Since its arrival in Ukraine in the summer of 2022, the CAESAR mobile artillery system from the French KNDS has established itself as one of the most effective systems in this theater of operations.
Significantly outperforming the systems inherited from the Soviet era in terms of mobility, precision and range, it has become, in a few months, The nightmare of Russian gunners, in their own words.
Since then, many other Western self-propelled systems, from the German Pzh2000 to the American M109, have been delivered to Ukraine. However, recent statistics, emanating from internal documents of the Ukrainian army, show that the CAESAR outperforms, in many aspects, these other systems, to the point of highlighting certain conceptual weaknesses which, today, tend to change the expressions of needs of the armies in this area.
Automation and armoring, at the heart of the expressions of need concerning mobile artillery systems, until now
Indeed, before the war in Ukraine, certain criteria appeared almost systematically in the needs expressed by the armed forces, concerning the acquisition of new mobile artillery systems.
Automation of the firing chain, and in particular automatic shell and charge loading systems, represented the bulk of the requests, in order to guarantee high rates of fire, with a reduced crew. In addition, models offering an armoured turret, to protect the crews, were favoured in calls for tenders, and competition criteria.
Obviously, these two criteria require heavy systems, with tracked platforms or 8x8 or even 10x10 carriers, often to the detriment of mobility, particularly to exploit the dense road networks in this region.
In this context, the French CAESAR, a system of barely 17 tons in combat mass, mounted on a fast and maneuverable 6x6 truck, equipped with a semi-automatic loading system and lacking a protected turret, was perceived, most of the time, as an anomaly, having sacrificed everything to air transportability, and especially intended for theaters of lesser intensity.
Lessons from Ukraine on the effectiveness of Western mobile artillery systems
In the field of artillery, the war in Ukraine has profoundly shaken many certainties, often inherited from Cold War doctrines. And the French CAESAR, the first Western-designed system to join the Ukrainian armies in the summer of 2022, and the combat performance that this atypical system has demonstrated since then, has a lot to do with it.
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