Artillery on Future Weapons

[Sir_Krahn]

I was watching Future Weapons on the discovery channel last night and I saw something pretty cool. The Germans now the world's most advanced artillery unit, the Panzer Howitzer 2000. It is a tank that can travel around 40 mph in the roughest of terrains and it has a rapid fire cannon that can fire at objects 25 miles away. My question is, why don't we have something like this?

[Vulture6]

Program was cancelled during defense budget review a couple of years ago (Paladin)

[Sir_Krahn]

yea i guess if we are good enough with the weapons we got now, then there really isn't much need.

[USMC Chuter]

And it's a self-propelled howitzer, not a tank.

[Sir_Krahn]

I am no expert on weapons. To a civilian like me it looks like a tank. I am wrong you are right.

[SGRock]

It was interesting to see that there is an American arty piece, very similar to this one but a towed version, in testing right now.

[Grimmy]

There's issues particular to US military that the Germans dont have to consider much.

Deployability. How hard will it be to keep that thing up and running in a deployment environment? How do you justify having a battalion's worth of firepower in one gun system if that gun can be taken out of the fight by simple drive train problems?
I spent some time in an arty regiment (10th Mar) and I can tell ya, when we'd go to Ft. Bragg for a shoot, it was not at all unusual to see self propelled arty along the side of the road due to transimission problems, engine failures etc. (Not along the road to Ft. Bragg, they were hauled on transport trucks to the range. We'd lose them at the range during "shoot and scoot" movements).

It's a whole whoppin lot easier to keep guns in the fight if you can simply comandeer another truck to lumber that gun up to if the first truck breaks down.

Also, how would they manage to plop that big ol' self-propelled gun system down onto a mountain top for a firebase? It's stuck to where ever you can get to on a road or terrain traversable by very heavy tracked vehicles.

In an old, no longer applicable, large unit manuever warfare model...such as that of WW2 or the potential of Soviet vs US european war, such a gun might have have value. Now, it's just a really expensive collection of cool sounding stats that really has no usable place in a real military's inventory.

Personally, I can see a whole lot more value in developing larger bore and longer ranged mortar systems that are still light enough to be man-transportable on a battlefield of rugged terrain.

[SGRock]

Originally Posted by Grimmy

Personally, I can see a whole lot more value in developing larger bore and longer ranged mortar systems that are still light enough to be man-transportable on a battlefield of rugged terrain.

HMMM. Sounds like the 81 mm MORTAR. LOL
Actually the gun I was reffering to was a towed weapon with all of the features that the Germans had on their SP arty pieces.

[Grimmy]

not 81s!!

They should make y'all carry at least 120s :P