Posted on 05/13/2013 3:42:25 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Scoot and Shoot “à la Française:” Caesar SP Gun Transforms French Artillery
(Source: defense-aerospace.com; published May 7, 2013)
By Giovanni de Briganti
DRAGUIGNAN, France --- The French army has almost completed the wholesale transformation of its artillery, a process which has seen the merger of its air-defense and field artillery units and the gradual replacement of its towed (TRF1) and self-propelled (AUF1) 155mm howitzers by the Caesar truck-mounted, air-transportable gun of the same caliber but with substantially longer range.
In terms of units, the reorganization will be completed this summer with the disbandment of the 8th Artillery Regiment, the fourth to be disbanded since 2008 in a process which also saw the number of artillery officers reduced by 28%.
Despite having fewer units, the artillery’s overall firepower will in fact be enhanced because the truck-mounted Caesar, fitted with a 52-caliber tube, is able not only to attain ranges of the order of 40 kilometers, but also to deliver fire support over an area 45% greater than with a 39-caliber tube, which has a range of less than 30 km. Caesar is the acronym of CAmion Equipé d’un Système d’ARtillerie, or truck equipped with an artillery system.
The goal of the transformation is to be able to provide each of the army’s future maneuver units with an integral fire support unit comprising heavy and medium fire-support, as well as air-defense cover with Mistral truck-mounted surface-to-air missiles and 20mm automatic cannon. In parallel, the French army has also adopted the “joint fires” concept, with Fire Support Teams to maximize the return on firepower. These teams are designated “Détachement de Liaison, d’ Observation et de Coordination” (DLOC) by the French army.
In all, the French army plans to ultimately field 141 Caesars, 128 towed 120mm mortars, 186 Mistral missile launchers and 60 VAB wheeled vehicles armed with a 20mm dual-purpose gun. It also operates 24 Guided MLRS launchers, half of which will be retired by the end of this year.
Once the older 155mm weapons are retired – the process will be entirely completed by 2019 – all of the French army’s field artillery -- Caesar and 120mm rifled mortar – will be air-transportable by C-130H Hercules, thereby improving not only tactical but also strategic mobility, Lt Col Cyril Mathias, head of the French artillery capability branch, told reporters here April 22. He and other officers spoke during a media event organized by the Versailles, France-based Nexter Group, maker of the Caesar and its Bonus smart munition, and the French army's artillery school, based in this town in south-eastern France.
Caesar’s mobility was most recently illustrated in Mali, when the French army deployed four Caesars and four 120mm mortars in support of Operation Serval. Few details have as yet been released about their performance there, but the simple fact that they were deployed in a matter of days by standard military transport provided ground troops with a level of support that would have proved impossible with older self-propelled or towed 155mm guns.
Halving the size of the artillery branch while increasing available firepower was only made possible by Caesar, a novel 52-calibre cannon mounted on a six-wheeled medium truck and whose all-up weight does not exceed 18 metric tonnes. The only comparable artillery vehicle is the BAE Systems Archer, co-developed for Norway and Sweden, but at 30 metric tonnes it weighs half as much again, says Gen. Jacques Grenier, (ret’d), artillery adviser to Nexter Group. A conventional 155mm tracked self-propelled howitzer, like the German army’s PzH 2000, weighs 55 metric tonnes, mostly due to its armor protection, tracked running gear and rotating turret.
Nexter, then known as GIAT Industries, originally developed Caesar as a private venture in the 1990s, and won the first French army order thanks to the unexpected support of then Defense Minister Alain Richard, who overruled opposition by the army staff, which disliked the idea of a gun on a truck. This led some wags to say Caesar really stands for “CAnon à Effet de Surprise d’Alain Richard,” or Alain Richard’s surprise effect gun.
The minister’s support led to an initial order for five guns in 2002, followed in 2004 by another for 72. The army staff now thinks so highly of the weapon that it plans to order an additional 64 for delivery between 2015 and 2019.
Export orders have slowly mounted up, especially after Caesar was deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 – barely 12 months after it entered French service in December 2008. As of late April, Grenier said, the company had delivered 183 guns out of 252 ordered by France (77), Indonesia (32), Thailand (7) and an unidentified Middle-Eastern country that Nexter will not name but which is widely known to be Saudi Arabia (132).
Nexter is very upbeat about the gun’s prospects, thanks to what it believes is a unique mix of long-distance firepower, light weight and low acquisition and ownership costs.
Caesar’s remarkably short reaction times multiply its effects. When it stops to fire, for example, its tube is already pointed towards its target, and fine laying is done in a matter of seconds. Each gun can fire 6 rounds per minute, and 1 minute and 40 seconds after having stopped, Caesar is ready to move on, thus avoiding counter-battery fire. Its five-man crew and some ammunition are carried on board, and it is fitted with semi-automatic loading, automatic laying and has a hydraulically-operated firing ramp.
Caesar's 40 km range with standard high-explosive shells can be extended to 42 km using Extended-Range Full Bore (ERFB) rounds, and even to over 55 km with additional propulsion. Accuracy is also quite good, with six rounds fired at a range of 37 km having a dispersion of less than 150 meters, according to French army range officers.
Nexter believes that thanks to these features, Caesar can become the natural replacement for the ubiquitous NATO-standard M-109 self-propelled gun, of which over 2,000 units were sold worldwide. One likely new customer is Denmark, which had to drop its original plan to buy the BAE Archer because of budget restrictions, and which is now expected to instead opt for Caesar.
Nexter's ability to provide “smart” munitions as well as a high-performance gun should prove a significant competitive advantage, Grenier says. Nexter demonstrated the Bonus anti-tank round it developed together with Sweden’s Bofors (now part of BAE Systems); Switzerland, originally a program member, pulled out before full-scale development.
Bonus is a cargo shell which carries two sub-munitions which are ejected at an altitude of about 200 meters above the target area, and which scan the ground as they fall to earth. Their explosively-formed penetrator warheads attack any armored vehicles they detect. The French army demonstrated two Bonus salvoes on April 22: the first two rounds hit three out of four targets (rusty tank hulls heated by petrol fires at a range of 30 km), but two of the four sub-munitions of the second salvo missed their targets, one of them impacting a target already hit.
Neither Grenier nor other French officers would be drawn about Bonus’ unit price, but one observed that, whatever the price, it will always be the least expensive way of delivering a high-explosive warhead on target at a range of 40 km – in all weathers, by day and night. Aircraft-launched weapons, he noted, are far more expensive and require that the aircraft be able to take off, something that weather and local conditions sometimes limit or preclude, but which do not affect artillery.
Article history: -- May 12: updated with minor editing changes. -- May 13: corrected date of April 22 firing demonstration.
-ends-
Then imagine that you have 8 inch howitzers firing in GS reinforcing; 203 millimeters of pure, precise devastation and 200 pounds of America's best HE and forged steel to overlay your fires.
Nice, isn't it?
Now please don't tell me that we're back to towing 8 inch howitzers...
In that kind of combat environment, the King of Battle needs rapid-moving and rapid-firing SP artillery, not just light DS.
Larger cannons can be towed than can be self-propelled.
I’m going to venture a guess that you’re not an engineer and probably never served in artillery..
Eight inch guns are a little large for towing and WAY too large for air lifting.
The L/12 is 16.5 inch towed artillery.
Incorrect.
The US had several towed 8" and larger guns.
The 240 mm howitzer M1 was towed.
Even the frickin 280mm M65 atomic cannon was towed.
Here's an
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_howitzers
Btw I am an engineer and served in the US Army artillery -if that helps.
Your definition of “towed” and mine differ a bunch! The M65 wasn’t Towed in my book: it is clearly carried by its transport and then emplaced on the ground. We have one of those puppies at Aberdeen and I would be pleased to show it to you. As far as I know, 240mm howitzer was rarely used -Anzio, as I remember.
You are correct that we had towed 8 Inch howitzers in WWII. Very clearly a large, unwieldy weapon on today’s battlefields. Should I ever be privileged to command a division, I would opt for the SP version..
How's that again?! This one's bigger than 9 inches...and it is towed.
*oh yeah, we had a self-propelled version, but we scrapped it...wanna **guess** why?? You can guess; I can tell ya.
Self-propelled howitzers provide mobility, speed (compared to towed, anyway) rapidity in emplacement, crew assistance in the form of projectile handling, loading and aiming and can use much smaller crews and fire far more rapidly. Further, SP howitzers can be used for more rapidly shifting fire fans than a towed howitzer, covering more area for attack. SP guns do require more maintenance support than towed artillery but the mobility and speed of firing is worth the effort.
We have the technology, so it's time to use it. Modern howitzers aim using ring laser gyros which sense the turn of the Earth so precisely that we can aim within less than one mil in traverse and elevation. We now have ballistic programs that can iterate the flight of the projectile through all of the elements of its trajectory including the latest weather effects and provide a firing solution that dead-nuts-on for the first shot as long as we're given a good target location. We have laser rangefinders now, so the targets provided are pretty darn good. As I mentioned earlier, I have worked on an armored system which will be capable of accurate firing on the move for our future battlefields - we are in the 21st Century now and our prospective enemies all have large, modern armies. We have to be able to offset their advantages in mass and mobility, so we have to use the best equipment possible.
It's fine to look back to the past to gain an appreciation for history but do you seriously think we should use towed 240mm howitzers today? Heck, we had massive railway guns too but do you think those are a great idea today?
Why not go back to horses as prime movers?
I don’t see a need for larger artillery than our standard 155 mm at this time. Rockets, aircraft, and drones are for longer distances or harder targets.
Really, I just took issue with your bizarre claim that “you’re not an engineer and probably never served in artillery.. Eight inch guns are a little large for towing...” when we towed greater than 9 inch artillery into battle in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam.
It’s as though you didn’t know that we towed larger artillery, yet were pretending that others didn’t know what they were talking about.
Now you know.
“I don’t see a need for larger artillery than our standard 155 mm at this time.”
They have a devastating effect on massed things like artillery and vehicles. Also on Japs hiding in caves/bunkers.
Artillery is mandatory. Size was the point/debate.
Sizes have tradeoffs. Time to fire. Crew sizes to load/reload. Blast radius/depth. Quantity of munitions that can be transported.
Don’t fight the last war.
Well. that's swell. Now what is the basis for your expertise?
To the best of my knowledge, we never used any artillery larger than an 8 inch in Vietnam. We had that worthless 175mm but that isn't larger. You have repeated the "all we need is towed artillery" tripe, so let's hear about your actual experience.
The pic in post #29 is from Vietnam.
A surprise to me - I spent 18 months in combat over there and never saw or heard of anything like that beast. They must’ve had a whole lot of ammo left over from WWII and Korea and had to use it somewhere. I was at Dong Ha and Con Thien and even though we had several battalions of Marine Corps and Army artillery there, we didn’t have monstrosities like that.
You still haven’t answered my question: did you serve in artillery or did you get all of your opinions from reading?
Here's my experience: I actually served on towed 155mm (M114) and 105mm (M101A1) gun sections for several months in combat. Work on a cannon section is strenuous to say the least. You have to manhandle the stupid thing into position over ground that is never level, you have to dig it in, including digging trail pits and recoil pits, dig the position in/fill sandbags, put up a camo net, manhandle the ammunition boxes and break out the ammunition and of course, run through the manual labor of serving and firing the damn thing. With the 105, we often hit firing rates of 500-1,000 rounds per tube per day during Operations Prairie and Hastings on the DMZ. That meant convoys of trucks to the ammo dumps, working parties to unload the ammo and then break the WWII-era ammo out of its boxes and then strip it out of its creosote tubes. Hours of backbreaking labor in the sweltering heat. Towed guns are comparatively light compared to SPs and therefore the smaller ones can be moved by helicopter, however, most of the time you move by towing with a truck. The gun has to be broken down and march ordered and then hitched to the truck. If you are under fire, you have the choice of trying to get all that done so you can recover the guns, or just get the heck out of Dodge and hope there's something left to recover when you get back. While you're towing the guns, you are slow, loaded with ammunition and crew and extremely vulnerable to ambushes. We lost a lot of people during our convoys.
After Vietnam, I was commissioned and spent 24 years as an artillery officer, including commanding a 24 gun 155mm artillery battalion. I applied many of the lessons I learned as an enlisted cannoneer as an officer, including taking into account the strenuous and hazardous work serving the guns. The current fixation with 155mm towed artillery was frustrating because the people at the top saw the M198s as an improvement to direct support artillery where I saw a 7 1/2 ton behemoth that took 12 minutes to emplace in emergency conditions. After I left active duty, spent 13 years designing next-generation artillery. I applied the lessons I learned as an enlisted and commissioned officer - and Mechanical Engineer - to designing lighter, fast, more effective and less labor-intensive artillery support.
SP artillery is evolving and we have the ability to make them more effective and more reliable. Given the strong probability that we will eventually face large conventional forces again, it would be an enormous mistake to neglect self propulsion and armor protection and crew assistance systems for artillery.
So why did you say that anything bigger than 8 inches was too big to tow?
Famous last words: Honest sir, I thought the freeway overpass was higher.......
Was that too difficult for you to understand?
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