A Russian Drone Hit Ukraine's 'Hidden' Krab Gun—And Exposed a Billion-Dollar Flaw in Artillery Design
A Russian drone slipped into a camouflaged dugout and destroyed a Krab howitzer. The real damage? A warning to every army still betting on self-propelled artillery.
Ukraine has received 108 Krab self-propelled howitzers from Poland. In three years of hard fighting since the first of the 53-ton, five-person guns arrived in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have lost no fewer than 35 of the howitzers, which fire Ukraine’s best 155-millimeter shells as far as 31 km.
On or just before June 7, a Russian drone crew showed what happens when artillery gunners don’t take every precaution. The Russian crew flew two fiber-optic first-person-view drones through gaps in the front and back of one Krab’s covered, concealed dugout in a tree line somewhere along the 1,100-km front line—and lit the gun on fire, destroying it.
It was probably the 36th Krab loss. And it was totally preventable.
Didn’t Rumsfeld kick up a hornet’s nest two decades ago canceling a similar platform for the U.S. military?