Ukraine Is Fitting 70-Year-Old Naval Turrets To Flatbed Trucks

The Russians aren’t the only ones fitting obsolete naval guns to ground vehicles and deploying them to the war zone in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are doing it, too.

Back in March, the first photos appeared online depicting 1970s-vintage Russian MT-LB armored tractors packing ‘50s-vintage 2M-3 turrets for over-under 25-millimeter cannons.

Three months later, there’s a photo of a similar vehicle in Ukrainian service: a Kamaz six-by-six truck with a 2M-3 turret on its bed.

The unsophisticated Ukrainian gun-truck has obvious uses as a point defense against small drones. At the same time, it’s a reminder of serious and enduring gaps in Ukrainian air-defenses. A well-equipped army wouldn’t have to drag 70-year-old naval turrets out of long-term storage and bolt them to an equally aged truck.

There was some speculation this spring that Russia’s MT-LB-based gun vehicles—some with 2M-3 turrets, others sporting 2M-7 turrets with over-under 14.5-millimeter machine guns—would deploy with front-line brigades in a surface-to-surface role. As mobile gun nests, in essence.

But photos that appeared in late May or early June hinted at the MT-LB-2M-3’s actual role. The photo depicts a pair of the gun-tractors guarding a civilian excavator apparently digging defensive trenches somewhere in Russian-occupied Ukraine.

It seems the MT-LB-2M-3s are rear-area air-defenses. “This is probably due to the cases observed in the previous months when drones used to fly by and drop grenades on workers digging trenches,” the independent Conflict Intelligence Team noted.

Ukraine has its own drone problem. Russian forces since at least September have been flying Iranian-made Shahed drones packed with explosives on one-way trips to Ukrainian cities. The 440-pound Shaheds are, in effect, small cruise missiles.

The Shaheds exploited a gap in Ukrainian defenses. While Ukraine’s long-range S-300 and medium-range Buk surface-to-air missiles could deter raids by Russian air force fighter-bombers, they were far less effective against low- and slow-flying drones that might not even appear on the air-defenders’ radar scopes.

What the Ukrainians needed were fast-firing mobile guns—plus small radars for cueing them and spotlights for aiding them at night. The territorial brigades defending Ukraine’s cities began cobbling together whatever gun-vehicle combinations were possible. Some were very crude—for instance, the World War I Maxim guns some units mounted on pickup trucks.

Ukraine’s foreign allies eventually pledged much more modern short-range air-defenses, including scores of German-built Gepard armored vehicles with radar-cued 35-millimeter cannons as well as American-made Avengers, which are unarmored Humvees armed with infrared-guided Stinger missiles and a heavy machine gun.

The 67 Gepards, 20 Avengers and dozens of other SHORAD systems Ukraine has acquired evidently still aren’t enough. It’s worth noting that some of the first Shahed strikes targeted Odesa, Ukraine’s last major free port on the Black Sea. The Kamaz-2M-3 also appears to be somewhere in or near Odesa, if the ocean and ship’s mast in the photo are any indication.

Ukraine desperately needs more short-range air-defenses to defend Odesa and presumably other strategic sites—enough to justify improvisations such as the Kamaz gun-truck.

It’s better than nothing. A 2M-3 should be able to engage targets as far away as 2,700 yards. Its biggest flaw is its lack of any radar guidance. You aim a 2M-3’s cannons the old-fashioned way: by peering through a gunsight. At night or in bad weather, the gun-truck is unlikely to hit anything.