Anticipating A Russian Attack, The Ukrainian Army Doubled Its Artillery

Both the Ukrainian and Russian armies still follow the Soviet ground-warfare doctrine, which states that the decisive force is the cannon. The big guns are able to destroy enemy forces by isolating and pining them down.

The Ukrainian army was short of cannons and rockets when the war started. There is an army without guns.

Russian forces outgunned Ukrainian forces when they first invaded easternUkraine. Russian scouts found the Ukrainian formations just minutes after the Russian bombardment began.

The Ukrainian army has proven that it is a learning army. The fighting in the Donbas region taught it that it needed more and better weaponry.

In a new study for the Royal United Services Institute in London, analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk, and Nick Reynolds explain that since March of last year, Ukraine has focused on recovering its artillery capabilities.

The army nearly doubled the strength of its cannon. There were only two independent brigades with howitzers, three independent rocket units, and one independent brigade with Tochka missiles.

There are 1,900 pieces of rocket- launchers. The Russian army had 4,200 guns and vechicles.

The Ukrainian army opened up old warehouses to store weapons and equipment. Adding rocket battalions to the infantry, tank and air- assault brigades was one of the things the army did. battalions were added by the Tockha brigade

The Ukrainian army had 2,900 big guns after eight years. At the same time, the Russian army expanded to include over 6,000 rocket systems. The Ukrainians were getting closer to one another.

The Ukrainian artillery corps improved its fire-control system with new drones and radars, but it wasn't good enough to match the Russians'.

A lot of effort was put into improving the quality of life. The deployment time for artillery units was reduced by 80 percent thanks to the use of the Ukrainian intelligent mapping software. The amount of time to open counterbattery fire was reduced by 90 percent.

Russian fire control broke down under the stress of combat after the war on Ukraine began. The Ukrainians' fire-control was better than the Russians'. The Russians had a larger number of guns.

There was a weakness in the Ukrainian army. It would take hundreds of thousands of tons of shells and rockets for a war to start. The RUSI analysts said that the Ukrainians had just six weeks of fighting when the Russians attacked.

More than 300 NATO-style guns and launchers that fire different types of weapons were provided by the allies to the Ukrainians.

Even as it burned through its pre-war stock of shells and rockets, the Ukrainian artillery corps was still supported by Western guns and equipment.

It was a near-run thing, but 10 months into Russia's wider war on Ukraine, Ukrainian shelling is capable of doing what Ukrainian doctrine asks of it. After the tanks and infantry fix the enemy forces, you can bomb and destroy them.