostly… Aren’t.
There’s another “mass” thing, however, that the Ukrainians have mastered against the Russians: Mass participation in the war. There are apps on Ukrainian cell phones allowing any citizen with one to become a spotter for the Ukrainian military, feeding targeting data back into the system on a scale unprecedented in history. This is a big damn deal, and nobody is recognizing it. If the Russians recognized how much damage was being done by these apps and all the rest of it, they’d shut down the networks for the cell phones and kill anyone they found with one. But, they can’t, because their own communications systems are so inadequate and reliant upon cell networks to supplement them. The corruption that led to their tactical radios being so lousy and ineffectively encrypted is a sign that they’re really not the superpower they want to make believe they are; Azart is basically “Baofeng” in a pretty case with Cyrillic lettering on it. They have no equivalent to the US SINCGARS on general issue; that’s why you see so many of their tank crews using walkie-talkies.
That’s another “mass” thing they have missed out on: Mass secure communications. The Ukrainians are listening to everything they’re doing, as if this were Samsonov during the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 all over again.
The support from the US in this regard ain’t trivial, either; that was one reason they went after that drone in the Black Sea, because it was vacuuming up data as the Russians launched their missile strikes.
But, back to my point: One of the big things that defeated the Russians last spring when all this crap started was the mass mobilization of Ukrainian citizens via those cellphone apps. Every Ukrainian within visual range became a sensor; every phone became a communications node, reporting Russian movements and vulnerabilities back to the command nodes in the Ukrainian defense system. This is a big deal; the nations that note this and take advantage of it are going to become almost impossible to invade. Why? Because those damn cell towers and mesh networks are incredibly effective at piercing the fog of war. And, in mobilizing the populace.
If I were any of the Baltic states, I’d be looking long and hard at what went on during those first days of the war, and making sure I had similar tools widely dispersed on my cell networks. I’d also have hardened backup networks that can’t be taken down, with multiple redundancies.
There’s also something that needs to be done, which I’d call “Dragon’s Teeth”. You need apps on all of those phones telling people what to do, how to become “just add water” citizen-soldiers or even just “citizen-observers”, so that they’re effective and survivable against the sort of thing the Russians do when taking over a country. There’s a script they follow; the public needs to know what it is, and how to short-circuit it. The Russians had 45,000 body bags stockpiled outside the borders of Ukraine and mobile crematoria; those were not for their soldiers, they were for the massive number of Ukrainians they intended to kill in order to pacify the country, as if this were the 1940s all over again. You saw the start of it in Bucha and all the other occupied territories; they went after the local government figures and what they considered to be “influential” people, having made lists before the invasion. They had infiltrated Ukrainian society to an incredible degree, but they still failed in the face of the fact that the Ukrainian public wasn’t a passive, docile thing they could pull this off against. Watch what comes out of this, when it’s all over; that crap will need to be studied and means of counteracting it will need to be developed. Much of what people decry about what Zelensky is doing with his domestic crack-downs is due to this sort of subversion by the Russians, who even co-opted the Russian Orthodox Church as a vector.
This war has lessons to it, that are extremely deep. The current swing of the wheel shows that mass in battle is at a disadvantage today, but that mass in terms of popular mobilization is on the upswing. Precision in targeting is extremely important because it allows an economy of force in terms of what you have for weapons and munitions, something the Russians are lacking in due to their incredibly foolish expenditure of all that stockpiled ammo over the last year.
Of course, in the long run, this is a good thing: They won’t have to worry about demilitarizing all those ammo dumps that they have blowing up every so often… The Ukrainians are doing that for them.
Useful RUSI paper on the early days of the invasion, which just came out:
https://static.rusi.org/202303-SR-Unconventional-Operations-Russo-Ukrainian-War-web-final.pdf.pdf
What is the end game?
Invading Russia? A rump Russia with no geographic security?
Let Russia keep eastern Ukraine, end the war.
We won’t, will have a weak Russia, depleted NATO and a destroyed Ukraine.
Helps China, no one else.
#notourwar
What’s the end game of letting Russia effectively annex Ukraine by force?
I always wondered what it must have been like to live in late 1930s Europe, watching the various idiots allow and outright enable Hitler as he re-militarized the Rhineland, took over Austria, annexed Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland… At which point, having allowed him to build up his forces and give them valuable live-fire training, they decided to do something about it.
Brilliant, that was. Today isn’t any different; Russia should have been slapped down hard back when they raped Chechnya, Georgia, and Transdniester. Instead, we all looked the other way, studiously, while the Russians violated the clear wording of the Budapest Memorandum by which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for guarantees of territorial integrity from the US and Russia.
I’m not sure what you people looking at this situation and defending Russia as though it has some “right” to buffer states all around it. How about the same rights applying to their neighbors? Shouldn’t they be able to demand chunks of Mother Russia to assuage their fears? Who invaded who, here?
The Russians are fundamentally insane. There’s zero reason for them to have done what they’ve done against their own interests since 1990, and they’re to blame for everything bad that’s happened. Nobody forced them to turn the end of Communism into a free-for-all that impoverished all the common people. They did that, themselves; the connected and the criminal got ahead, the same as they always did under the communists.
Frankly, I’m tired of hearing excuses and justifications for the Russians. I’m also tired of people fearfully saying that they’ve got nukes, so they get to play asshole to all their neighbors with impunity. What precedent do you suppose that sets?
Any wonder why Poland is arming itself to the teeth, when they should be spending that money on making lives better for Poles? Easy guess: Russia has them on the list for “after Ukraine”. Same with the Baltic states; same with Finland and all the rest of their former satrapys.
Russia is just about as bad as Islam; once they’ve put boots on the soil, they think it belongs to them forever, no matter what the locals might happen to think. This mentality has to be fought, or we’re all going to go under the yoke.
And, the time to do it is now, before Putin and his successors get more power. Ukraine is basically the 2020s version of Czechoslovakia; let him get those industries and agriculture under his control, digest the population, and that’ll enable future conquests. Money spent now is money that won’t have to be spent later on, and before the Russians grow their systems.