I suppose it's obvious, but Russia is basically out of useful (self propelled 152mm) guns and their ammo. Yes, they can scrape together some crap grade towed artillery tubes and mortars, old SP mortars and light (122mm) guns, and substandard shells for them in a siege operation; but a more mobile fight like the one in Kursk takes brigades of SP 152mm guns with new barrels (50-60 guns each), and properly made new shells by the kiloton, in order to really have a prayer when fighting like Russians.
That said, so far no one has seen so much as batteries of those SP guns (6 each) showing up at that salient; nor is there much chance left that we ever will. If they had them, they wouldn't be using hundreds of towed Stalinist era AT guns and T-62s as artillery in a desperate attempt to have anything on the line at all. Ok, so far Oryx only documents the combat loss of a fifth of their entire paper pre-war stock of SP 152mm guns; but even if that were complete and accurate, the best Russian gun barrels wear out after maybe 1,500 shots. So everything has long since worn out, and Russian industry is too worthless to fix them except in trivial quantities.
Which means a significant counter attack will require masses of meat cubes; but they've only been raising those about as fast as they've been losing them (if that). Which makes the existence of a massive and unused Russian reserve of actual trained infantry unexpected, to say the least. So unless they strip the rest of the front and abandon all other offensive operations, the Ukrainians will probably be in Kursk for a while.
|