“The audacity of the wheeled cannon is the maximum efficiency,” Beaudouin told Defense News. “You sacrifice nothing in terms of firepower, rate of fire, precision and range, and you’ve got a truck, armored all the same, but which is able to be nimble, which is very stealthy.”
Beaudouin was part of the French Army’s decision to buy an upgraded Caesar, so he might be suspected of bias toward wheels. But at least nine other countries, including the U.K. and Germany, decided to invest in self-propelled wheeled howitzers in the past year. Analysts said the Ukrainian experience is driving military planners’ interest.
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Interest in wheeled self-propelled artillery flows from a desire for a “much higher degree of mobility and survivability” than towed guns, said Daniels. Military staff who see wheels as an attractive option over tracks “often define survivability in a broader way, as opposed to seeing it purely from the physical protection offered by onboard armor,” he added.
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“Ukrainian use of shoot-and-scoot artillery fire suggests that the future lies in highly mobile artillery, be they tracked or wheeled,” Jones said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14513149/Russia-nightmare-Ukraine-best-artillery-guns.html
Probably because EU trusted us Finns to keep the eastern border with our artillery, and we couldn’t give it to Ukraine because we need it to keep Russia away.
https://www.quora.com/Does-Finland-indeed-have-the-largest-artillery-force-in-Western-Europe-If-so-why-Does-Finnish-military-doctrine-rely-heavily-upon-artillery
Very different landscapes though, 75% of Finland is covered by forests, whereas I think it’s less so for Ukraine. Ya, 16.7%. There’s pros and cons to the differences.
Yeah, the problem with Ukraine is you can slam armored columns through the landscape a lot easier.
As soon as things start to slow down in tougher terrain like you are describing in Finland artillery just becomes even more decisive because the coordinated movements of concentrated mechanized forces becomes more and more bottlenecked to having to pass through very obvious and predictable artillery targets you can precompute if you want.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5bhRe5oVBbY&pp=0gcJCb4JAYcqIYzv
This video just came out of Ukraine and demonstrates an example of how artillery becomes even more powerful with bottlenecks, a signficant vigorous Russian armored assault here is snagged up by fierce resistance… in the form of mines, dragons teeth but then the critical devastating weapons system is the… dirt trench.
The dirt trench makes the Russian vehicles sit there for just long enough to figure out what to do for artillery to fire a salvo and rain down on their vulnerable, static position. Once the artillery locks onto the position pushing that avenue of assault becomes essentially a lost cause though the Russians seem to have a hard time realizing that in this case. The motorbikes may be a brutal way to attempt to gamble being able to pass through the artillery zone fast enough not to die to shrapnel, and if you don’t value your life that may work for awhile…but there is a reason armored vehicles aren’t going anywhere, assaulting somebody with artillery and artillery spotters like this is a daunting prospect and you better be ready to do so or you will get obliterated.
Without the artillery that dirt trench was just an annoying somewhat confusing delay, with the artillery it spelled the end of the entire operation and worse the entire existence of the people involved in this folly of an assault. That is how artillery changes things.