When Will Ammunition Shortage Silence Russia’s Artillery?

Stalin famously called artillery ‘the god of war,’ and during WWII the Red Army honed the tactic of concentrating thousands of guns on a narrow section of front to deliver devastating barrages. Artillery has been similarly important in the current campaign, causing around 80% of the casualties, but many analysts including the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence are suggesting that Russian forces are now facing a critical shortage of ammunition. Is this wishful thinking, or will Russian guns start to fall silent?

Expended Russian artillery shells on the outskirts of Bucha. Massive quantities of shells were ... [+] expended and much of the city destroyed in a typical Russian artillery campaign

Any assessment relies on knowing how many shells Russia had to start with, and the rate at which shells are being expended. And we have seen a wide range of figures thrown around.

In January, CNN quoted U.S. officials saying the average rate of fire had dropped from a high of 20,000 rounds per day to an average of 5,000. They contrasted this with Ukrainian estimates of a fall from 60,000 per day to 20,000.

In March, Spanish newspaper El Pais quoted EU insider sources as saying that Russia was firing 40-50,000 rounds per day, and alongside an estimate of 20-60,000 rounds per day from the Latvian government which has been a major supplier of ammunition to Ukraine.

Also in March, in a letter to the EU asking for ammunition, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said that Russian forces were firing on average about 15,000 rounds per day.

In March, Konrad Muzyka, a defense analyst at Rochan Consulting returned from the front line in Ukraine with the estimate that Russia is expending around 10,000 shells per day.

Many commentators concur that the rate of fire is falling off, though whether this is from 60,000 a day to 20,000 or 20,000 to 5,000 is impossible to tell.

At the start of the war, Ukrainian analysts estimated that the Russians has some 525,000 rounds stockpiled in the country. Mark Urban of the BBC says the total stockpile may be as many as 16 million rounds — but most likely the Russians themselves do not know the exact number, nor how many of their 40+ year old rounds can still be fired.

The sharp reduction in the amount being fired suggests that stockpiles are now severely depleted. Russia is reportedly drawing on old ammunition reserves, but reportedly as many of 50% of the shells are visibly rusty and are not in a satisfactory state due to poor storage and sheer age. Troops are reportedly being issued ammunition previously declared unfit for use.

How has Russia run through such ammunition reserves, reserves which presumably were supposed to be sufficient for a full-scale war with NATO, without achieving its war aims in Ukraine? While Ukraine has increasingly developed precision indirect fire to make best use of their resources, using drones to adjust their aim and hitting Russian tanks with a few well-directed shells, the Russians have relied on more and more firepower.

As a piece by the European Council on Foreign Relations noted last August, after the initial advances were defeated:

In an article entitled ‘Why Russia Keeps Turning to Mass Firepower’ in Foreign Policy, Lucian Staiano-Daniels notes that while the U.S. emphasizes the need for precise artillery fire, Russia prefers to use massed fires to make up for inadequacies in its army, tracing this back to the Napoleonic wars and beyond: "an army that is unable or unwilling to invest in its manpower must compensate with something else."

This has been particularly obvious in urban warfare, where Russian forces have repeated the tactics developed in Chechnya, Rather than infantry fighting building-by-building, massed artillery demolishes entire blocks when they encounter any resistance. The result is the utter devastation of the towns and cities they capture, and the expenditure of large quantities of ammunition.

Indiscriminate Russian artillery barrages have destroyed population centers in the Donetsk region - ... [+] and wasted ammunition

Even when fighting Ukrainian forces in the open countryside, Russian artillery is notable for throwing shells in the general direction of the enemy rather than at specific targets, leaving landscapes reminiscent of a WWI battlefield.

This is very much by the book for Russian artillery commanders. Russian army firing tables lay down the number of shells needed to carry out a barrage against any given type of target, and according to these hundreds of rounds are required even to destroy a single armored vehicle.

In addition to this inefficient use of ammunition, Russia has another problem: stockpiles are being blown up by long-range strikes. This seems to have been one of the main uses of the U.S.-suppled HIMARS rockets, with Ukraine claiming to have destroyed 50 ammo dumps in July. Since those first few months Russian ammunition has been stored even further back from the front line, but clearly significant quantities have been blown up, and forward storage sites and even individual ammunition trucks are still regularly hit.

Once the stockpile is gone, the only source will be new deliveries. According to Ukrainian estimates, Russia has capacity to produce around 20,000 rounds a month or less than 700 rounds a day. One 152mm gun fires 7-8 rounds a minute, so a single battery of 6 guns will expend that 700 rounds in one 15-minute bombardment – leaving nothing for any other Russian forces anywhere in Ukraine. No wonder competition for shells between different units is becoming intense and Wagner units claim they are not being given any.

Russia still has some ammunition reserves, and the steady trickle of new ammunition will continue and perhaps increase as Russian industry shifts to meet Putin's demands. Maybe they will succeed in buying additional ammunition from Iran. But expending 40,000 rounds, or even 20,000 or 10,000 in one day will no longer be feasible. Ukraine's General Staff believe that Russia will experience critical ammunition shortages in the next two months. Russian artillery is being starved into uselessness, and the current round of attacks around Bakhmut have been bloody infantry assaults without adequate artillery supporting them.

The next phase is likely to see a Ukrainian offensive, and Russia will rely on artillery to blunt it, just as Ukraine's drone-directed artillery did most of the killing when they stopped the advance on Kyiv. Whether Russia still has enough ammunition left, and whether they will be able to get it to the right place at the right time, is likely to be a crucial factor in what happens next.