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Artillery Is Back: Why Tube and Rocket Fires Still Decide Wars

RAGE Global · Defense Analysis · Updated 2026-08-22 · 12 min read

RAGE X ANALYSIS — Expert assessment authored and reviewed by Carlos Kfoury. This is analysis, not reportage. Factual claims carry source attribution; judgements carry confidence labels.

For thirty years, Western Europe treated massed artillery as a Cold War relic and sold most of it. Finland declined. Ukraine settled the argument in public.

Executive Assessment

Artillery is the least glamorous capability in any inventory and the one that has decided more ground engagements than any other. Between 1991 and 2022, most Western European armies divested it — the assumption being that precision air power and networked sensors had made mass fires redundant.

That assumption did not survive contact with a peer war.

First, the country that refused to divest now has the largest artillery force in Western Europe. Finland fields approximately 1,500 artillery weapons: 700 howitzers, 700 heavy mortars and around 100 multiple rocket launchers. The Wilson Center's assessment is that this exceeds the combined artillery firepower Poland, Germany, Norway and Sweden can currently muster. (Confidence: Confirmed as published assessment)

Second, Finland's standing army is about 23,000. The artillery is operated by conscripts and reservists against a wartime strength of 280,000 drawn from a reserve of 870,000–900,000. Mass fires and a mass reserve are the same policy. (Confidence: Confirmed)

Third, the doctrinal logic is that artillery works without preconditions the others require. It does not need air superiority, which most states cannot assume against a peer. It does not need armour parity. It needs guns, shells, trained crews and fire control — all of which a conscript reserve can generate at scale. (Confidence: Analysis, high)

Fourth, drones did not replace artillery; they re-tasked it. FPVs excel against individual vehicles at short range. Artillery does area suppression, denial, and the volume of fire that fixes a force in place so something else can finish it. In the Russian offensive method, artillery and scatterable mines sit in the middle of the sequence — between fixing and glide-bomb delivery. (Confidence: Analysis, high)

Fifth, the binding constraint everywhere is production, not inventory. Finnish domestic ammunition output is reported to outpace larger European states including Germany and Poland, with the FDF doubling ongoing production. Rounds per year is the metric that matters; everything else is a stockpile that depletes. (Confidence: Confirmed as reported)

The Holdings

Category Finland
Howitzers ~700
Heavy mortars ~700
Multiple rocket launchers ~100
Total artillery weapons ~1,500
Principal self-propelled howitzer K9 Thunder 155 mm
Principal MLRS M270
Training area Rovajärvi — Europe's largest artillery training area
Operated by Conscripts and reservists
Standing army ~23,000–24,000
Wartime strength 280,000
Trained reserve 870,000–900,000
Population ~5.6 million

The comparison that makes the point: more artillery firepower than Poland, Germany, Norway and Sweden combined, held by a country with a standing force smaller than a single US Army division.

Why Artillery Survived the Precision Revolution

Four properties, each of which precision air power does not have.

It is always available. A gun line does not require a sortie, an airbase, a tanker, or permissive airspace. It is responsive in minutes to a call from a company commander, in weather that grounds aircraft, at night, and under an air defence umbrella that would make a fast jet a casualty.

It does volume. Precision solves the problem of hitting a known point target. It does not solve suppression, denial of an area, or the destruction of a dispersed force in prepared positions. Those require rounds, and rounds require tubes.

It is cheap per effect against area targets. The FPV cost-exchange revolution applies to individual high-value vehicles. Against a treeline, a trench system, or a road junction that needs to be denied for six hours, a fire mission remains the economical answer.

Its crews can be generated at scale. A fire direction centre and a gun crew are trainable within a conscription cycle. A fast-jet pilot is not. For a state whose defence rests on mobilisation, that is decisive.

RAGE INTEL judgement: the divestment of European artillery between 1991 and 2022 was not a technical error. It was a correct optimisation for the wars Europe expected to fight — expeditionary, permissive, against non-peer opponents — applied to a war it did not expect. The failure was in the strategic assumption, not the capability assessment. That distinction matters because it predicts where the next mistake will be made. (Confidence: Analysis, high)

Where Artillery Sits in the 2026 Kill Chain

Artillery no longer operates as an independent arm. It is one node in a sensor-to-shooter loop that drones now dominate at both ends.

Detection. Reconnaissance UAVs locate targets, replacing the forward observer for most missions and extending observed depth well beyond line of sight.

Fixing. Artillery and mortars deny movement, forcing an enemy to remain in place under continued observation.

Finishing. FPVs, loitering munitions and — in Russian practice — UMPK glide bombs strike the fixed force.

RUSI's Jack Watling characterises the Russian offensive method as a triangle: fix Ukrainian frontline units with infantry and mechanised troops; attrite and deny manoeuvre with FPVs, loitering munitions, artillery, mortars and scatterable mines emplaced between and behind positions; then apply glide bombs against forces now fixed in place.

Note the placement. Artillery is in the middle of that sequence, not at either end. It has lost the finishing role to cheaper systems and retained the fixing role, which is the one that makes everything else possible.

Counter-battery

The other half of the story is that artillery's principal enemy is artillery. Counter-battery radar, drone observation and rapid fire-mission processing have compressed the time a gun can remain in position after firing from tens of minutes to single-digit minutes.

The consequences are structural:

  • Shoot-and-scoot is mandatory, favouring self-propelled over towed systems
  • Dispersal is standard, with batteries operating as individual guns
  • Survivability is a function of displacement speed, not armour
  • Towed artillery is increasingly a liability in a peer fight, whatever its cost advantage

That is why the K9 Thunder and comparable self-propelled systems dominate current European procurement, and why the towed inventories many armies retained look worse on paper than the raw counts suggest.

The Production Problem

Inventory is a stock. War consumes a flow.

Finland's domestic ammunition production reportedly outpaces Germany and Poland, and the FDF is doubling ongoing output. That is the correct emphasis, and it is the one most European rearmament announcements avoid because it is expensive, unglamorous and slow to deliver.

Three structural points:

Shell plants take years. Energetics production — propellants and explosives — is the bottleneck, not shell bodies. Capacity added today delivers rounds in three to five years.

Barrels wear out. Sustained high rates of fire consume tubes on a schedule. A gun park without a barrel replacement pipeline is a depleting asset regardless of shell stocks.

Announcements are not production. The honest metric across every European rearmament programme is rounds per year delivered, not contract value signed. This is the single most useful filter for separating serious programmes from press releases.

The Counter-Argument

Stated fairly, because it is not frivolous.

Drones do the job more cheaply. An FPV at $400 destroys a specific vehicle with a precision a howitzer cannot match. Ukraine recorded roughly 820,000 confirmed FPV strike missions in 2025 at an average unit cost far below $1,000 — achieving effects that would otherwise have required thousands of shells. Ukraine War Analytics notes FPV cost-effectiveness continues to favour their adoption over traditional artillery fire for many missions.

Artillery is a signature magnet. A firing gun announces its position to counter-battery radar and any drone overhead. Survivability requires constant displacement, which reduces the volume of fire actually delivered.

Logistics burden is enormous. Shells are heavy. Sustaining a large gun park requires a transport network that is itself a target set.

The synthesis. Both arms do work the other cannot. Drones cannot suppress an area for six hours, cannot fire in weather that grounds them, cannot deliver the tonnage required to break prepared positions, and are defeated by jamming in ways a shell is not. Artillery cannot chase an individual vehicle into a treeline for $400.

The honest formulation: drones took artillery's precision missions and left it the mass missions, which were always the ones only it could do. (Confidence: Analysis, high)

What Europe Is Actually Doing

The industrial signal is clearer than the political one.

BAE Systems Bofors reported production rates grown by a factor of three to four across several product areas in 2026, citing the Archer self-propelled howitzer, the Tridon Mk2 air defence system and 40 mm 3P ammunition. The order book is driven principally by Eastern and Northern European states, with supply chain expansion in Sweden.

Finland is frontloading artillery and long-range fires projects to enhance deep-strike capability, and in early 2026 initiated preparations to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention to reintroduce anti-personnel mines into territorial defence doctrine — a contested decision covered separately in the Finland cluster.

A three- to fourfold increase in an artillery and ammunition line is not a legacy support contract. It is a market that reappeared because the assumption underlying its disappearance was falsified.

Key Judgements

# Judgement Confidence
1 Finland fields ~1,500 artillery weapons — the largest force in Western Europe Confirmed
2 That reportedly exceeds Poland, Germany, Norway and Sweden combined Confirmed as published assessment
3 Artillery works without air superiority or armour parity, which is why it survived Analysis — high
4 Drones took artillery's precision missions and left it the mass missions Analysis — high
5 Artillery's role in the current kill chain is fixing, not finishing Analysis — high
6 Counter-battery compression has made shoot-and-scoot mandatory and towed artillery a peer-fight liability Analysis — high
7 Production throughput, not inventory, is the binding constraint everywhere Analysis — high
8 Energetics capacity, not shell bodies, is the bottleneck; new plants deliver in 3–5 years Analysis — medium-high
9 European divestment 1991–2022 was a correct optimisation for the wrong assumed war Analysis — high
10 BAE Bofors' three- to fourfold production increase confirms the market reversal Confirmed

Indicators to Watch

  1. Rounds per year delivered by each European producer — the only honest metric, and the one least often published.
  2. Energetics and propellant plant construction, the real bottleneck behind every shell announcement.
  3. Barrel production and replacement pipelines, the quiet constraint on sustained fire.
  4. Counter-battery response times as published or inferred, which determine displacement doctrine.
  5. Towed versus self-propelled procurement ratios in European programmes.
  6. Whether any army publishes cost-per-effect comparisons between fire missions and drone strikes for equivalent tasks.
  7. Finnish long-range fires procurement, which the FDF is reported to be frontloading.
  8. Rovajärvi utilisation by NATO partners, an indicator of whether the Alliance is training for mass fires or talking about them.

Sourcing and Methodology

Tier 1 to Tier 3: Finnish Defence Forces published figures, named institutional assessment from the Wilson Center, RUSI and Small Wars Journal, manufacturer earnings disclosures, and established defence trade press.

The claim that Finnish artillery exceeds the combined holdings of four named states is reported as the Wilson Center's published assessment rather than an independently verified count. Equipment figures vary modestly across sources and reporting dates.

This assessment discusses force structure and doctrine at the level published in open institutional analysis. It contains no fire planning content, no counter-battery technique, and no unit dispositions.

Principal references

Corrections policy — errors are corrected promptly with a notice appended. No silent edits, ever. Corrections to: intel@ragex.co

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