NS Military Realism Consultation Thread Vol. 11.0

[The Manticoran Empire]

Ah America, completely fucking up the cornerstone of Armies since Assyria ruled Mesopotamia.

[Crookfur]

If the DM53, which uses tungsten, had a penetration value of 800 mm of RHAe, what would its penetration value be if it used depleted uranium?

DM53 has a weight of 21.4 kg, a projectile weight of 8.5 kg and a muzzle velocity of 1,750 m/s.

If you were making it from DU the dimensions and weights would be altered and you would pretty much end up with M829A3 or very similar. The latest 120mm DU APFSDS rounds are commonly listed at achieving 900mm of RHAe so make of that what you will.

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

The Vietnam problem was that the USA elite fraction was discovered to be entirely disloyal and had no intention of winning Vietnam. A large fraction explicitly wanted to lose Vietnam so they could win the USA internal conflict (e.g. Harvard Crimson Khmer Rouge editorials). Any possible draft scheme would have to go through a disloyal designer rather than a national HOI4 AI.

The Selective Service Act was probably written by actual communists. Or banksters. Not much of a difference in the end.

It has nothing to do with Kent State though.

It was true in Korea too. It was true in WW2, as well, except that the deferments were rarer and less likely to be granted because wartime boards were instructed to ignore them by FDR. It's not something unique to Marxism, it's just that the USA actively courts subversive elements internally, whether communist or capitalist leaning. Deferment systems are generally a sign of problematic or subversive issues because it means you can game your way out. The solution is to not allow deferments, which is basically what FDR did, just unofficially. It means more The Sullivans happens but whatever.

The only deferments should be for actual physical or mental problems, like severe scoliosis or palsy or something, not class distinctions or whatever. That's just a great way to make any possible elites hate their own nation because they never had obligations towards it. Deferment should ultimately just be a way to keep the draft board from needing to examine the guys who can barely walk up stairs without crutches I guess. Once you start introducing class distinctions into the mix you end up making a Korean War style draft system (as enforced, anyway, but the actual draft had class distinctions built-in for weird reasons) that pulls from the chaff instead of the cream, while said cream go on to establish a society that destroys itself from within.

The USA is just kinda awfulbad at running a conscript army I guess. It's sort of the example of how to not run a draft system to begin with, since it was sabotaged from its inception in 1940.

What if the elites are conscripted when they complete University and then put into the officer ranks

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

Whomever is more willing to fight. Married soldiers and single soldiers don't differ in their discipline or morale in any particular ways. Age is probably the bigger part in it all and for the job you want to boot.

Married soldiers probably take fewer personal risks, doubly so for soldiers with children, relative to the same people being unmarried.

Whether this is important or not depends on whether you rely on personal aggression and risk taking to matter. For people like Hamas who rely on literally suicidal attackers because most of their army is fedayeen, it can be a problem. For people like ISIS or Ansar Al-Islam who rely on suicide bombers, it is also a problem, it can be a problem. For the Caroleans, who rely on disciplined troops who are unwavering against (for their time) near certain death, it can be a problem. For people who don't rely on suicidal bravery/recklessness in the face of battle, it probably isn't an issue.

But a fact remains that for plenty of historically successful armies, such as those of Al-Qaeda or their descendents, marriage is a problem because it will lead to guys backing out of deals and not committing politically valuable attacks against your enemies. How do we know this? Because the PLO used marriage and child rearing to liquidate one of their more infamous assassin special forces units, the Black September, by marrying the assassins and giving them a baby birth stipend. The Fedayeen became the family man and the potential for ex-BSO operatives to attack their employers was greatly reduced. Naturally it didn't stop the occasional lone wolf from claiming the BSO's namesake but it basically dissolved the organization internally. Who cares if some random Belgians at a gay homosexual night club, or some Greeks get killed by a guy or two who couldn't get married though. The important thing is that the BSO wasn't shooting Yasser Arafat for selling out.

Unmarried men in large, cohesive groups who disagree with your sudden change in political sentiments are probably the most dangerous threat to an organization. Which is why you marry soldiers in the first place: it helps prevent coups. It also helps if you are economically and militarily weak and need to rely on extremely powerful, mobile, computerized weapon systems utilizing such things as liquid natural gas carriers and airliners as ersatz warheads, with the guidance package being a 18-20 year old battle computer of a design so advanced and powerful we don't even know they work, much less how to build them in factories, because they are quite literally an alien technology to our greatest engineers.

So it's doubly important for smaller Islamic armies, such as the Mahdi Army or AAI or ISIS, that rely on highly motivated and zealous troops who engage in metaphorical (forlorn hopes, human sea attacks, Munich) and literal (boom) suicide attacks.

What if occupation could be worse for their wives and daughters than being widowed
(E.G. if the enemies are rapists from Serbia etc.)

[Gallia-]

The USA has always had a bizarre idea that wealthy elites are somehow exempt from serving it, presumably because said wealthy elites control the writing of policy and prefer to not get their kids drafted, and they have no reason to sustain any real national or trans-generational loyalty to USA. After all, Henry Ford invested in the USSR and Elon Musk is investing in the PRC (as opposed to, say, pretty much any other place in the world), so it's not like those sort of people are willing to choose national loyalty over profits. Commutation was allowed explicitly in the Civil War draft to avoid abasing the wealthy factory and landowners of the North by keeping their sons from fighting. Deferments for reasons of whatever class distinction tend to benefit subversives who can use their time not spent fighting in the military instead building rapport with other wealthy subversives.

As Dtn mentioned, the USA tends to swing towards loyalty over subversion, especially so in the relatively better off upper middle classes (and middle class in general), but there is always a huge and visible subversive element there, and as you get higher in the wealth ladder, it generally trends closer to collusion I guess.

Married soldiers probably take fewer personal risks, doubly so for soldiers with children, relative to the same people being unmarried.

Whether this is important or not depends on whether you rely on personal aggression and risk taking to matter. For people like Hamas who rely on literally suicidal attackers because most of their army is fedayeen, it can be a problem. For people like ISIS or Ansar Al-Islam who rely on suicide bombers, it is also a problem, it can be a problem. For the Caroleans, who rely on disciplined troops who are unwavering against (for their time) near certain death, it can be a problem. For people who don't rely on suicidal bravery/recklessness in the face of battle, it probably isn't an issue.

But a fact remains that for plenty of historically successful armies, such as those of Al-Qaeda or their descendents, marriage is a problem because it will lead to guys backing out of deals and not committing politically valuable attacks against your enemies. How do we know this? Because the PLO used marriage and child rearing to liquidate one of their more infamous assassin special forces units, the Black September, by marrying the assassins and giving them a baby birth stipend. The Fedayeen became the family man and the potential for ex-BSO operatives to attack their employers was greatly reduced. Naturally it didn't stop the occasional lone wolf from claiming the BSO's namesake but it basically dissolved the organization internally. Who cares if some random Belgians at a gay homosexual night club, or some Greeks get killed by a guy or two who couldn't get married though. The important thing is that the BSO wasn't shooting Yasser Arafat for selling out.

Unmarried men in large, cohesive groups who disagree with your sudden change in political sentiments are probably the most dangerous threat to an organization. Which is why you marry soldiers in the first place: it helps prevent coups. It also helps if you are economically and militarily weak and need to rely on extremely powerful, mobile, computerized weapon systems utilizing such things as liquid natural gas carriers and airliners as ersatz warheads, with the guidance package being a 18-20 year old battle computer of a design so advanced and powerful we don't even know they work, much less how to build them in factories, because they are quite literally an alien technology to our greatest engineers.

So it's doubly important for smaller Islamic armies, such as the Mahdi Army or AAI or ISIS, that rely on highly motivated and zealous troops who engage in metaphorical (forlorn hopes, human sea attacks, Munich) and literal (boom) suicide attacks.

What if occupation could be worse for their wives and daughters than being widowed
(E.G. if the enemies are rapists from Serbia etc.)

kids these days be like

"occupation: bereaved widow"

probably because women arent allowed to work

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

The USA has always had a bizarre idea that wealthy elites are somehow exempt from serving it, presumably because said wealthy elites control the writing of policy and prefer to not get drafted, and they have no reason to sustain any real national or trans-generational loyalty to USA. After all, Henry Ford invested in the USSR and Elon Musk is investing in the PRC (as opposed to, say, pretty much any other place in the world), so it's not like those sort of people are willing to choose national loyalty over profits. Commutation was allowed explicitly in the Civil War draft to avoid abasing the wealthy factory and landowners of the North by keeping their sons from fighting. Deferments for reasons of whatever class distinction tend to benefit subversives who can use their time not spent fighting in the military instead building rapport with other wealthy subversives.

As Dtn mentioned, the USA tends to swing towards loyalty over subversion, especially so in the relatively better off upper middle classes (and middle class in general), but there is always a huge and visible subversive element there, and as you get higher in the wealth ladder, it generally trends closer to collusion I guess.

What if occupation could be worse for their wives and daughters than being widowed
(E.G. if the enemies are rapists from Serbia etc.)

kids these days be like

"occupation: bereaved widow"

probably because women arent allowed to work

Read it more carefully
What if THE occupation (in the military sense) of their COUNTRY would be worse than being widowed for the women?
Because the enemy are rapists.

Also women can work in Sharifistan.
How does a society that's 2/3rds women function if they can't work?

[Gallia-]

woman work is haram

the parody is sharifistan is it is a moderate islamic state

the kids these days be like "i dunno i think the taliban have some good policy points"

How does a society that's 2/3rds women function if they can't work?

if every dude has 2 wives that's basically problem solved lmao

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

woman work is haram

the parody is sharifistan is it is a moderate islamic state

the kids these days be like "i dunno i think the taliban have some good policy points"

Women's education is very high in Sharifistan.
Also Khadijah (Muhammad's wife) worked as a merchant both before and after converting to Islam. Also Khawlah bint al-Azwar.

Gallia, what is your degree in?

[New Vihenia]

If the DM53, which uses tungsten, had a penetration value of 800 mm of RHAe, what would its penetration value be if it used depleted uranium?

DM53 has a weight of 21.4 kg, a projectile weight of 8.5 kg and a muzzle velocity of 1,750 m/s.

you would perhaps have 10 mm extra penetration using DU Munitions assuming same parameters. This is one example of mine using Odermatt's spreadsheet.

[Crookfur]

Hello guys, I appreciate the help you all have given me in the past and I have a bunch more questions:

1) Was/is the high-low mix of aircraft a thing any more? It seems to me that you'd want the most capable aircraft you can to fight peer-level adversaries, and if you need something to just drop bombs on insurgents or something you'd just use drones or armed trainers or something even cheaper than a low end fighter aircraft.

2) Is utilizing towed artillery in a conflict with a near-peer adversary suicidal? If you know you're going to receive counter-battery fire and you have to shoot and scoot in order to survive, how do you even do that with towed artillery?

3) I can understand the usage of light/medium mortars at the company level and below by being reasonably man portable and being quick to deliver support. I can understand the efficiency of 155mm howitzers at high levels of organizations. I'm having a harder time understanding the artillery in between the two extremes, like 105mm howitzers or 120mm mortars. If 155 does everything that 105 does except at a larger logistical footprint, wouldn't you just be better off with more 155s and getting rid of 105s entirely? What situation is there where you want to shoot a 105mm howitzer at something versus a 155mm?

I can kind of see a niche for 120mm mortars since you can mount it on a vehicle that has the same footprint as a 81mm mortar carrier, but similar to the above question, if all your mortars except for the light 60mm ones are going to be driven around in vehicles, why bother having a 81mm at all when you could have a 120mm one?

4) Tracks versus wheels for artillery? I understand that tracked is more expensive but has better terrain crossing capability, but I'm not sure how that translates to artillery. How often is artillery supposed to be going into rough terrain? Does it affect their ability to displace after shooting? I imagine wheeled is faster when actually moving, but don't a lot of these vehicles need to deploy ground supports in order to fire which tracked vehicles don't need to do? What kind of military would select something like a Panzerhaubitze 2000 over a CAESAR or vice versa?

5) Do dedicated reconnaissance aircraft like a RF-4E have much of a point nowadays when satellites and drones exist?

6) I don't really know how to word this question so I'll give a scenario.

Nation A is preparing for a Fulda Gap type scenario against a much stronger Nation B. Once hostilities starts it is likely Nation A's air force will be unable to hit Nation B's airfields and other strategic sites or contribute much to the ground fighting and would instead be solely devoting its attention to surviving and contesting the air space over the battlefield. Consequently, once hostilities start, instead of the air force trying to suicidally attack enemy strategic assets, the plan is just to lob as many tactical ballistic missiles at their airfields/harbors/supply depots.

I'm just basing this entirely on the idea that the missiles on the ground in hiding are less vulnerable to being blown away than aircraft trying to get through an air defense network and lots of enemy aircraft.

Thank you in advance.

Most of this has been answered but on the recce aircraft you probably don't need a dedicated tactical aircraft/fighter based solution thanks to modern recce pods that you can mount on any decent modern fighter. You probably would have a unit or two that specialises in uisng pods and carrying out recce flights but other than the pods living with them and the crews doing extra training in using them they wont be using any different aircraft if you have a single highish end multirole fighter as your mainstay.

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

woman work is haram

the parody is sharifistan is it is a moderate islamic state

the kids these days be like "i dunno i think the taliban have some good policy points"

Women's education is very high in Sharifistan.
Also Khadijah (Muhammad's wife) worked as a merchant both before and after converting to Islam. Also Khawlah bint al-Azwar.

Gallia, what is your degree in?

I mean female literacy.
Due to marrying at 17.3 on average and having children at about 18 most women in Sharifistan do not go to University

[Gallia-]

1) Was/is the high-low mix of aircraft a thing any more? It seems to me that you'd want the most capable aircraft you can to fight peer-level adversaries, and if you need something to just drop bombs on insurgents or something you'd just use drones or armed trainers or something even cheaper than a low end fighter aircraft.

High/low is less an actual common sense thing and more a subsidy for having too many aircraft engineers in a perpetually shrinking market. It's not something the USAF or Russia do anymore. One is all low, the other is all high. Maybe it will exist for the PRC, which is still growing industrially and can probably afford multiple fighter designs at once, but the USA can barely afford two major combat aircraft programs at once. Everyone else leeches off the good graces of the superpowers.

Eventually only the superpowers will be able to afford air forces at all. And they'll probably have small numbers of extremely powerful aircraft.

2) Is utilizing towed artillery in a conflict with a near-peer adversary suicidal? If you know you're going to receive counter-battery fire and you have to shoot and scoot in order to survive, how do you even do that with towed artillery?

No for reasons I said earlier. Shoot and scoot is a bad meme that never really existed.

3) I can understand the usage of light/medium mortars at the company level and below by being reasonably man portable and being quick to deliver support. I can understand the efficiency of 155mm howitzers at high levels of organizations. I'm having a harder time understanding the artillery in between the two extremes, like 105mm howitzers or 120mm mortars. If 155 does everything that 105 does except at a larger logistical footprint, wouldn't you just be better off with more 155s and getting rid of 105s entirely? What situation is there where you want to shoot a 105mm howitzer at something versus a 155mm?

120mm mortars more or less obsolete the 105mm howitzer, unless you do something silly, but literally no one has done anything silly like that. L119 is not really useful in any respect relative to a 120mm mortar, and if you're starting from scratch it's fine, but no one starts from scratch so it sticks around in inventories and people have to work around what they're given.

I can kind of see a niche for 120mm mortars since you can mount it on a vehicle that has the same footprint as a 81mm mortar carrier, but similar to the above question, if all your mortars except for the light 60mm ones are going to be driven around in vehicles, why bother having a 81mm at all when you could have a 120mm one?

81mm can be carried by people easier.

120mm is a battalion's artillery battery.

4) Tracks versus wheels for artillery? I understand that tracked is more expensive but has better terrain crossing capability, but I'm not sure how that translates to artillery. How often is artillery supposed to be going into rough terrain? Does it affect their ability to displace after shooting? I imagine wheeled is faster when actually moving, but don't a lot of these vehicles need to deploy ground supports in order to fire which tracked vehicles don't need to do? What kind of military would select something like a Panzerhaubitze 2000 over a CAESAR or vice versa?

Pzh 2000 has armor. CAESAR is a self-moving towed artillery piece. They're probably not terribly different in actual combat use except Pzh 2000 likely costs 2-3x as much due to requiring more of everything.

5) Do dedicated reconnaissance aircraft like a RF-4E have much of a point nowadays when satellites and drones exist?

Satellites and drones are dedicated reconnaissance aircraft. F-35 has better ISR capability than any preceding generation of aircraft besides big boys like E-3 and E-8 though. Including stuff like ES-3 and EA-18G.

6) I don't really know how to word this question so I'll give a scenario.

Nation A is preparing for a Fulda Gap type scenario against a much stronger Nation B. Once hostilities starts it is likely Nation A's air force will be unable to hit Nation B's airfields and other strategic sites or contribute much to the ground fighting and would instead be solely devoting its attention to surviving and contesting the air space over the battlefield. Consequently, once hostilities start, instead of the air force trying to suicidally attack enemy strategic assets, the plan is just to lob as many tactical ballistic missiles at their airfields/harbors/supply depots.

Nation A would lose because its air force cannot destroy the other air force. Then it gets occupied.

Just buy some Saab 36s with megaton bombs to kill Oslo Leningrad with and you'll be fine. The smaller the air force the more important that it be able to kill large quantities of enemy population. Investing entirely in a variety of nuclear missiles (cruise, ballistic, or whatever) or something and make it obvious and clear that you'll nuke the other guys if they bother you; also buy a big radar and point it at the enemy and launch if you see missiles or planes flying in your direction. Or just accept the occupation and become a client state because that hurts less than waging a hopeless total war unless the enemy is literally Hitler or something.

One is Samson the other is Western Europe.

Small nations investing in actual conventional armies is basically tacit admission that invasion and regime change is preferable to maintaining national sovereignty though. Belgian nuclear program would have been wild.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Stormaktstiden Mk. II when

[Gallia-]

if you added a bomb on copenhagen i still would have believed it

real plutonium hours: the only steel the swede needs

virgin chalk and salt water vs chad hewn from granite

e: talinn lmao

why isnt leningrad on here aaaaaaaaaaaa

[Immoren]

Not really realism question, but I'm doing these inane charts more and for some reason I'm at miss what qualifier could come between "expert specialist" and "entry level specialist". lol
Like
"Master sergeant, roles: ....(Subject matter) master specialist...."
"Senior staff sergeant, roles: ....(Subject matter) expert specialist...."
"Staff sergeant, roles: ....(Subject matter) ????? specialist...."
"Senior sergeant, roles: ....(Subject matter) entry level specialist...."

lol

[Dayganistan]

Women's education is very high in Sharifistan.
Also Khadijah (Muhammad's wife) worked as a merchant both before and after converting to Islam. Also Khawlah bint al-Azwar.

Gallia, what is your degree in?

I mean female literacy.
Due to marrying at 17.3 on average and having children at about 18 most women in Sharifistan do not go to University

>women's education is very high
>most women are mothers by 18 and don't go to university
Pick one. Also not military realism related

[Albynau]

Towed artillery can be better under certain circumstances, they are lighter which means they can be airdropped or helicopter transported much more easily, they can be better dug in and concealed, which is a bonus as well. It is hardly suicidal, especially if your crew are well trained and know what they are doing. Self propelled guns are probably preferred, but they have issues as well.

Towed artillery is harder to kill (in terms of both weapons lost and crew injured or killed) than self-propelled artillery.

This is probably because there are fewer things to actually break on a towed piece (anything can tow a 155mm, even a Humvee, less a 5-ton or whatever, while a Paladin can only tow itself) and the crew is spatially separated and can be better protected against fire (in theory every crewman of a towed gun can have a dugout with overhead protection against bomblets at the least, whereas even the best protected self-propelled piece is limited by tonnage and probably won't stop high penetration warheads like TGSM without significant capital investment). You can also make towed artillery much harder to kill than self propelled guns (in theory, again, because its armor isn't limited by chassis tonnage, as the Chinese PVA proved in Korea when it produced towed artillery firing positions with significant overhead cover capable of resisting 155mm hits).

It is the optimal "high intensity war" artillery, provided you have enough hours (a couple days, at least) to prepare the fighting positions and aren't afraid of limited gun traverse, anyway.

Self propelled guns are either a crutch for wimps who can't use shovels or the arch representation of the cult of shoot and scoot. Towed artillery just finds a good spot and wails away at maximum fire rate, stopping only when the counter fire gets so heavy it starts to damage the piece's fighting position.

I can understand that you can conceal and dig in a towed field piece easier than a self propelled one, but doesn't the benefits of that go completely out the window once you start firing and the enemy locates your pieces with radar and starts dropping artillery on you? I was under the impression that hardening artillery positions is kind of a lost cause and pillboxes/bunkers aren't a thing anymore.

Or is the idea to get off your fire mission as fast as possible, the crew runs like hell to their dugouts, sits out the counterbattery fire then run back and hope your gun isn't kaput?

No for reasons I said earlier. Shoot and scoot is a bad meme that never really existed.

Sorry, I'm stupid, could you elaborate more on this?

I thought the basic premise of shooting as much as you can and then displacing before you get hit by counter battery fire made sense in principle.

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

I mean female literacy.
Due to marrying at 17.3 on average and having children at about 18 most women in Sharifistan do not go to University

>women's education is very high
>most women are mothers by 18 and don't go to university
Pick one. Also not military realism related

I said I meant literacy
There’s a difference between literacy and higher education.

[Immoren]

Towed artillery can be better under certain circumstances, they are lighter which means they can be airdropped or helicopter transported much more easily, they can be better dug in and concealed, which is a bonus as well. It is hardly suicidal, especially if your crew are well trained and know what they are doing. Self propelled guns are probably preferred, but they have issues as well.

Towed artillery is harder to kill (in terms of both weapons lost and crew injured or killed) than self-propelled artillery.

This is probably because there are fewer things to actually break on a towed piece (anything can tow a 155mm, even a Humvee, less a 5-ton or whatever, while a Paladin can only tow itself) and the crew is spatially separated and can be better protected against fire (in theory every crewman of a towed gun can have a dugout with overhead protection against bomblets at the least, whereas even the best protected self-propelled piece is limited by tonnage and probably won't stop high penetration warheads like TGSM without significant capital investment). You can also make towed artillery much harder to kill than self propelled guns (in theory, again, because its armor isn't limited by chassis tonnage, as the Chinese PVA proved in Korea when it produced towed artillery firing positions with significant overhead cover capable of resisting 155mm hits).

It is the optimal "high intensity war" artillery, provided you have enough hours (a couple days, at least) to prepare the fighting positions and aren't afraid of limited gun traverse, anyway.

Self propelled guns are either a crutch for wimps who can't use shovels or the arch representation of the cult of shoot and scoot. Towed artillery just finds a good spot and wails away at maximum fire rate, stopping only when the counter fire gets so heavy it starts to damage the piece's fighting position.

I can understand that you can conceal and dig in a towed field piece easier than a self propelled one, but doesn't the benefits of that go completely out the window once you start firing and the enemy locates your pieces with radar and starts dropping artillery on you? I was under the impression that hardening artillery positions is kind of a lost cause and pillboxes/bunkers aren't a thing anymore.

Or is the idea to get off your fire mission as fast as possible, the crew runs like hell to their dugouts, sits out the counterbattery fire then run back and hope your gun isn't kaput?

No for reasons I said earlier. Shoot and scoot is a bad meme that never really existed.

Sorry, I'm stupid, could you elaborate more on this?

I thought the basic premise of shooting as much as you can and then displacing before you get hit by counter battery fire made sense in principle.

I don't know if this is understandable, but this is simplest way to make towed artillery more resistant to CB fire. Especially with modern intra battalion communications and gun ranges.

[Albynau]

I don't know if this is understandable, but this is simplest way to make towed artillery more resistant to CB fire. Especially with modern intra battalion communications and gun ranges.

I understand that dispersing your tubes reduces how many of your dudes get exposed to each particular counterbattery fire mission, but if they're incapable of relocating fast enough, what's stopping the opponent from just going down the list blasting your tubes one after another? It takes longer and more munitions expended sure, but if the enemy knows your positions isn't it just a matter of time?

[Immoren]

I don't know if this is understandable, but this is simplest way to make towed artillery more resistant to CB fire. Especially with modern intra battalion communications and gun ranges.

I understand that dispersing your tubes reduces how many of your dudes get exposed to each particular counterbattery fire mission, but if they're incapable of relocating fast enough, what's stopping the opponent from just going down the list blasting your tubes one after another? It takes longer and more munitions expended sure, but if the enemy knows your positions isn't it just a matter of time?

Because you're doing your own counter-battery fire?
Also it takes some time to adjust the tubes, you do have more time to pack things and leave if necessary.

[Gallia-]

I can understand that you can conceal and dig in a towed field piece easier than a self propelled one,

It's not easier, though. To construct a proper fighting position for towed pieces took the People's Volunteer Army something like three weeks, but it provided sufficient protection that their towed pieces were all but immune to American counterfire at the cost of not being able to traverse. They quite literally built huge earthen log bunkers around their escarpments to protect against fragments. This would also protect against things like SADARM (it would probably ignore such a target) and bomblets, obviously, at a much lower capital cost than something like special roof armor. You could do it with sufficient amounts of trees and bulldozers, but not everywhere has trees I suppose.

but doesn't the benefits of that go completely out the window once you start firing and the enemy locates your pieces with radar and starts dropping artillery on you?

It depends on what they're shooting. Something like Excalibur could probably land in the shell scrape and destroy the caisson or limbers at least. This is still preferable to losing a self propelled gun to a similar weapon like BONUS, which may be a complete loss (vehicle fire, catastrophic ammo detonation) rather than a loss of something like a tube or a single limber, which is relatively cheaper to replace.

I was under the impression that hardening artillery positions is kind of a lost cause and pillboxes/bunkers aren't a thing anymore.

It's probably a forgotten art in Western militaries because they bought into the idea after the 1960's that making everything self-propelled automatically makes it superior, and have essentially been stuck there since, but on the contrary...

There is an argument to be made that a towed artillery piece is just as competitive in combat as a self-propelled one, and given the preponderance of potential prime movers vs self-propelled howitzer chassis, perhaps even more mobile. Naturally it requires ignoring the concept of "shoot and scoot" and adopting a more...British...manner of artillery use: stopping, digging in, and firing a literal truckload of shells for a while.

Or is the idea to get off your fire mission as fast as possible, the crew runs like hell to their dugouts, sits out the counterbattery fire then run back and hope your gun isn't kaput?

Pretty much.

Very likely it would be hard to kill the crew in such a situation, because each man could theoretically be protected by individual foxholes with overhead cover to defend against bomblets (which means your attempt at targeting a gun goes from a single SPH to nearly a dozen individual targets) and splinter. The guns can be recovered, replaced, and re-fielded as they're damaged or destroyed. Much like a tank, not everything in the towed piece is necessarily useless after a bomblet kills it, it might be that only the limbers are bent, or an axle, or maybe a wheel is tore off, or the gun tube is hurt, but the breech is okay. Recovery is possible and practical, but something of a lost skill among Western howitzermen because they've never faced significant counterbattery since the Second World War.

No for reasons I said earlier. Shoot and scoot is a bad meme that never really existed.

Sorry, I'm stupid, could you elaborate more on this?

I thought the basic premise of shooting as much as you can and then displacing before you get hit by counter battery fire made sense in principle.

In theory it makes sense. In practice, it really doesn't, unless you are facing conventional (HE-F) ammunition fired in mass volleys relatively inaccurately you're unlikely to escape the range of effective fire in the about 20-30 seconds it takes for the shells or rockets to arrive.

By the time you pickup an inbound shell and start moving you might displace 200-300 meters in a self-propelled gun that has just completed a multiple round fire mission. Something like Damocles (a sort of Super SADARM with a search footprint of 500 meters [compare to the 100 meters of the Swedish BONUS or the 75 meters of the OG SADARM] that the US Army was looking at in the 1990's for MLRS) would be able to kill at least one howitzer in your battery in that case, perhaps more, which is very bad. Let alone an actually modern PGM like the various guided submunitions (Hermes, 9M55K1, American TGSM/Assault Breaker, Brilliant Anti-Tank, etc.) which can fly down and smack a tank with a HEAT round on top (no practical amount of Special Armor will stop something like that). At that point it is probably better to simply dig in with substantial overhead cover and hope for the best.

This takes about a minute or so for a SPH, by the way, and a towed artillery piece can be moved in similar amounts of time by a sufficiently motivated gun crew.

Active protection becomes beneficial but at this point (an APS capable of stopping multiple diving top attack HEAT weapons, like 9M55K1's submunitions, or something like the American TGSM) it's worth asking the question is further investment in a self propelled vehicle necessary or desirable when you can incorporate towed guns, which while easier to suppress (the crew runs for cover) are harder to kill completely (there's no engine on an M777 to break), and their crews can be better protected via dispersion over area instead of concentration of armor and "layers" of protection. If the point is to be able to afford a sufficient quantity of guns to kill the enemy then it becomes a serious issue, because not even the United States could afford the most advanced self-propelled howitzer, and that thing didn't even have the ability to kill an RPG, much less a Javelin or TGSM. And Crusader still cost something like $10 million a pop.

You could save money instead by giving each battery a D7 bulldozer and each gunner a shovel and telling them to dig. The earth is free armor.

Alternatively you could abandon the co-located battery organization entirely and go for independent all-gun-in-range fire missions with each vehicle being treated as its own unit. This is a highly advanced method of thinking but it requires reliable radio/wireless communications and is probably prone to electronic intercept/attack. No one has done it, but Crusader was supposed to operate without batteries (or rather, highly dispersed batteries) and instead each vehicle would independently receive fire missions from AFATDS and commence shooting from on the move, then start moving again. It has never been implemented in practice though so field wire communications are still the norm, even for self-propelled batteries, AFAIK.

That would make batteries harder to suppress or kill, but again requires significant investment in the vehicles themselves, and modernized equipment for battery commanders. There's also no reason a towed piece can't do the same thing, provided it has a long enough range gun, and similar radio equipment. Might even be better, again, because you can disassociate the location of the offending emitters (radio antennae) from the actual shooting area. You'd need to send runners out to fix the field wires (not really an issue TBH, it's probably no much more than 200 meters of cable) or dig a trench, and those could be mapped by SAR from something like F-35, though. But that last part's a question for the air force, not the army's artillery.

The ultimate method of shoot and scoot would be a SPH that can fire on the move at high speed, but that is a meme from the future of extremely powerful gun motors (and honestly if you're moving you're basically a target for GMTI guided weapons like TGSM/BAT anyway).

Mechanization is neither an absolute detriment nor a panacea to problems, and especially in Anglo-American military thinking it tends to be thought of in a frankly absolute terms as "mechanization = good; non-mechanization = bad" with the sole exception to this being the various Anglo-American naval infantry forces. There's no particular reason why artillery howitzers should be mechanized, though, except that mechanization tends to reduce the immediate cost of the battery's personnel (whether this is actually reflected in the addition of mechanics, fuelers, etc. to maintain the typically increased consumption of supplies of the SPH unit, though...) and it makes it slightly faster over rough terrain. But we have a solution for that one too. Well, there's another terrible issue, but you can always add more wheels to the towed gun's limbers.

It's much more important to mechanize, say, a infantry gun or field gun that can resist shellfire and machine gun bullets than it is to mechanize an artillery piece. By all means mechanize the battery, and by that I mean give them 5-ton and 2.5-ton trucks and high speed tractors, but they don't necessarily need self-propelled pieces or heavy armor. They're howitzers, not tanks.

The picture of the weird howitzer is called Terrastar and it was the US Army's attempt to make towed howitzers great again in the 1960's by improving the howitzer's ability to not get stuck in mud because it uses wheels instead of tracks for towing. The Soviets just slapped some tracks on their bigger artillery pieces but this is a bit impractical for a 155mm howitzer (and calls into question the whole idea anyway, due to track tensioning requirements), and it inevitably led to the advent of the tracked howitzer completely dominating all forms of non-airborne division artillery pieces by 1990 in the U.S. Army.

That said, Galla being a strong turnip growing country just slapped some band tracks on M2 Bradley (actually M993, but he's only 25 tons so he'll be fine!) to handle the track tensioning question (perhaps the main reason the high speed tractor died was the maintenance man-hour requirements and associated cost savings weren't substantially greater than a turreted artillery piece?) and had it tow big boi M198s with dual wheel setups like the Long Tom.

Here is the picture:

Truck Towed Battery

High Speed Tractor Battery

Self-Propelled Battery

How it works is Galla has a majority of truck-towed batteries in mechanized infantry divisions and brigades. Brigades get 105mm G7s and 2.5 ton trucks instead of the 5-tons and Long Tom looking things. High speed tractors are slowly infiltrating these truck-towed batteries and probably by 2040 all truck-towed batteries will be gone due to a surplus of Long!M2 Bradley hulls thanks to this guy who took something like 3 years of on and off dawdling to draw. IFVs go into factory, factory zeroed high speed tractors come out, because all new production hulls are going towards Pbv 501, which is not a reference to the actual Pbv 501 (he originally had a 50mm Supershot gun, I changed it to 25mm but the turret is obviously oversized for that caliber [it's an OG 50mm from the US Army {thanks Kib}], and might change it again to a 57mm Bofors). The self-propelled batteries are for the Supreme High Command ("Staven") armored reserve which is a pair of heavily equipped tank divisions, a parachute division, a strike division, a corps artillery (which has XM2001s instead), and a couple brigades who act as the field army of last resort for the rest of Galla's army.

There are also cancerous fire-by-platoon versions of all these for the cavalry branch, because it has to be different because no spur wearing yee-haw is gonna drive around in the same tank as a bunch of trench diggers.

tl;dr The gap in capabilities between SPHs and towed guns on the small scale (tactical) is narrower than most people think. It grows wider, in some respects in favor of the towed piece (O&M cost, speed of deployment) and in others in favor of the SPH (personnel cost). The only time the SPH proves itself valuable in its inherent self-mobility is when its gun has a small range and needs to constantly relocate to maintain its ability to support friendly troops. This is what happened in Desert Storm to the U.S. Army, but it's not unique to the SPH, and the U.S. Marines were capable of supporting themselves with towed pieces (M198) perfectly fine in the same war, but their tanks (M60A3) were slower moving and their rate of advance might have been slightly smaller, but is not really an issue in itself, even in "bad" terrains like soft sand or muddy jungle.

I understand that dispersing your tubes reduces how many of your dudes get exposed to each particular counterbattery fire mission, but if they're incapable of relocating fast enough, what's stopping the opponent from just going down the list blasting your tubes one after another?

Nothing except availability of ammunition and the type fired. Excalibur is only used by one military IRL in large quantities. Most armies make use of something like BONUS, or even old-fashioned DPICM, unless you're European. Then it's BONUS and conventional HE-F. In the latter case, you absolutely can dig in like it's 1953 and be immune to pretty much all counter-fire except the odd shell that smacks directly inside the gun pit.

In the former case, moving doesn't help much, and increasingly won't help, because large footprint sensors will see you before you can escape their fire. At that point the only method of survival becomes not being shot at, shooting down the shell before it deploys its payload, shooting down the payloads, or absorbing the impact of the shell with armor. This is possible with EFP warheads like SADARM, but not possible with HEAT warheads like TGSM, BAT, or whatever 9M55K1 carries, because the amount of armor would be too heavy. Then you need to kill the rocket or kill the bomblet before it hits you, which is possible with terminal HEAT warheads, but you'll need an advanced active protection system on the vehicle (if it can kill Javelin it can probably kill TGSM or something similar) to defend it.

At this point it becomes a bit absurd since the highest performing howitzer ever built clocked in at nearly $10 million a piece. $20 million if you include the mandatory reloading vehicle for each Crusader-RAASV couple.

It takes longer and more munitions expended sure, but if the enemy knows your positions isn't it just a matter of time?

Shoot him back. Kill him before he kills you. Or dig in, wait until it stops, and recover what's left. Counter-battery is generally going to be done by multiple rocket launchers which are non-targets as far as gun tubes are concerned (too much range, too short of fire windows, when you see an MRL fire you run and hide), unless you get into a gun duel or something (which may happen, especially if MRLs are relatively scarce for either side), in which case it becomes a question of how many tubes do you have vs. how many does he have, and how many of your tubes can shoot his vs. how many of his can shoot yours. At that point, recovery of dead/damaged guns, initial tube quantities, and the relative ranges (not just map range, but also relative firing arcs and such) of the pieces becomes the important factors. If your tubes are longer ranged, if your tubes can be recovered faster than his after being knocked out, and if you can fire more ranges at weirder arcs and longer ranges, you should win, all else equal.

This is why the U.S. Army was constantly pushing M109 batteries forward in Desert Storm: they were terrified of the G6 and didn't want to be yeeted to death by a similar howitzer with 1/3rd's greater their range. I'm not sure the G6 registered (literally or figuratively) in the minds of the Marine commanders, though, because the G6 never fired a shot and the Marines never engaged the Republican Guards.

It's relatively easier (in terms of systems to be replaced and cumulative man-hours, even from production [but perhaps not consecutive man-hours, as you can build a hull, an engine, and a turret all at the same time, while building limbers is a consecutive process {the hydraulic press channel presents: building a pair of Long Tom limbers from a red hot steel ingot}]) to recover and refurbish a towed piece than a self propelled one, so eventually (after extended combat), you'd expect a towed artillery force to have more surviving gun pieces than a self-propelled one, assuming self-propelled pieces and towed pieces both follow the same sort of shallow-S curves (high loss rates during initial meeting combat, CSS recovers and refurbishes dead tanks/howitzers, replacement crews are found/trained, and available weapons stabilizes around half to three-fifths of the paper number of tanks being available at any one time) that tanks do. I certainly can imagine self-propelled howitzers could follow such an S-curve, as they are effectively tanks as far as recovery is concerned. If the loss rate of towed artillery is compensated for enough by their greater relative ease of recovery and finding replacement prime movers, then for a given quantity of man-hours you might be able to eke out a significant amount of advantage in number of guns, all other things equal. But that's totally speculative.

The Dupuy thing shows that for whatever reason towed pieces survive more often than self-propelled ones, although Dupuy makes the caveat that it might be because the self-propelled pieces were sent into thicker fighting. Even if it were the same combat though, I imagine you'd be chewing through limbers and barrels like gangbusters but that's perhaps better than chewing through armor steel and engines, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps not for the 1960's United States, which is built on engine assembly lines and steel rollers, but certainly OK for the 1930's United States, which is built on casting mills and hammer forges.

hammer forge go brrr

[New Vihenia]

The solution : Self propelled piece that can fire on the move.

[Gallia-]

As I said that is a meme from the future though. Also GMTI maybe kinda btfos any sort of mobile shute n' skut stuff by directing FOG batteries or something.

[Immoren]

Partially related.
Was development of gun-howitzer result pf "natural" technological development because you can make single piece cover both roles. Or was it logistics-institutional thing where bean counters said that "we can use this weapon that's good enough compromise of capabilities to reduce logistics and other money/material footprints. Even though dedicated gun and howitzers would be preferable".