Artillery questions

[VinceW]

The Canadian Army has 37 M777's and no more self propelled artillery does only having 37 M777's mean that there are only 4-5 batteries of 6 M777's and the rest are used for training?
And is the Army going to get self propelled 155's again?
Or is the plan to buy the 227mm HIMARS going fill that role?

 

[dangerboy]

Or is the plan to buy the 227mm HIMARS going fill that role?

I may have missed something, but what plan to buy a 227mm? 

 

[Ostrozac]

I may have missed something, but what plan to buy a 227mm?

That's the Long-Range Precision Rocket System project. LRPRS is somewhere between a delayed good idea and a far-fetched pipe dream. It currently appears to be stalled somewhere in requirements land (which is on the way to procurement land).

 

[slayer/raptor]

The three reg force regt's have two batteries each of 4 M777s + 2 for backups, so 10 M777s per regiment.  W bty at the RCAS has at least 2, they may have 4 I don't remember.  And there are 2 in Borden I believe for courses for maintainer types.

There are talks of getting self-propelled 120mm mortars.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

There are talks of getting self-propelled 120mm mortars.

Is that not what the plan was when they took the Bisons from the Reserves all those many years ago?

The reasoning was that part of the fleet was supposed to be turned into mortar plates for a 120mm.

I saw the Regs driving lots of Bisons after the turnover, but never saw any employed as 120mm mortars.

If the plan has been in the works since then, I don't hold much hope of it coming to fruition.

 

[Ostrozac]

I saw the Regs driving lots of Bisons after the turnover, but never saw any employed as 120mm mortars.

We had Bisons configured as 81mm self-propelled mortars, but I never heard of any plans to convert them to 120mm. The Bison with 81mm was a very good piece of kit, I'm not sure why it didn't stay in service.  One of the issues between whether you should have 81mm or 120mm mortars is not the weight of the weapon, but rather the weight of the ammo. An 81mm round weighs 4 kg, a 120mm round weighs 16 kg. 120 is more effective, but is it 4 times more effective? We used to carry 99 rounds of 81 onboard the Bisons -- that would have weighed the same as 25 rounds of 120 -- and the vehicle would probably carry even less, since the 120 weapon and mount would have been bigger and heavier than the 81.

But the US use a 120mm self-propelled mortar variant of the Stryker, so vehicles are out there.