While Russia has experienced difficulties elsewhere on the battlefield, artillery has been central to its ability to hold Ukrainian forces at bay. This article explores how the Russian armed forces have adapted traditional artillery practices to overcome challenges and achieve greater efficacy. Artillery is central to the Russian way of war, so it is beholden upon Western forces to properly understand how it has been applied in Ukraine. Russia’s artillery war is best analysed through two mechanisms: artillery doctrine – which provides the foundation for how artillery use has changed – and what artillery practitioners refer to as the gunnery problem.
The gunnery problem is the same regardless of country, and describes the technical challenges involved in hitting a target with indirect fires. These challenges include accurate acquisition and use of meteorological data, which will impact flight path and speed; and survey data, which is critical to identifying where the firing gun is located and where it is pointing, as well as accurate location of the target. An additional element of the gunnery problem is calibration of the gun and ammunition. This involves measuring the temperature of the ammunition, the barrel wear, and the velocity of each shot if possible.
If this information can be paired with sufficiently accurate target coordinates, an artillery battery will be able to fire for effect from its first rounds and will require fewer adjustments. The traditional approach without this is to fire rounds from a single battery and observe their deviation from the target. Corrections are made using forward observers, laser targeting systems and uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). Artillery rounds will disperse along the range of fire as well as the line. The range refers to accuracy in front of or behind the target. Line refers to dispersion on either side of the target, as a result of which tube artillery produces a beaten zone that is approximately cigar-shaped.
It is important to understand the gunnery problem because it dictates what artillery forces must do to affect a target. The willingness of users to understand the gunnery problem, as well as doctrine, dictates efficacy. Because of this, the ability of the Russians to account for these technical limitations and achieve the commander’s desired effect provides a useful benchmark for Russian artillery efficacy in Ukraine. Russian forces manoeuvre to fire, Western forces fire to manoeuvre’ is a neat encapsulation of Russian doctrine compared with the West. Put simply, Russia uses artillery as its primary form of lethality in the deep and close battles.
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