Ukraine has received its first battery of six German 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzers called RCH (an acronym for Remotely Controlled Howitzer), continuing the country's armed forces' transition from Soviet to Western calibers in artillery.
As reported by the Balkan Security Network portal, Ukraine is expected to acquire a total of three RCH 155 divisions, which is a total of 54 weapons according to the country's army formation.
However, these weapons will initially remain at the training grounds in Germany, where they will be used to train Ukrainian artillerymen who will use these weapons on the battlefield when they are delivered in larger numbers.
Ukraine, which has been in conflict with Russia for almost three years, will thus become the first in the world to use a new howitzer created by integrating a 8-millimeter remotely controlled artillery module onto the chassis of the Boxer 8x155 armored combat vehicle.
This module represents the next link in the development chain of the German Panzerhaubice PzH 2000.
Ukraine already operates a number of PzH 2000s and there are announcements that it will also receive the classic Boxer infantry fighting vehicles. The fact that the RCH has a remotely controlled artillery module means that this combat vehicle has only two crew members (driver and commander) and that there is actually no personnel in the turret.
The RCH 155 has a range of 40 kilometers with a conventional shell and a theoretical rate of fire of up to nine shells per minute. It has a combat load of 30 shells and, with the already standard MRSI (Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact) option, the howitzer can also operate from the move.
The howitzer also has STANAG 4569 (level 4) armor protection, which protects against direct hits from 14,5-millimeter rounds at distances greater than 200 meters.
It provides protection against the fragmentation effect of a 155-millimeter shell at a distance of 30 meters and from the explosion of an anti-tank mine with a ten-kilogram warhead.
Assumptions indicate that the first weapons of this type could arrive on the battlefield in Ukraine as early as April, and in addition to Ukraine, which is the first user of the RCH 155, there are plans to produce around 80 weapons for the German armed forces.
The plan is to produce a certain number of copies for Great Britain (which will cascade its AS90 howitzers to Ukraine), Italy, and Switzerland, which will integrate the artillery modules into the Pirana IV armored vehicle.
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