Why Britain Gave Ukraine Every AS-90 It Had — Then Quietly Bought a German Robot to Replace Them

[00:00:00]Every self-propelled howitzer in history has required a crew of four, five, sometimes six soldiers to load, aim, and fire the gun. The RCH 155 needs two. One drives, the other commands. Neither of them touches the weapon system. The turret has no crew compartment at all.

[00:00:18]It loads its own shells. It lays its own gun. It fires on its own authority. And when the last round leaves the barrel, it drives itself to a new position before the enemy's counterbattery radar can calculate where the shells came from. That is not a prototype. That is not a defense contractor's sales pitch at a trade fair in Paris. That is a machine rolling off German production lines right now. With confirmed orders from five nations and a price tag approaching 1 billion pounds from Britain alone. But the reason Britain is buying 72 of them is not ambition. It is desperation.

[00:00:50]Between 2023 and 2024, the British Army packed every single AS90 self-propelled howitzer it owned onto flatbed trucks and shipped them to Ukraine. All 99 of them. The largest artillery donation any European nation made since the Cold War ended. And it left the British Army, one of NATO's founding members, without a single self-propelled gun in its inventory for the first time since 1916.

[00:01:15]The RCH 155 weighs 39 tons. It rides on eight wheels, not tracks. Its 155 mm gun stretches 52 calibers long, the same family of ordnance that arms the PzH 2000, the most powerful howitzer in the Ukrainian arsenal. It carries 30 fused projectiles and 144 modular charges in an automated magazine that no human hand needs to touch. It fires up to nine rounds per minute.

[00:01:41]It reaches targets at 40 km with standard ammunition and beyond 70 km with precision-guided shells. It goes from road march to first round fired in under 20 seconds. And after firing, it is packed up and moving in under 10.

[00:01:55]Gone before the enemy knows where to shoot back. 39 tons of German engineering on a chassis that was originally designed by three nations, abandoned by two, and ultimately perfected by the one country that never stopped believing wheeled armor could replace tracks on a modern battlefield.

[00:02:10]This is the RCH155, the weapon that ended Britain's artillery crisis, the weapon Ukraine demanded before anyone else, and the weapon that may have just made the crude artillery turret obsolete forever. To understand why Britain gave its entire howitzer fleet to a foreign country, you need to understand what the AS90 was and what it was not. The AS90 entered British service in 1992.

[00:02:32]Its name stood for artillery system for the 1990s, a designation that told the truth about its ambitions and its expiry date in the same breath. Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering built 179 of them at its Barrow facility. Each one weighed 45 tons, ran on tracks, and carried a 39-caliber 155-mm gun capable of reaching roughly 25 km.

[00:02:54]The crew was five, a driver, a commander, and three soldiers working the turret, manually loading each shell and charge. For its era, the AS90 was respectable, not exceptional. British artillery officers praised its burst-fire rate, three rounds in 10 seconds when the crew worked fast, but its range fell well short of NATO's emerging 52-caliber standard. A planned upgrade called Braveheart would have fitted a longer barrel and extended the reach past 40 km.

[00:03:21]Braveheart was canceled after the propellant charges failed qualification testing. The AS90 would keep its short gun for the rest of its life. It went to war twice, in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. The AS90 provided fire support during peacekeeping operations across the former Yugoslavia. In Iraq in 2003, 32 AS90s deployed with the Royal Artillery as part of the British ground advance. General Robin Brims, commanding the First Armored Division, described their accuracy as phenomenal. Defense Minister Adam Ingram reported a 92% availability rate across the entire deployment for a vehicle designed to fight Soviet armor on the North German plain. Performing that well in the Iraqi desert was a genuine achievement, but Iraq was its last war. The AS90 sat in British garrisons for the next two decades, maintained but never modernized, while the nature of artillery warfare changed completely around it.

[00:04:12]When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Ukrainian forces began consuming ammunition at rates nobody in the West had planned for, governments across Europe opened their armories. Britain opened all of them. By late 2024, every operational AS90 had been shipped east.

[00:04:29]A freedom of information response published in November 2025 confirmed the final number, 99 howitzers. Every single one donated. The British Army had nothing left. As an emergency stopgap, the Ministry of Defense purchased 14 Archer self-propelled guns from Sweden.

[00:04:45]The Archer mounts a 155 mm gun on a modified Volvo truck chassis with a crew of three to four. It is a capable weapon, but 14 guns cannot replace 99, and the Ministry of Defense labeled the Archer an interim solution from the day it arrived. A bridge to something that did not yet exist in British service.

[00:05:04]That something had been under development in a German factory for over 20 years. In 2003, a team of engineers at Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, the German armored vehicle manufacturer known by the initials KMW, began work on a concept they called the artillery gun module. The idea was radical even by German engineering standards. Take the proven gun and autoloader technology from the PzH 2000, the Bundeswehr's tracked self-propelled howitzer, and package it into a fully unmanned turret that could be dropped onto any armored chassis. No crew inside the turret, no manual loading, no hands on the gun at any point during the firing sequence.

[00:05:38]Everything automated. The first demonstrator was built in 2004 and test-fired at the Meppen proving ground in northern Germany. A second demonstrator followed in 2006.

[00:05:49]That machine fired 10 rounds in 2 minutes and 19 seconds with only two crew members operating the entire system from inside the hull below. Over the course of testing, the artillery gun module fired more than 1,000 rounds without a crew member ever entering the turret. KMW mounted the module on a tracked ASCOD chassis and marketed the combination as the Donar. It weighed roughly 31 and 1/2 tons, light enough to fit inside an A400M transport aircraft.

[00:06:15]But Donar found no buyers. In the mid-2000s, armies were not ready to trust their fire support to a fully robotic turret that nobody could manually override from inside. Then the battlefield changed. The wars in Syria and eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 proved that counter-battery radar and loitering munitions had made static artillery positions suicidal.

[00:06:37]A howitzer that stopped to fire and remained in position for more than 60 seconds was a dead howitzer. Crews were being killed not by opposing artillery, but by small autonomous drones that cost less than a used car. The question was no longer whether artillery needed to move faster. The question was whether tracks were fast enough. In April 2014, KMW announced the integration of the artillery gun module onto the Boxer, an eight-wheeled armored vehicle originally developed by Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain in the 1990s. Britain had withdrawn from the Boxer program in 2003 to pursue its own future rapid effect system, which subsequently collapsed.

[00:07:13]Germany and the Netherlands built the Boxer without them. And when Britain returned to the program years later, it came back as a customer, not a development partner. The combination of the unmanned turret and the Boxer chassis created something entirely new.

[00:07:26]A wheeled self-propelled howitzer with no crew in the turret compartment, eight-wheel drive, a top speed of 100 km/h on paved roads, a range of 700 km, and STANAG level four ballistic protection for the two crew members sealed inside the armored hull below. In 2021, KMW unveiled a lower profile version of the turret and designated the complete system the RCH 155 remote controlled howitzer 155 mm. What separates this machine from every other self-propelled howitzer in NATO service is not just the crew reduction or the wheeled chassis. It is the firing cycle.

[00:08:04]The RCH 155 does not need to deploy stabilizer legs before firing. It can shoot while stationary, while braking, and according to the manufacturer, while moving at speed. Its automated systems load, lay, and fire the gun in a sequence that no human hand interrupts.

[00:08:21]The two crew members select targets and authorize fire through digital displays.

[00:08:25]The machine does everything else. It can complete a three-round fire mission and be moving to a new position within 30 seconds. By the time a counter-battery radar system like the German-built Cobra has finished calculating the origin of the shells, the RCH 155 is already gone.

[00:08:40]Before covering where this weapon has gone and who is buying it, if this deep dive into modern military engineering is the kind of content that keeps you watching, hit subscribe. It takes 1 second and it helps the channel cover vehicles like this in the detail they deserve. Ukraine was the first nation on Earth to order the RCH 155 on July 14th, 2022, less than 5 months after Russia's full-scale invasion. Ukraine formally requested the system from Germany.

[00:09:07]The German government approved the sale of 18 units on September 17th that same year, financed from the German-Ukraine Aid Fund at a cost of roughly 216 million euros. The order eventually grew to 54 across three separate batches of 18, with the total program value reaching approximately 890 million euros. The first unit was formally handed over at the KNDS factory in Kassel on January 13th, 2025. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius presented the howitzer to Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksii Makeiev in a ceremony attended by senior military officials from both countries, but the initial six vehicles from that first batch remained in Germany for crew training. They did not ship to Ukraine immediately.

[00:09:47]Delivery slipped through 2025.

[00:09:50]Integration with Ukraine's Kropyva battlefield management system proved more difficult than anticipated.

[00:09:56]KNDS engineers were still resolving technical modifications driven by Ukrainian crew feedback as late as August 2025. The German Ministry of Defense confirmed in March 2026 that more than 600 Ukrainian soldiers had completed training on the system at the artillery school in Idar-Oberstein. The full order of 54 units is scheduled for delivery by the end of 2028. Whether the RCH 155 has actually fired a shot in combat remains one of the most contested questions in modern defense reporting.

[00:10:26]and marketing materials describe the system as combat-proven. A senior company adviser posted on social media in July 2026 calling the RCH 155 combat-proven in Ukraine without specifying where, when, or under what circumstances.

[00:10:41]But independent tracking organizations monitoring Western equipment deliveries to Ukraine have found no photographic or video evidence of a single RCH 155 deployed in the field. No losses have been recorded by open-source analysts.

[00:10:55]No unit identification has been confirmed. The 155 mm gun itself is genuinely combat-proven through decades of PzH 2000 service across multiple conflicts, but that is not the same as the RCH 155 platform being tested in war. What is proven beyond any dispute is what Ukrainian artillery crews face every single day and why the old way of doing things is killing them. Russian artillery outnumbers Ukrainian guns by a margin that varies between 3:1 and 10:1 depending on the sector, but the principal threat is no longer just enemy shells.

[00:11:28]It is the Lancet, a Russian loitering munition built by the ZALA Aero Group with a range of roughly 40 km and a production cost reportedly between 20,000 and 35,000 dollars per unit. The Lancet has destroyed dozens of Western-supplied howitzers in Ukraine, including towed M777s and self-propelled M109s. Ukrainian crews have responded with improvised metal cages, camouflage netting, and drastically compressed engagement cycles. The time from stopping to firing to moving again has been cut from roughly 2 minutes down to 30 to 45 seconds. Any that takes longer is gambling with their lives. The tracked PzH 2000 has been praised by Ukrainian gunners for its raw firepower.

[00:12:08]One crew reported firing up to 240 rounds in a single day during sustained operations.

[00:12:14]But, they also reported barrel overheating, electronic failures under sustained fire, and vulnerability to water and dirt infiltrating the turret's complex systems. The Polish-built Krab was rated more accurate by some Ukrainian crews, but slower in rate of fire. Towed guns suffered the highest loss rates of all because they simply could not relocate fast enough to survive. The RCH 155 was designed from the ground up to solve exactly this problem. Its manufacturer claims the system is up to three times more effective than the PzH 2000 in internal simulations, destroying more targets while sustaining fewer losses, primarily because of its ability to fire and relocate before counter-battery systems can respond. That claim comes from a manufacturer's internal model, not an independent battlefield assessment.

[00:12:59]But, the underlying logic that speed of displacement now matters more than volume of fire is the single most important tactical lesson to emerge from the artillery war in Ukraine. The RCH 155 did not win Britain's mobile fires platform competition by being the only option available. It won because it was the only option that solved four problems simultaneously. The Swedish Archer, which Britain purchased 14 of as an interim measure, mounts its gun on a modified Volvo truck chassis. It is effective, stores 21 rounds, and operates with a crew of three to four, but it is a truck with a gun bolted on, not an armored fighting vehicle. It cannot survive anywhere near the front line against direct fire, and it shares no components with any other vehicle in the British inventory. The French Caesar is a proven combat platform used by France, Denmark, and over a dozen export customers across three continents.

[00:13:49]But the original 6x6 version carries only 18 rounds. The newer 8x8 variant improves capacity and protection, but adds weight and cost without addressing the crew reduction problem. A Caesar still needs a full gun detachment to operate. The PzH 2000 remains the gold standard for tracked self-propelled howitzers worldwide. It carries 60 rounds, fires five rounds in 9 seconds in burst mode, and has proven itself from Afghanistan to Ukraine, but it weighs 55 tons, requires a crew of five, and its mechanical complexity has caused serious maintenance problems under the sustained firing conditions of Eastern Ukraine. It was designed for a Cold War doctrine of mass defensive fire from prepared positions, not for the rapid displacement that modern counter-battery warfare demands. The South Korean K9 Thunder is the world's most widely exported tracked self-propelled howitzer, serving in at least eight nations across Europe and Asia.

[00:14:42]It is reliable, battle-tested, and comparatively affordable, but it is tracked, requires a crew of five, and offers no meaningful automation advantage over the AS90 it would have replaced. Buying a K9 would have been replacing one Cold War howitzer with another. The RCH 155 offered what none of them could, a two-person crew operating a fully unmanned turret, wheeled mobility at 100 km/h, and critically, the same Boxer eight-wheeled chassis that Britain had already ordered for its mechanized infantry vehicle program, meaning shared logistics, shared training pipelines, shared spare parts, and a single family of vehicles across multiple roles. The gun fires NATO-standard 155 mm ammunition compatible with every Western ally on the continent. In April 2024, Britain selected the RCH 155 under the Trinity House agreement with Germany.

[00:15:32]A 52 million pound early capability demonstrator contract followed in December 2025, providing one demonstrator vehicle for the United Kingdom and two for Germany. In March 2026, a 53 million pound long lead item contract initiated production of barrels, breeches, recoil systems, and trunnions at Rheinmetall's gun manufacturing facility in Telford, England. And on May 13, 2026, Defense Secretary John Healey announced the full production order, 72 RCH 155 howitzers for close to 1 billion pounds.

[00:16:06]Boxer hull drive modules will be assembled at the KNDS factory in Stockport. Gun barrels and breech assemblies will come from Rheinmetall in Telford. Armor grade steel will be forged at Sheffield Forgemasters. First deliveries are expected in 2028, with a full fleet in service by 2032.

[00:16:23]Germany has ordered 84 for the Bundeswehr, with a framework contract approved by the German Parliament, allowing procurement of up to 500 systems across multiple allied nations.

[00:16:34]Switzerland has ordered 32 on a Piranha chassis. Qatar has been approved as an export customer. The Netherlands, the United States, Italy, Spain, and Canada have all expressed formal interest.

[00:16:45]Rheinmetall's Chief Executive Armin Papperger has projected revenues of up to 15 billion euros from the RCH 155 program over the coming decade. If those projections hold, the RCH 155 will become the most commercially successful artillery system since the American M109 entered mass production in the 1960s.

[00:17:05]Britain gave away every self-propelled howitzer it owned.

[00:17:08]99 vehicles built by a company that no longer exists, designed for a war against the Soviet Union that never came, shipped east to fight the same enemy three decades later under a different flag. And when the gun sheds were empty and the Royal Artillery had nothing left to fire, Britain turned to Germany and bought a robot. The RCH 155 is not perfect. Its unmanned turret is the most mechanically complex artillery system ever fielded and complexity in the field has historically meant fragility. It has not been independently confirmed in combat despite the manufacturer's claims. Its wheeled chassis, while fast on roads, will struggle in the deep mud and broken terrain that define Ukrainian and Eastern European front lines in autumn and spring. And Britain's entire future artillery capability now depends on a German designed supply chain running through factories that did not exist in British hands 5 years ago, but the direction it represents is irreversible.

[00:18:02]Every major Western army is moving toward unmanned turrets, reduced crews, wheeled mobility, and networked fire control systems. The AS90 served the British Army for 30 years. It fired its last British round sometime before 2024 in a training exercise that nobody thought to record. It left service not with a ceremony, but on a flatbed truck heading for a country at war. The RCH 155 was not built to repeat what the AS90 did. It was built for a battlefield where a howitzer that stays still for 60 seconds is already dead, where two soldiers operating the right machine can deliver the firepower that five soldiers with the old machine never could.

[00:18:40]Where the speed of displacement matters more than the speed of fire and where the gun that survives to fight the next day is the gun that was never where the enemy expected it to be. Two soldiers, eight wheels, one unmanned turret that loads, aims, and fires without a human hand touching the weapon. That is not a compromise. That is what artillery looks like now.