....very good point....! another article about this M777 on another website points out this gun needs an 8-man crew, while previous howitzers needed 5-man crews...
I am no artillery expert, and don’t pretend to be one...this is a link to an article that is rather critical of this new weapon...just posting it for info....I have no axe to grind....
https://www.herald.co.zw/us-sends-arms-to-ukraine-it-cannot-operate-effectively/
1. The M777 howitzer is not the maintenance nightmare he describes. Any new weapon has a sorting out period where not-perfectly-designed parts break/wear out and they are reengineered and issued with the new mods. The M777 has proven itself in Iraq and if does have an 8-man crew, it's a slight reduction in the gun crew compared to its predecessor.
2. The M198 had an 11 man gun crew (counting the truck driver for the howitzer) and we needed ever darn one of those cannoneers. It weighed 7 1/2 tons and "hipshoots" were both tragic and funny at the same time: the crews would race around getting that beast emplaced and laid to be ready to fire and it took all of them to do it in less than 12 minutes. 12 minutes to fire the first round! As compared to our M101A1 105mm howitzer we could have off the truck and firing in 30 seconds!
3. There's more than the M777 and its employment in the training: US and NATO sighting systems use a 6400 mil circle and the Russians (and the Ukrainians) use a 6000 mil circle - so they have to learn a whole new fire control system to use it. I was once asked by a Russian artillery officer if "we could use the Russian systems if we got them" - and it was a trick questions to see if I really was an artillery officer or I was a spy - and I knew about their 6000 mil orienting system and told him so.. Passed that test and I was given a tour of the Artillery School in Perm as a reward - and I was present during their class graduation and I am in about a hundred photographs with a graduate on one side of me and his proud mother on the other side.
I think of those Russian kids and their moms and wish all to beat hell that Putin hadn't ordered them into Ukraine. It's a stupid, unnecessary war and a waste of Russian and Ukrainian lives.
I had a tour of the Bastogne battlefield in 1995 and the guide from the US Embassy remarked to me that it was "sad to see all those German graves at the cemetery". I told him that "if they all stayed in Germany, they'd have lived long lives".