13 ms·

Good explainer w/o bias towards either side. Explains why Ukrainians want the MLRS systems so much.

remarkEon 4y ago
Austria maintains neutrality (they are not NATO members), so I'm not surprised and agree that this is a pretty good unbiased review of the situation. I thought it was really interesting that the M777s we've been giving the Ukrainians don't come with the PIK systems allowing them to use Excalibur rounds. I assume this is because we don't want the Russians to get that technology should (read: when) those systems get captured.
- horns4lyfe 4y ago
  Ehhh…do you have experience with them? If so, I’m happy to hear a new perspective, but I’ve actually shot quite a few of them and for the 100k they cost they’re pretty bad. The systems on the guns malfunction a lot and it ends up just being a really expensive HE round. A competent forward observer and fire direction officer(or nco) can drop accurate rounds faster for a lot less money. It always just felt like another in a long line of cash grabs for Raytheon.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    Thanks for the in-field report on those systems. How good do you think Russian forces are at counter-battery fire in general, and has technology and/or doctrine evolved to better protect FiSTers these days?
    - horns4lyfe 4y ago
      I can’t speak from direct experience with Russians, but I’d bet they’re pretty good at it, as effective artillery fire (aside from target locating) is really more of a function of training rather than technology. For FiSTers though, it’s different. They have some truly impressive (albeit heavy) tech that can be used to spot targets from a pretty long distance. I so although any FiSTer worth their paycheck can call in fire with a map and compass, there is useful tech for them to get the target location to the guns.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    I was an 11A, so personally no I never pulled the cord for that specific round. My FO and most of the other FA lieutenants held, basically, the same opinion as you (it's cheaper and ultimately faster to drop conventional rounds). Still, if we're not giving the Ukrainians those specific systems I'd assume the reason is we don't want the technology leaving NATO.
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    Interesting: why are they bad, and why are they so expensive? I would have thought it would be the one or the other. GPS guided drones, for example, are like under a hundred bucks, so I don't get why a GPS guided shell should be literally a thousand times more expensive, and still not work.
    - the_biot 4y ago
      The Russians have been jamming GPS frequencies routinely for years, and apparently pretty much continuously in the Ukraine war. Also consumer drones can carry almost no weight, certainly not anything genuinely heavy like a shell. And let's not forget their range -- even as lightweight as they are -- which is so limited as to make them useless as anything but toys.
      - pasabagi 4y ago
        The thing the drones prove is that you can can solve the guidance problem cheaply and with commodity hardware. Obviously, an excalibur shell has like a rocket booster, and there are lots of things like jamming that could cause problems, but the thing that I'm really asking is, why doesn't somebody make a cheap (JDAM style) guidance kit for shells? It just seems to me to be manifestly technically feasible to produce such a kit for very little, even if you went out of your way to overcomplicate things, and if it was jammed, you could just have it drop down into 'dumb bomb' mode. (Personally, I feel the worse bang-for-buck the military gets, the better, because it means less people get blown up per dollar wasted on weapons[0], but I can't believe it's just institutional dysfunction that results in a 100,000 dollar shell that doesn't work half the time). [0]: imagine if the war in Iraq had been three orders of magnitude less expensive, for instance: it's entirely possible that the argument for expanding the conflict into Iran would have been viable then, to everybody's detriment.
    - horns4lyfe 4y ago
      I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with them from n engineering perspective, but from a user perspective the guidance rarely worked correctly (a scary possibility with artillery) and the system the gun was retrofitted with just wouldn’t function a lot. As far as cost, if Raytheon was selling that gps guided drone to the government, you can bet it would cost orders of magnitude more than the consumer version. The military industrial complex is not a myth.

Austria maintains neutrality (they are not NATO members), so I'm not surprised and agree that this is a pretty good unbiased review of the situation. I thought it was really interesting that the M777s we've been giving the Ukrainians don't come with the PIK systems allowing them to use Excalibur rounds. I assume this is because we don't want the Russians to get that technology should (read: when) those systems get captured.

horns4lyfe 4y ago
Ehhh…do you have experience with them? If so, I’m happy to hear a new perspective, but I’ve actually shot quite a few of them and for the 100k they cost they’re pretty bad. The systems on the guns malfunction a lot and it ends up just being a really expensive HE round. A competent forward observer and fire direction officer(or nco) can drop accurate rounds faster for a lot less money. It always just felt like another in a long line of cash grabs for Raytheon.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  Thanks for the in-field report on those systems. How good do you think Russian forces are at counter-battery fire in general, and has technology and/or doctrine evolved to better protect FiSTers these days?
  - horns4lyfe 4y ago
    I can’t speak from direct experience with Russians, but I’d bet they’re pretty good at it, as effective artillery fire (aside from target locating) is really more of a function of training rather than technology. For FiSTers though, it’s different. They have some truly impressive (albeit heavy) tech that can be used to spot targets from a pretty long distance. I so although any FiSTer worth their paycheck can call in fire with a map and compass, there is useful tech for them to get the target location to the guns.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  I was an 11A, so personally no I never pulled the cord for that specific round. My FO and most of the other FA lieutenants held, basically, the same opinion as you (it's cheaper and ultimately faster to drop conventional rounds). Still, if we're not giving the Ukrainians those specific systems I'd assume the reason is we don't want the technology leaving NATO.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  Interesting: why are they bad, and why are they so expensive? I would have thought it would be the one or the other. GPS guided drones, for example, are like under a hundred bucks, so I don't get why a GPS guided shell should be literally a thousand times more expensive, and still not work.
  - the_biot 4y ago
    The Russians have been jamming GPS frequencies routinely for years, and apparently pretty much continuously in the Ukraine war. Also consumer drones can carry almost no weight, certainly not anything genuinely heavy like a shell. And let's not forget their range -- even as lightweight as they are -- which is so limited as to make them useless as anything but toys.
    - pasabagi 4y ago
      The thing the drones prove is that you can can solve the guidance problem cheaply and with commodity hardware. Obviously, an excalibur shell has like a rocket booster, and there are lots of things like jamming that could cause problems, but the thing that I'm really asking is, why doesn't somebody make a cheap (JDAM style) guidance kit for shells? It just seems to me to be manifestly technically feasible to produce such a kit for very little, even if you went out of your way to overcomplicate things, and if it was jammed, you could just have it drop down into 'dumb bomb' mode. (Personally, I feel the worse bang-for-buck the military gets, the better, because it means less people get blown up per dollar wasted on weapons[0], but I can't believe it's just institutional dysfunction that results in a 100,000 dollar shell that doesn't work half the time). [0]: imagine if the war in Iraq had been three orders of magnitude less expensive, for instance: it's entirely possible that the argument for expanding the conflict into Iran would have been viable then, to everybody's detriment.
  - horns4lyfe 4y ago
    I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with them from n engineering perspective, but from a user perspective the guidance rarely worked correctly (a scary possibility with artillery) and the system the gun was retrofitted with just wouldn’t function a lot. As far as cost, if Raytheon was selling that gps guided drone to the government, you can bet it would cost orders of magnitude more than the consumer version. The military industrial complex is not a myth.