Hard limits are appearing on Russia’s ability to continue the Ukraine war. It has begun running out of tube artillery (as opposed to rocket artillery) and light armored fighting vehicles (AFVs). The artillery shortage is because tube artillery barrels are wearing out, while the light AFV shortage is because so many have been lost in combat.

Russia’s stocks of self-propelled tube artillery pieces were eliminated by combat losses in the Ukraine, worn-out barrels or exploded from firing with worn-out barrels, and were replaced by towed artillery from its reserve stocks. Now the Russians have lost, worn out or almost worn out everything but their oldest reserve tube artillery, 50+ year-old 122mm towed guns of which they allegedly had about 4,000 in 2021. These are Russia’s last artillery reserve, are being put into service now and, when those are worn out this year, Russia’s tube artillery park will be reduced to their current production of about 200 yearly tube artillery pieces. At that point Russia can no longer continue the war unless their 2024 production increases to at least 2000 a year.

The barrels of tube artillery pieces have a crucial inner sleeve called a barrel “liner” composed of better quality steel than the barrel and coated with special chemicals for greater resistance to super-hot propellant charge gases when fired. Spiral grooves (lands) cut into it engage the rotation bands around artillery shells to rapidly spin them when fired for greater accuracy. Barrel liners are commonly replaced when worn out during peacetime. This makes the more expensive artillery tube last longer.

No country is known to keep spare barrel liners in reserve for wartime, and it takes as long to create new liner manufacturing capability as it does for whole barrels – about two years. If Russia or any other country started developing new liner and barrel manufacturing capability immediately after the Ukraine war started, it will come online sometime this summer. That is unlikely. No one expected a long war. If anyone has done that, they’d more likely have started in late 2022 or early 2023....