>>64034664
The US’s hesitancy around automatic arty is a little curious to me. Most “why doesn’t the US use this” questions are answered by either the US performing the action via different means, such as using air launched missiles instead of tactical ballistic muscles, or by the technology only debatably existing, like Chinese super air to air missiles, or whatever. Automatic artillery clearly works fine, has almost none of the downsides of tank!auto loading, and the US has built and tested a variety of models. The M1299 “Iron Thunder” was basically the single most capable self-propelled howitzer in history in terms of on paper stats… except for horrific barrel life, which got it cancelled. Said barrel life was due to the hyper-ranged gigavelocity shell, not the rather quick auto loader it had, so America had direct access to a very good 155mm auto loader mounted to a Paladin chassis, and threw it out with the bathwater so to speak. My uncle is a major in an artillery battery and I’ve talked to him about this, and he seems to be under the impression that we just really don’t care about the capability, which kinda checks out with us not like… using it. Increased rates of fire shorten barrel lifetimes further than they already are, and so far the US has been able to just set up more artillery pieces if they need more fire in a short period of time. It all kind of checks out to me, but its a boring answer. We hadve it but dont use it, germany and england and lots of other people were friendly with have it and would sell it to us eagerly but we dont buy it.