The M777 Howitzer looks outdated in a war dominated by drones, UAVs, and high-tech weapons. Heavy, unarmored, and towed into battle, it should be an easy target for Russia’s deadly drone swarms. Yet Ukraine has transformed this artillery system into one of the most effective weapons on the battlefield through clever tactics, rapid movement, decoys, and constant adaptation. Here’s how the “Triple Seven” continues devastating Russian forces and proving that innovation can keep even old-school artillery deadly in modern warfare.
I recently saw a video posted by some fool that put the M777 at a “D tier” in terms of Ukrainian military equipment. It truly shows how distorted and degraded the public’s knowledge of warfare has become from the media pumping “warfare is NEW now!” narratives about drones.
The M777 is one of the most effective tools ever made to stop a ground offensive from a large, mechanized military, if you don’t understand how drones don’t negate that you fundamentally don’t understand the dynamics at play here. The M777 will be used for decades to come and probably even longer than that.
The reason Ukraine has the operational space and time to conduct the extensive reconnaissance, planning and coordination necessary to accomplish midrange targeted drone strikes on crucial russian military equipment and personnel is because Ukraine now has sufficient 155mm artillery to decisively smash russian concentrated armored maneuvers allowing Ukrainian personnel to devote more time to striking out at the horizon and less time stopping russia from developing a fatal momentum in their rare armored pushes.
Yes, drones are highly effective at taking out armor, but they are limited and they take an immense amount of time to get into place and deploy compared to when a high flying fixed wing reconnaissance drone spotting a target from 1km away, relaying coordinates to a howitzer that fires after the message is conveyed with the shell landing after traveling for ~30 seconds to 1 minute in the air. If the firing calculations are done by a computer and transmitted efficiently and the howitzer crew is ready, a howitzer shell will be able to be placed on target as quickly if not quicker than a long/medium range missile fired from a standoff distance. It will be certainly quicker than getting drone crews into position and deploying drones in a tactical manner.
Artillery also doesn’t stop firing when it is raining, or when it is windy, artillery simply does not stop firing, that is what makes it artillery.
Shells are a fraction of the cost (at least 20:1) of a drone and can be easily deployed at a volume and sustained rate that cannot be matched. Arty never goes away.
That depends on the drone. Shells are generally quoted at costing $1000 each, but this can vary a lot depending on the factory and how you configure them (a chunk of lead is cheaper than lead with a timed explosive charge) . Drones can start at $100, but go up a lot.
There are not combat drones that cost $1000 to make. Even with free materials and labor, Ukraine’s cheapest drone was at $500. And again, because it bears repeating that is the price for a drone with donated manufactured materials, donated electronics, donated consumer 3d printer casings, and volunteers assembling them.
$20k is your cheapest mass produced combat drones.
Disagree with me if ya want, but I do not believe there will ever be a time in history for any military human or otherwise where artillery is obsolete.
I don’t wanna imagine the upgrades it will get in the future. Hell, here’s one off the top of my head. A Howie that fires fragment shells that burst in the air downwards the ground. Within those shells are drones ready to deploy. The drones are let off to take out any remaining forces.
Heck, even drones that could make arty pieces hover to move them at rapid speeds. Imagine arty firing from different locations at speeds that don’t make sense.
I don’t wanna imagine the upgrades it will get in the future. Hell, here’s one off the top of my head. A Howie that fires fragment shells that burst in the air downwards the ground. Within those shells are drones ready to deploy. The drones are let off to take out any remaining forces.
This technology had basically been implemented in the SMArt shell back in 1989, it just wasn’t really needed because the powers deploying it could rely on airpower most of the time. It is true that russian Electronic Warfare has been effective against these munitions, but that is a detail of implementation not really a fundamental limitation of the weapon category.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155
In general though I think a 155mm howitzer has to be seen as a precision guided hypervelocity low-earth-orbital delivery vehicle that can hide anywhere a large truck can.
Some of the quickly developing uses.
Missile and air defense
Small glide bomb launch platform
https://www.ga.com/ga-advances-artillery-modernization-with-lrmp-testing
Ramjet 150km+ precision guided munition launch platform
Heck, even drones that could make arty pieces hover to move them at rapid speeds. Imagine arty firing from different locations at speeds that don’t make sense.
I would argue that the more compelling tactic are what the US army calls “gun raids” where artillery ammunition is airlifted in with helicopters or in the future drones to temporary firing points where artillery is subsequently deployed to, moving without ammunition onboard to massively increase crew survivability where the artillery deploys, fires and moves to the next disguised ammunition pile set up by drones.
In general, no matter what side of a war you are on the idea of human beings having to drive a vehicle loaded with artillery ammunition is downright brutal. The use of unmanned ground vehicles to move large amounts of artillery ammunition around near the front in a paradoxical way is actually a good thing for the brutality of the battlefield in my opinion. No human should have to do that, a truck full of artillery ammunition is the biggest fish in a barrel on the entire battlefield.
The glide bomb thing is the first that came to my mind as a cool mix and the only thing I could think of that might be common already would be shells that can rapidly deploy a line of sight communication balloon device like lora or what ever the military would have at long distance, might be useful if you wanted to boost drone signal range maybe or make last minute changes to the preprogrammed targets