Artillery

Artillery is indirect firepower: guns, howitzers, mortars, and rockets that hit targets their crews never see, guided by forward observers, drones, and radar. Soldiers have called it the king of battle for two centuries because it causes most battlefield casualties in most wars, a statistic Ukraine has confirmed for the 21st century. Estimates through the war's first years attributed the large majority of casualties on both sides to artillery fire.

Tubes and rockets

The tube side centers on the 155mm howitzer in NATO and 152mm in the Russian sphere, either towed like the M777 or self-propelled like the German PzH 2000 and Korean K9, which drive, shoot, and leave. Range runs roughly 24 to 40 km depending on shell and charge, with rocket-boosted and ramjet shells pushing further. The rocket side trades sustained fire for salvo weight and reach: HIMARS and MLRS launchers firing GPS-guided GMLRS rockets to about 80 km became the war's signature precision weapon, and the ATACMS and successor PrSM missiles fired from the same launchers reach hundreds of kilometers.

The modern kill chain matters more than the gun. A drone spots, a fire-control network like Ukraine's GIS Arta assigns the mission to whichever battery is in range, the rounds land inside two or three minutes, and the battery moves before counter-battery radar can answer. Survival time for artillery that lingers is now measured in minutes, which ended the massed gun lines of older doctrine. Shoot and scoot is no longer a technique. It is the entire lifestyle.

Precision versus mass

The West spent two decades betting that precision would substitute for volume, then watched Ukraine consume shells at rates no Western stockpile could sustain, up to 10,000 rounds a day on the Ukrainian side and multiples of that on the Russian. The honest lesson is that precision and mass are not substitutes. Guided shells like Excalibur hit point targets, but suppression, smoke, and area denial still run on volume, and volume runs on the industrial base. Hence the scramble documented across every allied capital to multiply 155mm production.

Who supplies the market?

Howitzers come from BAE Systems (M777, Archer), KNDS and Rheinmetall (PzH 2000, RCH 155), Hanwha (K9, the export leader by volume), and Elbit (ATMOS). Lockheed Martin owns the HIMARS and GMLRS franchise. Beneath them sits the ammunition chain, shell forgers, propellant plants, fuze makers, and the barrel-boring capacity that only a handful of plants worldwide maintain, which is where the current expansion money is actually landing.