January 2025, a Ukrainian battery commander with the call sign Azure stands in a tree line somewhere between Zaporizhzhia and Pokrovsk. A Ukrainian journalist asks him about the British howitzer his brigade has just been issued. The commander does not reach for a spec sheet. He does not list ranges or shell weights.
He says one sentence that will travel further than any official British Army press release ever did. Comparing it to Soviet weapons, he says, “is like comparing a Zhiguli to a Mercedes E-Class. The difference is not just noticeable, it is colossal in every category, in every criterion.” The weapon he was talking about was 30 years old.
It had been quietly retired by its own army. It fired a barrel three calibers shorter than the modern NATO standard. By any specification table, it should have been obsolete. And yet, by November 2025, the British Ministry of Defense confirmed something extraordinary. Every single AS90 in the British inventory, 99 vehicles in total, had been transferred to Ukraine.
The British Army no longer operates this howitzer in any form. The entire fleet now serves on the Eastern Front against Russia. This is the story of how a dated British self-propelled gun became one of the most quietly devastating Western artillery systems on the Ukrainian battlefield. And why the Ukrainians who crew it refused to give it up.
The problem began in 1985. The British Army needed to replace its aging Abbot self-propelled gun and the American M109 it had supplemented it with. The trinational SP70 project, a joint British, German, and Italian howitzer program, was collapsing under cost overruns and political deadlock. Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited, based in Barrow-in-Furness, made a private gamble.
They would build their own 155-mm self-propelled howitzer on their own money, betting that SP70 would die. It died. In 1989, Vickers won the British Army’s Abbot replacement competition against three rivals, including the American M109 Paladin. The contract was for 179 vehicles at 300 million pounds. They called it the artillery system for the 1990s, AS90.
Deliveries ran from 1992 to 1995. Now, the technical reality. The AS90 weighs 45 tons combat loaded. It is powered by a Cummins VTA 903 diesel producing 660 horsepower pushing it to 55 km/h on road with a 370 km operational range. It crews five, commander, driver, gunner, and two loaders. Armor is 17 mm of welded steel proof against small arms and shell splinters, but nothing heavier.
The main gun is a 155 mm L31 ordnance, 39 calibers long. Elevation runs from -5° to +70°. Traverse is a full 360°. Ammunition stowage is 48 projectiles with 31 in a turret bustle magazine and 17 in the hull plus 33 charges. Maximum range with the standard L15 high explosive shell is 24.7 km. With base bleed extended range projectiles, that climbs to roughly 30 km.
But, the number that matters most on the modern battlefield is not range. It is rate of fire. According to British Army specifications, the AS90 can deliver three rounds in under 10 seconds in burst mode. Six rounds per minute for 3 minutes at intense rate. Two rounds per minute sustained for an hour. In trials, two AS90s firing in concert have placed 261 kg of high explosive on a single target in less than 10 seconds.
A 2008-2009 capability enhancement program added BAE Systems LINAPS laser inertial pointing system, GPS, automatic fuse setting, and barrel bend measurement. The vehicle can come into action, fire 18 rounds and displace position in under 5 minutes. In 2007, it was certified to fire the Raytheon M982 Excalibur GPS guided round following trials at Yuma Proving Ground.
There were supposed to be more, much more. In 1993, Britain approved an upgrade called Braveheart. A 52 caliber barrel 96 conversions contracted to BAE Systems in 2002. Promised range was 30 km unassisted, 40 km with extended range ammunition. The program died when the South African BI modular propellant charge failed both in sensitive munitions and intensive fire requirements.
That cancellation locked the British Army into the L39 barrel. It meant the AS90 would forever fire roughly the same distance as Russia’s 1989 vintage 2S19 Msta-S and fall 15 km short of modern L52 systems like the German PzH 2000, the French Caesar, the Polish Krab, and Ukraine’s own Bohdana. By the 2020s, the British Army was actively retiring the AS90.
The fleet had eroded from 179 to 134 by 2008 to roughly 89 by April 2016. Range was the killer. NATO peers had moved on. The final British live fire took place at Exercise Winter Camp in Estonia in May 2024 conducted by 127 battery at Tapa. Now, before we get into how this old British howitzer is performing in Ukraine, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. All right. Let’s get into the combat record. The first transfer was announced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on January 14th, 2023. 30 AS90s pledged alongside 14 Challenger 2 tanks. The first tranche delivered in 2023 totaled 32 vehicles, 20 battle ready and 12 stripped for spare parts.
A second tranche followed in April 2024. A third batch of roughly 16 came in July to September 2024 under the new Labor government with Defense Secretary John Healey confirming on September the 30th, 2024 that 10 had arrived with six more imminent. Then came the disclosure. A November 2025 UK Ministry of Defense Freedom of Information release reported by Janes confirmed that the ministry had donated to Ukraine all 99 AS90s declared in its 2021 United Nations Register of Conventional Arms Return.
Every operable hull, every cannibalization donor, the entire declared fleet. Ukrainian crews trained at the Royal School of Artillery at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain in a compressed 3-week conversion course delivered primarily by 19 Regiment Royal Artillery. According to The Defense Post Lieutenant Colonel Ed Bottrell, chief instructor at the Royal School of Artillery said of his Ukrainian students that they had soaked up everything taught them and within a couple of weeks they would be firing the AS90 in anger.
He was right. First combat use was documented on June 15th, 2023 with footage circulated on the Ukrainian General Staff linked Telegram channel Operativny ZSU confirmed Ukrainian operators across open-source reporting include the Third Assault Brigade, the 49th Artillery Brigade Mstyslav the Brave out of Chernihiv the 58th Motorized Brigade, the 116th Mechanized Brigade firing on Kupiansk, the 117th Heavy Mechanized Brigade and the 151st Mechanized Brigade.
Operations have been documented across the Zaporizhzhia, Kupiansk, Pokrovsk and Kursk axes. A Forbes relayed account picked up via Polish tech outlet WPTech describes one AS90 crew surviving at least six consecutive Russian strikes. Artillery, FPV drones, more artillery, and a Lancet loitering munition. The vehicle was severely damaged.
It did not burn. It did not cook off. The crew walked away. Now, the comparison Asya was making. The Russian D-30, a 122 mm towed howitzer designed in 1963, has a maximum range of 15.4 km. The 2S3 Akatsiya, a 152 mm self-propelled gun from 1971, manages 17.4 km. The 2S19 Msta-S, the Russian front-line equivalent fielded in 1989, matches the AS90 at 24.
7 km, but relies heavily on optical sighting with manual ballistic computation. PG-1M panoramic, OP-4M telescope, a gunner with a slide rule. The AS90 integrates ring laser gyro inertial navigation, automatic gun laying, and digital fire control. It feeds directly into Ukraine’s home-grown Kropyva fire direction software, which assigns the nearest available gun to a target with live atmospheric ballistics.
Russian crews still mostly compute manually. Royal United Services Institute analyst Sam Cranny-Evans noted in a 2023 assessment that Russia has tried to compensate via UAV-cued reconnaissance fire and Krasnopol laser-guided rounds, but forward observation remains weak, and Krasnopol is degraded by cloud cover and electronic warfare.
Colonel Serhii Musiienko, deputy commander of rocket forces and artillery of the Ukrainian armed forces, told RBC Ukraine in late 2024 that across the M777, M109, PzH 2000, AS90, Krab, and Archer, Western guns provide an advantage in both accuracy and range, provided crews are equipped with the proper amount and appropriate range of ammunition.
He cited Soviet ammunition’s calculated dispersion of 20 to 25 m against tighter Western precision figures. The 117th Brigade itself, in a public early 2025 statement via Militarni, declared the AS90 capable of inflicting devastating and crushing blows on the enemy with sniper accuracy. The verdict then, the honest verdict, because British engineering excellence does not require lying about it.
The AS90 did not win in Ukraine on raw range. It’s 24.7 km reach is identical to the baseline Msta-S and shorter than the long-barreled 2S5 Giacint-S. Where it wins is in the system around the gun. Burst rate of three rounds in 10 seconds, faster than any Russian system fielded in volume. Digital fire control plugged into Kropyva, a fully enclosed climate-controlled NBC turret.
While the 2S5 exposes its crew during firing in a way that has proven catastrophic against drone-saturated battlefields. NATO ammunition compatibility including Excalibur. And crews trained at Larkhill in shoot and scoot doctrine, treating survivability as a daily discipline rather than an afterthought.
According to Oryx’s open-source intelligence tracking, by August 2025, Russia had lost roughly 246 Msta-S, 54 modernized Msta-SM2, 132 Akatsiya, and 76 D-30 howitzers visually confirmed across the Ukrainian battlefield. Ukrainian AS90 losses listed at approximately 19 vehicles visually confirmed, 13 destroyed and six damaged out of the roughly 68 transferred by mid-2025.
Crews specifically cite Lancet loitering munitions as the dominant threat and consistently employed the howitzers in riveted or concealed positions. A British howitzer that was being quietly retired for being too short-ranged, too tracked, too dated, has now outlasted its own army’s frontline service by going to the front.
Britain is replacing it not with another tracked howitzer, but with the KNDS RCH 155, an unmanned automated turret on a Boxer 8×8 chassis. The UK announced its selection on April 23, 2024. On December 28, 2025, the UK and Germany signed a 52 million pound joint early capability demonstrator contract for three prototypes under the Trinity House agreement.
The lesson Britain has written into its next artillery program comes directly from Ukrainian battlefields. Mobility, automation, networked fires, range. Return to that tree line. Azure stands beside a 45-ton British howitzer designed when the Cold War was still the relevant war. He has a tablet running Croppy Ever. He has an interpreter’s worth of 3 weeks of Salisbury Plain training in his crew’s muscle memory.
He has Excalibur certified ammunition and a fire control computer that talks to drones overhead. And he has, sitting in his memory, a Russian battery somewhere over the horizon still using optics his grandfather would recognize. Comparing it to Soviet weapons, he says, is like comparing a Zhiguli to a Mercedes E-Class. The numbers prove him right.
The combat record proves him right. And the British Ministry of Defense, by stripping its own army of every operable AS90 to put them in his hands, has voted with the most expensive ballot any government can cast. The old British howitzer that nobody in white hall wanted anymore turned out to be exactly what the front line in Europe needed.
British engineering, three decades after it left the drawing board, still doing work that Russian engineering cannot match. That is the story this gun tells, and it is not a story about a Mercedes. It is a story about what gets built into a weapon when it is built right the first time.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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