Introduction
Josef Stalin once famously described artillery as “the God of war.” Even now, despite claims that drones have inherited artillery’s mantle, indirect fires remain the primary ground-based means of delivering sustained, massed firepower - suppressing enemy fires and enabling manoeuvre in a way no drone can match.
Heavy artillery retains this unique battlefield role due to its raw power - a standard 155mm shell has a lethal radius of around 50 metres and a fragmentation radius of 100 metres – a football-pitch-sized effect.
Yet artillery has also proved to be exceptionally vulnerable. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence claimed its armed forces destroyed a record 1,160 Russian artillery systems in May 2024 alone. Modern artillery, therefore, faces a paradox – it remains indispensable, but survival has become increasingly difficult.
Which characteristics, then, actually improve artillery survivability on today’s battlefield? To explore this question, this piece uses a Monte Carlo simulation to compare legacy towed artillery to modern self-propelled systems in high-intensity warfare.
A pattern worth testing - what Ukraine artillery loss data show
Towed artillery has been highly exposed on the battlefields of Ukraine. Approximately a third of the US-made M777 155mm towed howitzers sent to Ukraine were damaged or destroyed within the first year of the war. These large guns will often fire from concealed, yet static positions, giving the adversary time to react with counter-battery fire or drones.
Rapid displacement speed has been the typical response, but Ukraine shows simply replacing towed guns with self-propelled variants does not actually solve the problem.
To date, 44 of Poland’s self-propelled AHS Krab and 26 of the French-made CAESAR have been lost. Analysis suggests that some kill chains can be closed in under a minute in Ukraine and many of these guns – which can take over 100 seconds to lay, fire, and displace – were struck while at static firing positions or had settled into predictable firing routines.
By contrast, Sweden’s Archer system presents a different picture. It is capable of laying, firing and displacing in under 20 seconds, engaging targets beyond 50km with rocket-assisted rounds, and employs Saab’s “Barracuda” multi-spectral camouflage to mask its signature. It has been operational in Ukraine since 2023, with an estimated 26 systems now in use. In that time, just one system was destroyed, and one was damaged.
These comparisons warrant caution, given Archer’s smaller numbers and shorter service life in Ukraine. Still, it is lauded by Ukrainian forces as the best system in their arsenal and by their Russian counterparts as a “nightmare” to fight against.
Testing the logic
Modern artillery doctrine assumes that reducing a gun’s exposure through speed, range, and concealment will improve survivability. To test that assumption, a Monte Carlo model examines legacy towed artillery against more modern systems, using the Archer’s specifications.
Survivability was tested across four standoff bands (15km, 20km, 25km and 30km) against a networked adversary with reactive counter-battery fire, persistent ISR tracking a gun through its displacement, and blind fire into positions where guns are known or suspected to operate.
The figures produced are illustrative rather than predictive – calibrated against open-source reporting and modelled according to a single “competent, networked” adversary. Their value lies in the patterns that emerge, rather than the precise figures.
The results: Survivability
Displacement and range significantly improve the odds of survival. At 15km, a legacy towed battery loses an average of 3.17 of its four guns per mission and faces a 67% chance of being wiped out entirely. Even at 25km, close to its practical range limit with standard ammunition, it still loses 1.09 guns on average and faces a 9% chance of total loss.
Archer, across the same ranges, loses far fewer guns. Just 0.26 are lost at 15km and 0.06 at 30km. This improvement stems from rapid displacement, which minimises the time the gun remains targetable after firing.
Range adds a further, separate advantage on top. Because Archer can reach beyond 50km with rocket-assisted rounds, it can engage without needing to close the distance that would put it back in counter-battery and UAV range. At 50km, its loss rate falls to 0.008 guns per mission.
What Actually Kills Them?
The mechanisms that destroy legacy artillery and modern self-propelled systems are very different. Legacy towed artillery losses are overwhelmingly due to counter-battery fires at every range tested. For example, they account for 95% of guns lost at 15km, and still 90% at 25km.
This is largely a result of their static firing positions. Ukraine has illustrated the danger of standing still on the battlefield; in March 2024, three Russian D-20 guns were destroyed by Ukrainian counter-battery fire after failing to displace effectively. This is the exact mechanism that “shoot-and-scoot” tactics exist to defeat.
By comparison, Archer’s losses look almost nothing like that, at any range. Persistent ISR-enabled tracking of guns through displacement accounts for 56 – 70% of its losses at 15km through to 30km, while static-window counter-battery fire never exceeds 8%. Only at 50km does the picture shift again: persistent tracking falls to 30% of losses, overtaken by blind, pre-positioned fire into likely gun positions.
Both Russia and Ukraine already use the tracking mechanism. In February 2024, a loitering munition damaged an Archer near Kupiansk despite its displacement speed, while Ukrainian drone teams have done the same to Russian systems, following a camouflaged 2S19 Msta-S self-propelled howitzer through its own displacement before striking it.
The implication is that fast displacement does not eliminate risk. Instead, it shifts the adversary’s challenge from a counter-battery race to a persistent pursuit, forcing them to maintain custody of a moving, concealed target rather than just react to a static one. This does not make Archer invulnerable - guns are still lost, but they are lost differently.
Implications for Force Design
In a war often characterised by speed, this model illustrated the impressive impact of rapid mobility and range on artillery survivability. Systems that optimise displacement time and operate at longer ranges are essential, not optional, attributes of any artillery force.
But future artillery forces cannot rely on mobility or standoff range alone. The speed and range of reconnaissance-strike systems are expected to grow by as much as 100% by 2040, meaning the relative protection offered by the range and mobility of some of today’s systems is likely to diminish.
Thus, survivability will depend on a broader system of capabilities: electronic warfare to disrupt enemy sensors, camouflage and deception to complicate targeting, decoys to dilute enemy fires, and resilient command networks to sustain operations while under attack.
Ukraine suggests that future artillery will not survive because individual guns become invulnerable, but because they force the adversary into increasingly complex and resource-intensive kill chains. The force design challenge is therefore to field enough survivable systems to generate operational mass, while ensuring each one is sufficiently difficult to find, track and destroy.
Supplementary material such as the model used for this analysis is available upon request to the author.
