French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged that all of the 2025 production of its CAESAR 155mm / 52 caliber howitzer will be supplied to Ukraine, according to a Tuesday report by the milblogger “French Aid to Ukraine” on X.
The CEO of the Franco-German company KNDS, the manufacturer of the CAESAR (Camion Équipé d’un Système d’Artillerie – Truck mounted artillery system) howitzers announced in March that annual production of the weapon had been quadrupled since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. He said that by the year end more than 110 units would have been shipped to Ukraine.
Some analysts suggest that figure may be an underestimate. Around 70 units were assessed to have been delivered by the end of 2024. If Macron’s pledge is realized, the current monthly output of at least eight howitzers, as reported by the French news site La Tribune in April, means that at least another 100 will be received by Kyiv this year. Also in April, Le Monde reported that KNDS had diverted 90 percent of its production of replacement barrels for the CAESARs to Ukraine – such was the rate of wear being inflicted by the use of the system by Ukraine’s armed forces.
The CAESAR was designed to be highly mobile as well as highly accurate. It is mounted on a 6x6 truck chassis which is relatively easy to maintain in comparison with other self-propelled 155mm guns such as the German PzH 2000, the UK’s SP90 and the Swedish Archer. The system weighs under 18 tons and offers speeds of up to 90 kph (56 mph) on roads and 50 kph (30 mph) off-road and a range of around 600 kilometers (375 miles).
The French Parliament’s National Defense and Armed Forces Committee report “Artillery in the New Strategic Context” said that the number of CAESAR systems that had to be withdrawn from the field because of mechanical or other failures was a third of that experienced by other comparable Western weapons according to a May 2 Defense Express article.
Its 155mm/52-caliber gun can fire standard NATO rounds to a range of 40 kilometers (25 miles) which combined with its ATLAS fire control system allows it to outmatch Russian guns and allows Ukraine to accurately strike the enemy. Its speed of deployment and rapid rate of repositioning enables the use of “shoot-and-scoot” tactics that minimizes the threat from Russian counter-battery fire.
It has, by all account, become a favorite weapon system among Ukrainian gunners because, apart from everything else, its size facilitates its ability to hide and be camouflaged and its light weight leaves minimal wheel tracks in all but the softest ground.