re: The US Army looks to replace the M109 SP Howitzer, the Korean K9 may be their answer

It never ceases to amaze me that new military equipment is becoming obsolete faster and faster. Yet, it costs exponentially more at each upgrade or replacement. I would think, as proven by our conflicts over the past 20 to 25 years that tanks and artillery as a whole are virtually obsolete. We no longer fight battle's per se on a brigade, divisional, or corps level. Today's battlefields are about small highly specialized units with abundant mobility, speed, and lethality.

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Explain in simple terms what these do that modern tanks can’t? Range? Size/type of shell?

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Basically what it comes down to is tanks use direct fire, as in they are on the front line and physically see their target, while howitzers are usually between 5 to 20 miles behind friendly lines and use indirect fire to engage targets.

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How to you armor vs drones?

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I’m an old tanker from the 80s and early 90s. Drones were not a thing in my day. Drones are an issue armies are now seeing they have to contend with. Some clam they’ve made tanks obsolete. I find that to be patently absurd. They claimed Panzerfausts and RPGs made tanks obsolete. They claimed the atomic bomb made tanks obsolete. But tanks are still around and always will be. Right now in Ukraine we’re seeing what happens to a battlefield without tanks. Namely that without tanks, wars devolve into WWI style attritional trench warfare. Only tanks can bring the level of maneuver and firepower to break the stalemate when you have infantry fighting for fortifications backed up with automatic weapons and modern artillery.

The key is you have to find a way to neutralize the enemy drones. This can be done by electronic jamming or systems designed to destroy incoming drones. There are anti-drone systems being developed , some of which are already in field trials. So, while drones have not made tanks obsolete, they have nonetheless changed the battlefield in that armies will now have to account for them. And they will. The alternative is a repeat of 1916.

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Seems the days if fixed or functionally fixed (because of speed) fortifications and firing capabilities are greatly numbered?

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Not necessarily. Again, drones are the new “sexy” thing on the battlefield. And many believe, incorrectly I might add, they make everything else obsolete. But drones are like any other system. Answers can be find to counter them. You can’t expect to defeat an enemy simply by sending swarms of drones at them. They’re a useful weapon for sure. They’re also quite effective in reconnaissance. But they’re not the end all be all.

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the M109 takes a while to get set up and be ready to conduct fire missions.

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Not sure when back in your day was but the Paladins could roll into position and ready to shoot in less than 60 secs. This was mid 90's I'm sure that standard has dropped since then.

I was thinking about this earlier today I don't see the drones making artillery obsolete because of the rapid fire capabilities. Drones are one and done. How long does it take for operators to set up and program the next set of drones?

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It’s hard for me to understand why we haven’t come up with effective anti drone technology. It would seem with the advances made in technology over the last decade, we don’t already have something that would knock every drone out of the air. I admittedly know little about drone technology. But damn, seems like we could figure out a defense against them.

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These type systems are coming online now. One thing you have to keep in mind about the effectiveness that drones are having in the war in Ukraine is that this is happening to Russian tanks which are particularly vulnerable to internal explosions due to how their ammunition storage is designed coupled with the fact they use two-piece ammunition with a particularly vulnerable powder charge. Basically a spark inside the turret of the T-64, 72, 80, or 90 can result in a catastrophic ammunition cook-off that will send the turret flying.

Another thing to consider is neither side in the Ukraine war seems to be capable of grasping the concept of combined arms maneuver warfare. Both the Russians and Ukrainians have proven very poor at coordinating the efforts of their reconnaissance, armor, and infantry in anything more than localized small unit operations. And air support seems to be virtually nonexistent, much less integrated into anything approaching what US forces have mastered since the 1940s.

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88-92 active, then ARNG until 2000. If I remember right our arty units had the M109A3(?), the Paladins started arriving to line units around 93 or 94.

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I was right behind you. I was in a M198 unit but saw the Paladins M109 A6 (I believe). Few times when I was post operations of Sill. After looking up K9 units its seems they are essentially real world version of the Crusader.,

During the summer of 1978 I was one of the original platoon leaders (firing battery XO) in the 1/77 Field Artillery at Hood doing the 32 gun battalion test.
I had 4 M109A1s and a 577.

We could hit a new position, get laid, safed, and ready to fire in under 15 minutes. This was done all manually before the days of automated survey and gun positioning.

Maybe I’m fuzzy on the definition of self propelled now a days but it looks like a trailer hauled by a truck.

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Drone warfare should make the Pentagon step back and realize that the way battles and wars were prosecuted before today should be considered obsolete. If we insist on having tanks and armoured vehicles in the future, then a large amount of money and time need to be spent on anti-drone warfare.

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You're getting downvoted here but you are right. If our multi-billion dollar defense industry paid attention to the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 and all of the lessons from the war in Ukraine, they should have logically concluded that conventional high-dollar mechanized solutions are nothing more than luxury coffins for conventional soldiers.

I'm truly hoping the Pentagon at least has something to at least counter the drone threat, otherwise any endeavor in the future will simply cost more lives than what the American public will tolerate.

We've also stopped innovating in the Navy as well. Everything today is (at worst) about retrofitting old ship designs or (at best) creating complex machines that take decades to work out the kinks. Meanwhile the world around us is finding innovative, affordable ways to punch above their weight.

Meanwhile our former Secretary of thr Navy's (a buddy of our infalable orange idiot) main contribution was the concept of the Trump Class Battleship.

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You're getting downvoted here but you are right. If our multi-billion dollar defense industry paid attention to the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 and all of the lessons from the war in Ukraine, they should have logically concluded that conventional high-dollar mechanized solutions are nothing more than luxury coffins for conventional soldiers.

I'm truly hoping the Pentagon at least has something to at least counter the drone threat, otherwise any endeavor in the future will simply cost more lives than what the American public will tolerate.

We've also stopped innovating in the Navy as well. Everything today is (at worst) about retrofitting old ship designs or (at best) creating complex machines that take decades to work out the kinks. Meanwhile the world around us is finding innovative, affordable ways to punch above their weight.

Meanwhile our former Secretary of thr Navy's (a buddy of our infalable orange idiot) main contribution was the concept of the Trump Class Battleship.

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So you ignore our present 90%+ intercept rate of one of the most numerous simultaneous drone and missile attacks in history,

You ignore that we are spending billions with companies like Anduril and Saronics to leapfrog the drone issue. The very raison d'être for those companies' existence is rapid innovation, faster than any other competitor can manage.

And you spout blind TDS criticism at what will likely be the first ship designed from the ground up to fight drones with its multiple directed energy weapons, upgraded CIWS and more missiles onboard than any other platform. BTW, the Burkes are about maxed out on the electrical power they can carry, and more is needed for DE weapons, hence the larger platform.

Got it.