Countries by number of self propelled artillery

A lot of people know what artillery is. However, what is the point of producing the so-called self-propelled artillery? Everyone is aware how effective regular artillery was in the past. What is more, it is still crucial for modern warfare and it will remain essential for many years to come. It results from many reasons that, at the first glance, can be quite obvious. However, the role of self-propelled artillery is to get rid of one of the biggest downsides of using artillery, its lack of mobility.

Self-propelled artillery is artillery equipped with its own propulsion system to move towards its target. They are high mobility vehicles, usually based on continuous tracks carrying either a large howitzer. Modern SP artillery is highly computerized with the ability to self survey firing positions. The general role is to provide fire support.

There is one significant difference between self-propelled artillery and classic, towed artillery. As you can guess, it regards the mobility. One of the biggest problems with artillery was that in order to use it, soldiers had to bring it to the battlefield, set it up, aim and then fire, hoping that no one will find their position very soon. In case of self-propelled, or also known as mobile or locomotive artillery, we do not have such problem. It is because this kind of artillery is mounted on the vehicle, which in many cases is armoured in order to protect its crew from shrapnel and light fire arms. Although such armours are not thick and cannot stand against heavy fire power, they are still considered to be armoured fighting vehicle (known as AFV).

Still, we have to remember about the fact that mobile artillery has its own problems. In many cases such sizeable and very heavy vehicles cannot reach many destinations. A great example was the Vietnam War, where Americans had to use classic, towed artillery.

The purpose of this page is to show you how many self-propelled artillery you can find in particular armies. There are of course a lot of different statistics you can check. At the beginning there is a percentage-based chart. You can see there how many self-propelled artilleries one can find in a country. The dominance of Russia is quite obvious there. Besides that, there is also a table with exact numbers. Number of mobile artillery. Currently in equipment and in reserve.