In May the British Army retired its 89 AS90s, handing them all over to Ukraine. The Third Assault Brigade received at least 12, replacing their Soviet-era 2S19 Msta-S. They are pleased with their new weapon.

...

“When the enemy begins pushing toward our infantry, we engage to stop them from even getting close,” Skrypa said. “I had a situation where about 30 [Russians] started gathering in a tree line, preparing to attack our guys — storm troopers. But they didn’t make it. We fired several shells, and that was it, none of them wanted to come back.”

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Initially the UK planned to send only 30 [AS90] howitzers, which were transferred in January 2023. Yet the Ukrainian crews have proved so capable they were gifted all of them. The artillery systems, designed in the 1990s, were retired by the British Army because of their age and their lumbering lack of mobility for the modern battlefield. But they are still proving their worth in Ukraine and have become a high priority target for Russian drones designed in 2025.

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[–] Carrolade@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Prior to the recent decade, peer on peer warfare was considered pretty unlikely overall, where COIN was the big thing everyone was worried about.

Here in the US anyway. I'm not sure what priorities the British have and how much budget they have to throw at them.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The only reason these weapon systems weren't thrown in the dumpster by the US during that era was the military-industrial complex/professional military apparatus of the US military understood that this was a distraction and that one could learn very much the wrong lessons from fighting a series of counter-insurgency wars and become utterly unprepared for a near-peer conflict.

Essentially during the entire Iraq and Afghanistan wars this justification was constantly used as a bludgeon to justify more and more military spending for extremely advanced weapon systems that had no actual use against guerrila fighters with ak47s, rpgs and IEDs which was infuriating watching happen as a leftist.

My point is the US was in a similar position and chose to retain the M109 paladin as an essential part of its landwar system (to be replaced by something similar eventually) and I think that was a wise choice, Britain made a mistake here and they will eventually backtrack shrugs but whatever there will be plenty of M109s in WW3 and WW4 probably...

I am not arguing for increased military spending, I am just talking about what you practically need to stop a landwar in a modern near-peer conflict.