Jan 12, 2024
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Thanks to a huge consignment of shells from North Korea, Russian forces in Ukraine are flush with artillery ammunition.
What gunners don’t have in abundance are howitzer barrels. And there’s evidence the Russians are maintaining their best guns … by dismantling their worst guns.
A howitzer barrel usually is good for a few thousand shots before its steel becomes brittle or bends. If an artillery battery doesn’t replace worn-out barrels in time, it risks catastrophic accidents as shells explode inside their guns. Something we’ve seen many, many times on both sides of Russia’s 23-month wider war on Ukraine.
The math is unforgiving for Russia’s gunners. There might be 2,000 Russian howitzers along the 600-mile front line in Ukraine. Altogether, Russian batteries are firing at least 10,000 rounds a day.
That’s just five rounds per gun per day, over average. At that average firing rate, a howitzer barrel should last a little over a year. But in practice, the guns in the most critical sectors of the front fire much more than average, while the guns in the quieter sectors might fire less.
Around Avdiivka, Bakhmut or Krynky, Russian artillery batteries might need to replace their barrels every couple of months.
An artillery barrel requires high-quality steel and precision machining. Before the war, just two factories in Russia were equipped for producing artillery barrels: the Motovilikha Plant in Perm and Barrikady in Volgograd. It’s unclear whether the Kremlin has established any new production facilities or found a foreign source for replacement barrels. North Korea, perhaps.
In any event, it’s evident the Russians are struggling to produce the thousands of replacement artillery barrels they need to keep their big guns firing at their current high rate.
Russia is visually confirmed to have lost 1143 pieces of artillery so far, when plotted as a % of each month's losses, we see that Towed Artillery has been decreasing almost vanishing, but MLRS has been an increasing proportion of the losses. I think this might be, Russia… pic.twitter.com/Hei5SznI96
— Richard Vereker (@verekerrichard1) January 12, 2024
According to open-source analyst Richard Vereker, the Kremlin has been pulling out of long-term storage thousands of Cold War-vintage towed howitzers. But it’s not necessarily sending those old—but lightly-used—guns to the front in order to make good the roughly 1,100 artillery pieces Russian forces have lost since February 2022.
No, it seems technicians instead are yanking the barrels off the old towed guns and using them as a replacements for worn-out barrels on the most important self-propelled howitzers.
Vereker came to that conclusion after noting the precipitous decline in losses among Russia’s towed artillery batteries. Towed artillery “is coming out of storage much quicker than [self-propelled guns], but I think it’s to strip off the barrel and put it onto an SPG.”
If Vereker is right and the Russians are cannibalizing their towed artillery in order to keep their self-propelled artillery in action, the question—for advocates of a free Ukraine—is how many old guns the Russians have left, and thus how many spare barrels they can generate without building them from scratch.
In other words, are barrels a bottleneck in Russia’s artillery supply? And could a shortage of barrels throttle Russian firepower?
Not this year, if at all. According to Vereker, the Kremlin in 2021 was sitting on 12,300 old towed artillery pieces. After nearly two years of fighting, it was down to 7,500 stored towed pieces—implying it has yanked the barrels off as many as 4,800 old guns.
The recovered barrels, plus any new barrels Russian industry has produced, were enough to keep 2,000 howitzers shooting for two years. Assuming most of the 7,500 old towed howitzers remaining in storage aren’t already totally worn out, these guns—stripped for parts—could keep the front-line batteries in action for another two years.
If so, that points to 2026 as the crisis year in Russian weapons-supply. As it happens, that’s also the year the Russians could run out of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks.
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“…these guns—stripped for parts—could keep the front-line batteries in action for another two years.
If so, that points to 2026 as the crisis year in Russian weapons-supply. As it happens, that’s also the year the Russians could run out of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks.”
To repeat it for the umpteenth time, with the right tools, the AFU could cut the potential length of the war significantly. But, maybe the north korean shells will help along the way by demolishing many more roach artillery.
I wonder if the Moskali can make anything from all the steelworks they stole from the Donbas?
I think it’s safe to say that their production capacity for gun barrels is quite limited. The quality of such stuff is on the lower level anyhow.