M109A6 Paladin artillery vehicles sporting tan color on military tanks

Russia also has a larger number of superior artillery systems than the U.S., Gordon said.

It's going to put a premium on long-range fires to compensate for what will, at least initially, be a significant degradation in the amount of air support - less joint ISR, less CAS, less interdiction, less offensive and defensive counter-air, so all that is going to have an effect on Army operations because of the quality of these Russian air defenses,' he said. 'It's certainly going to put a premium on U.S. 'Because of the power and the range and the lethality of these Russian air defenses, it's going to make all forms of air support much more difficult, and the ground forces are going to feel the effects,' Gordon said. Rand conducted a study for officials at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, concluding that in the first seven to 10 days of a conflict with Russia, 'the Russians would have very significant advantage in terms of numbers and all aspects of ground combat.' We need rockets that fire as far as today's missiles, and we need missiles out to 499 kilometers.'Ĭurrently, Russian air defenses are effective enough to keep fixed-wing aircraft from conducting close-air support intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and other support missions vital to ground combat forces, said John Gordon IV, a senior policy researcher at Rand Corp. We need cannons that fire as far as rockets today.

'We don't do that right now it's a huge gap. Robert Brown, commanding general of United States Army Pacific Command, told an audience during a panel discussion on 'improving long-range precision fires' at the Association of the United States Army's Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.Īlso read: This tank is the backbone of the Russian Army 'We've got to push the maximum range of all systems under development for close, deep, and strategic, and we have got to outgun the enemy,' Gen. The Army has named long-range precision fires as its top modernization priority in a reform effort aimed at replacing the service's major weapons platforms. Army officials on March 26, 2018, mapped out a plan to dramatically increase the range of the service's artillery and missile systems to counter a Russian threat that would leave ground forces without air support in the 'first few weeks' of a war in Europe.

M109A6 Paladin artillery vehicles sporting tan color on military tanks