The US gave up sending Ukraine Excalibur guided artillery shells costing $100,000 because they rarely hit their target, report says
The US gave up sending Ukraine Excalibur guided artillery shells costing $100,000 because they rarely hit their target, report says
The US halted Excalibur-guided artillery shell deliveries to Ukraine after Kyiv reported high failure rates caused by Russia's electronic jamming.
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Guided artillery shells sound stupid to me, like yeah I get that everything has to be uber precise and high tech now but don't you have guided missiles for that?
Like surely there is room in modern doctrine for a nice and simple artillery system that you just aim and fire?
This comes down to lack of manufacturing capacity in the west. Russia's producing something like three times more artillery shells than the entire west by conservative estimates. And for a while, the narrative was that this didn't matter because western shells were more accurate so each excalibur was supposed to be worth 10 unguided shells Russia fires. Now we know that the whole thing doesn't actually work, meanwhile Russia pumps out shells at the cost of 600 bucks a shell or so.
I mean yeah that math might check out if you only believe that the purpose of things exploding in war is to kill guys every time but if I was a soldier I would hate having 10 things explode near me more than one thing very accurately exploding some guys close to me.
And there's probably a lot of cases where you would just flat out prefer to kind of accurately explode 10 areas compared to accurately exploding less areas than that.
Right, precision striking isn't a replacement for saturation, and the whole argument is fundamentally flawed. It's just how it's been sold in the west. What we're seeing is that west produces boutique weapons of questionable effectiveness, while Russia mass produces cheap and reliable weapons that you actually need in a war.