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From a New York Times piece today:
Artillery Is Breaking in Ukraine. It’s Becoming a Problem for the Pentagon.
A third of the roughly 350 Western-made howitzers donated to Kyiv are out of action at any given time, according to U.S. defense officials and others familiar with Ukraine’s defense needs.
Swapping out a howitzer’s barrel, which can be 20 feet long and weigh thousands of pounds, is beyond the capability of soldiers in the field and has become a priority for the Pentagon’s European Command, which has set up a repair facility in Poland.
A barrel change would typically be done in the field by the maintenance platoon at the battalion level. As the wise men of NATO have not trained any Ukrainians to do that they have to ship the guns 1,000 kilometer back and forward even for minor repair issues.
Also – The guns are crap:
In 2017, a Marine artillery battery from Camp Lejeune deployed to Syria with four M777 guns and fired more than 23,000 rounds of 155-millimeter ammunition in five months of supporting combat operations in Raqqa — nearly 55 times what a typical battery of that size would normally fire in a year of peacetime training.
As a result, three of the battery’s howitzers had to be removed because of excessive wear over the course of that deployment and were replaced with guns held in reserve in Kuwait.
When one of the howitzers went down, the others simply fired more, an option the Ukrainians are forced to choose daily.
Please stick to the topic. Contribute facts. Do not attack other commentators.