“The way you deal with Russian Artillery is: you kill it.”
As the war in Ukraine lingers on, the most visible sights on our screens, both the television and mobile phones are about destruction. In some places annihilation. Cities laid to waste, buildings razed to the ground, war fighting equipment strewn on highways, thousands rendered homeless and refugees in their own land.
In the absence of dog fights, classic tank battles and hand to hand combat, the largest contributor to this destruction is the artillery. In this it has been used to the maximum – ad maximum or maximum usum. Hence it is necessary that we analyse the employment of artillery as the decisive weapon of war by both militaries, including some doctrinal changes in its role in battle and draw a few transformational lessons for field commanders in the Indian context.
Doctrinal Issues
Central to the Russian artillery doctrine is the concept of mass – overwhelming use of firepower. Russians use artillery and rocket forces as a combat arm. The military strategy hinges around the mechanised forces, the maneuver element, encircling the enemy into a cauldron and the calling for artillery fires to destroy the encircled force.
This is much the opposite of most Western militaries and the Indian subcontinent, who use artillery as a combat support arm to soften up enemy defences or obstacle systems, break through with mechanised forces and then destroy the enemy forces. As Dave Johnson of Rand Corp says, “This is what the Russians do: they just hunker down, they conquer with Artillery, and they occupy with infantry”.[1]
That may not have worked in its entirety in the present context, the reasons of which are becoming clearer – unimaginative use of mechanised forces, lack of tactical air defence, long and insecure logistic lines, poor appreciation of Ukrainian capabilities and the international support that is forthcoming in huge numbers.
But after initial setbacks, the Russian Army got its act together and in weeks called up an extensive array of missiles, multi-barrel rocket launchers, guns including self-propelled guns and mortars to execute some of the largest artillery barrages in history after, perhaps the Second World War.
The other interesting doctrinal term used is called “operative encirclement”. This essentially means denying all ingress/egress routes to an enemy trapped or fixed by maneuver forces, by artillery fires. A classic case is of the ‘Severo Donetsk cauldron’ which trapped a large number of Ukrainian military forces forcing Kyiv to order a withdrawal from the city. (See map below).
Modern militaries must look at Attack by Artillery as a new operation of war. The overwhelming use of firepower has completely marginalised the role of the Russian Air Force, the Russian Tank Corps which was recently re-organised into Combined Arms Motorised Brigades or even the powerful Army Aviation Corps that were hardly seen in the Tactical Battle Area (TBA).
Map Courtesy: twitter.com (25 June 2022)
The Employment of Artillery
This is not the first time that Russian and NATO artillery equipment engaged each other in recent wars. Nevertheless, the initial days were typically Russian artillery pitched versus Soviet artillery, the major difference being that Russian artillery is more modern, possess longer ranges and has far superior ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance & recognition) capabilities. The Soviet artillery, relics of the erstwhile Soviet Union, are heavy, outdated, less effective and possessed very limited ISR capabilities. As a result, not only did the legacy Ukrainian artillery become ineffective, they also ran woefully short of ammunition and spares.
The Ukrainians continued to use erstwhile Warsaw Pact standard calibres – 122mm and 152mm which are not available with NATO. This asymmetry forced the NATO to step in – initially with thousands of rounds of ammunition of all calibres and as the Russian Army continued to relentlessly bombard its way towards capturing the entire portion of Eastern Ukraine, the US sent 108 x M-777 155mm How, the British 20 x M-109 155mm SPH, the French 12 x Caesar 155mm SPH to stall the Russian offensive.
Erstwhile Soviet bloc countries like Romania and Bulgaria, which still possess 152/122mm calibre (the standard Soviet bloc calibre) have reopened their ammunition factory lines to make up for the ammunition deficiencies in the Ukrainian legacy artillery systems. All these will have their attendant logistics issues, although mercifully NATO standard calibre is 155mm, a common factor binding all the NATO artillery.
The delivery of the HIMARS -142 or the High Mobility Artillery Rocket system from the US has been a game changer bringing immediate results in carrying out rocket attacks upto 70 km range on Russian concentrations. It carries a six-pack of GMLRS rockets or one TACMS missile, and is designed to launch the entire MLRS family of munitions. The missile has a range of 300kms.
A graphic from Twitter has this very expressive detail about the relevance of artillery in this war. Not only does the Russian artillery have a huge advantage in numbers (see Fig below), but there is a sizeable advantage in heavy calibres ranges as well. The Russian Artillery is strong than the Ukranian artillery (4.5 times) beyond the Tactical Battle Area and totally dominates the depth areas especially logistics installations and depots (6.5 times).
However, it is clearly evident that the pulverisation of Ukrainian cities and units which was common in the early part of the war has been somewhat negated and contested by the arrival of long-range heavy calibre NATO artillery in support of Ukraine. This has put the Russian artillery and its depth areas under threat although the numbers are few and need to be reinforced.
(Graphic : Courtesy Twitter handle Volodymyr_D_ as on 17 July 2022)
Towed Guns
One of the biggest takeaways for artilleries all over the world is the end of the towed gun systems. Towed artillery, particularly in the modern transparent battlefield, has extremely low survival rates, a fact that was abundantly visible as Russian gunners and their Orlan drones destroyed UA batteries with impunity. Drones, some imaginatively using grenades or mortar bombs dropped as dumb bombs over guns/AFVs or tanks played havoc. The inability of towed artillery to ‘shoot and scoot’ has become its nemesis.
Counter-battery fires have been extremely successful in this war, a clear indication of the excellent Intelligence, Surveillance & Recconaisance (ISR) and Battle Field Transparency (BFT) available to Commanders on both sides. ‘Shoot and scoot’ tactics by self-propelled guns, shifting battery positions, single gun engagements were seen on social media platforms. The absence of camouflage exposed many gun batteries to drone strikes, forcing most to be deployed in thick forests and glades to escape detection.
One of the biggest takeaways for artilleries all over the world is the end of the towed gun systems. Towed artillery, particularly in the modern transparent battlefield, has extremely low survival rates, a fact that was abundantly visible as Russian gunners and their Orlan drones destroyed UA batteries with impunity
The UA adopted asymmetric tactics to counter, stall or defeat the RA. Small artillery observation teams (OP parties) crawled up to as close as possible to RA mechanised and artillery units and guided armed drones onto these targets with considerable success. Further, the stretched logistics tail of the RA especially ammunition convoys were cherry picking for Special Forces teams that used the US Javelins and the British NLAWS ATGMs to effective use.
Innovation in communications was done by Ukrainian gunners who shifted their artillery tablets for planning fire missions onto Elon Musk’s STARLINKS GPS constellation. Resultantly, while fire mission orders were passed without secrecy, they were not interfered by Russian COMINT systems.
Use of PGM’s
Another issue of debate has been the efficacy of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs). Originally intended to use laser guidance and designation with improved fuzes and better accuracy, PGMs were to minimise collateral damage while maximising effect at the target. PGMs cost are prohibitive as compared to dumb bombs – an 155mm Excalibur is $176,000 a piece- as compared to a 155mm dumb bomb at $2230!
However, Russian PGMs like Krasnopol as well as others did not show any spectacular achievements on the ground. With satellite imagery, digitisation of maps, live video evidence to support missions and the ubiquitous drone overhead, accuracies of engagements by dumb bombs have improved considerably. Ukrainian gunners also innovated with local quadcopters or drones mounted with laser designators to ‘sparkle’ targets, say at a fixed wavelength. Kvitnyk PGMs were fired by 155mm SPHs with same fuse setting to ride the ‘sparkle’ beam and destroy the target. This ingenious innovation was extremely cost effective.
Innovation in communications was done by Ukrainian gunners who shifted their artillery tablets for planning fire missions onto Elon Musk’s STARLINKS GPS constellation. Resultantly, while fire mission orders were passed without secrecy, they were not interfered by Russian COMINT systems.
Lastly, the efficacy of Artillery is a direct function of sound logistics planning. The Russian gunners messed up their artillery logistics, especially in the initial stages of the war. In his insightful piece titled “Return of Industrial Warfare”, Alex Vershinin makes an attempt at assessing daily artillery engagements of the Russian artillery and how the numbers continue to be alarming in today’s day and age.
He calculates a total of approximately 390 artillery missions a day, expending 6240 rounds per day and with some wastages, concludes a figure of 7176 rounds per day.[2] That’s a conservative 150 truckloads a day, undoubtedly an artillery logisticians nightmare. This coupled with absence of Air Defence protection to rear depots, AD escorts to ammunition convoys, poor forecasting and limited routes of replenishment forced a logistics pause. The logistics pause, after the attack on Kiev failed, slowly built up the logistics shortfall as the RA began to muster its logistics resources from other Military Districts as far away as Vladivostok. Clearly ammunition forecast exceeded ammunition production, a major logistics failure.
Key takeaways from the Russia-Ukraine war
What are the takeaways from this war? Gunners across the world, especially in India can draw following lessons:
- Shift artillery doctrine from achieving destruction to annihilation. The days of infantry assaults led by armour are limited.
- Attack by Artillery must be followed by mopping up by mechanised forces/infantry. The era of sending body bags home is over.
- Towed guns must move into the legacy segment. In any case their employment may be restricted to high altitudes and mountains only.
- Asymmetric and innovative tactics must be encouraged to defeat weapons that pose a threat to guns. Counter Drone systems, for eg, must be available at each gun position.
- Review the cost-benefit of PGMs in a digitised, networked battlefield. With modern day ISR and Battle Field Transparency (BFT) available to Commanders, dumb bombs can be ‘smartened’ to a large degree.
- Logistics scales in Ukraine proved completely outdated and irrelevant to modern battle. Since Indian army equipment is largely Russian vintage, our scales of ammunition have largely followed the Russian experience. That needs to be seriously reviewed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it would be in order to revisit the role, organisation, equipment profile and logistics of the Indian Artillery. While mediumisation is underway, its way behind in timelines. There is scope and a window for opportunity to induct LRVs, especially MBRLs and UAVs in large numbers into the artillery to reduce the sensor to shooter link, improve BFT and pulverise objectives.
Most of all we must review our operational art especially the employment of artillery being the decisive instrument of force of an operational commander. With special reference to the Ukrainian war, there was an apt quote on Twitter which said “Everyone has a theory about 5th Generation warfare, until the artillery starts firing”. That should sum up the argument.
[1] Lara Seligman & others, “Outgunned. Outmanned. Outnumbered. Out planned?”, Politico, 16 June 2022.
[2] Alex Vershinin, “Return of Industrial Warfare”, RUSI Commentary, 17 June 2022.
