Illustrative title card. ISC open-source assessment, 20 June 2026. A sourced image will accompany the published edition.

The British Army’s Real Artillery Problem Is Not Artillery. It Is the Packaging.

Technical Summary

One of the most striking essays in the Summer 2026 edition of The British Army Review is not about drones, artificial intelligence or long-range strike. It is about packaging. In ‘Severe Risk of “Shell Shock”’ (Issue 198, pages 50 to 51), Lieutenant Colonel Martin Smith argues that the British Army’s most urgent artillery shortfall is not the gun at all. It is the way 155mm ammunition is packaged, moved, stored and prepared on the way to the breech. Smith writes from inside the problem. He is the SO1 (Staff Officer Grade 1) on the Archer self-propelled howitzer project in the Programmes Directorate, and has held capability and acquisition posts across Army Headquarters since 2017.

His framing is blunt. The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) 2025 promises a ‘tenfold increase in lethality’ through a ‘Recce-Strike model’. Smith’s reply is that no model has ever killed anyone. Firepower kills, the Royal Artillery provides it, and the weapon of artillery is ammunition. Britain has gifted its remaining AS90 self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine. The interim gun is the wheeled 155mm Archer. The future is the Mobile Fires Platform (MFP), the Army’s top equipment priority, now confirmed as 72 Boxer-mounted RCH 155 systems contracted with Artec, a KNDS and Rheinmetall joint venture, in May 2026 for about £1 billion. (A £53 million long-lead production contract for the first 37 systems had already been placed via OCCAR, the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation, in March 2026.) None of that matters, Smith argues, if the rounds cannot reach the gun. The artillery system-of-systems is only as good as its weakest link. Right now that link is ammunition packaging. More precisely, it is the gap between how that ammunition is stored and how it has to be configured to fight.

The ULS 291 holds 34 shells. The new modular charges arrive in pallets of 20 full charges. A flatrack is left with either 16 shells without charges, or 38 charges without shells. Lt Col Martin Smith, ‘Severe Risk of “Shell Shock”’, The British Army Review 198, Summer 2026

How a 155mm Round Reaches the Gun

British 155mm operational ammunition has moved the same way since 1970. The Unit Load Container (ULC) was procured for the tri-nation FH70 towed howitzer and built around the L15 high-explosive (HE) shell and L8 cartridge, carried on the Foden gun-towing vehicle. Each ULC held 17 all-up rounds: 17 fuzed shells below, 17 bag charges above. Soldiers slid the shells and charges from the tubes, set the fuzes, and loaded the gun. It was robust, foolproof and proven on operations. It was also heavy on manpower.

The next leap was DROPS, the Demountable Rack Offload and Pickup System, which entered service in the 1990s. A single flatrack carried ten ULCs, 170 rounds, and could be delivered straight to the gun position. It was designed to feed the very high-intensity battle expected against the Warsaw Pact, and it earned its keep through the AS90 era. The ULC was the connective tissue between depot and gun line. Lose it, and the whole chain changes.

Why ULS 291 Is Not a Battlefield System

Responsibility for artillery ammunition packaging sits with the Defence General Munitions Delivery Team in Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S). In 2023 DE&S ordered 155mm ammunition from BAE Systems under the Next Generation Munitions Solution (NGMS) contract, with the ULCs to be supplied as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The catch is simple. Most of the ULCs went to Ukraine with the shells, and many of the rest have rusted away. By Smith’s account, enough ULCs survive for only about 5,000 shells.

The fallback is the Unit Load Specification (ULS) 291. It is a wooden pallet holding 34 shells stacked vertically and held together with metal banding. It is cheap, easy to produce and safe to transport. It is also, in Smith’s words, ‘not fit for purpose on a battlefield’. Three failures stand out. The shells sit open to dirt, dust and other contaminants. The shells cannot travel fuzed, so fuzing has to be done on the gun position, which costs time and soldiers. Worst of all, once the metal banding is cut, the pallet becomes unstable, and at that point the ammunition and the vehicle carrying it cannot be moved. Smith likens it to issuing infantry their 5.56mm rounds in cardboard boxes instead of bandoliers on stripper clips. His verdict on the comparison: only worse.

Storage is not the same as battle-ready, and that distinction is the heart of the problem. The ULS 291 is a storage and transport configuration. To fight, the rounds have to be re-configured into unit loads built for the gun line. A Shell Unit Load (SUL) holds 17 fuzed shells. A Charge Unit Load (CUL) holds 17 full charge systems and 19 primers. The CUL is placed on top of the SUL to form a 155mm Batched Unit Load (BUL): fuzed, matched, and ready for the battlefield. That is what the old ULC delivered in a single container. It is what ULS 291 does not. Issue the storage configuration to the gun line and the re-configuration does not vanish. It lands on soldiers, by hand, in the open, under time pressure. Responsibility for getting it right sits with DE&S and the Defence Munitions (DM) depots that pack and issue the ammunition.

The Charge Arithmetic

The ULC paired one full bag charge with every shell. Archer brings modular charges, and the sums stop working. The ULS 291 holds 34 shells. The modular charges arrive in pallets of 20 full charges, which is 120 modules. Load a flatrack and it ends up with either 16 shells and no charges for them, or 38 charges and no shells to fire. There are not enough rounds, flatracks or trucks, and no reliable way to track any of it. Smith calls the result a logistical nightmare. That tracking gap also runs against the inventory-management discipline of the International Ammunition Technical Guidelines (IATG) 03.10, which call for munitions to be accounted and visible to NATO Stock Number (NSN) level. The reconfiguration burden compounds it: a storage pallet that has to be reworked at the gun line is harder to account for, not easier.

This is not one officer venting in a journal. In January 2025 the Ministry of Defence advertised a five-year Munition Packaging Services contract worth £58 million, running from March 2026 to March 2031. It covers roughly 60 container types, named as including ‘pallet sized Unit Load Specifications (ULS) for artillery ammunition’, and it demands a ‘warehouse stock management system’ that tracks every item by NATO Stock Number (NSN). The packaging and tracking gap Smith describes is the same gap the department is now paying a contractor to close.

A Cross-Domain Pattern: 105mm and Afloat Support

The same logic runs through 105mm field artillery, which has its own battlefield configuration under a Unit Load Specification. The shell Ammunition Container Assemblies (ACA) and the charge ACAs are loaded onto a single NATO 2-tonne pallet to form a commando pack, issued in a small and a large variant to suit the lift available. The calibre is not the point. The point is that a correctly batched unit load, shell and charge married on one pallet, is a force multiplier. It collapses the handling, fuzing and matching that would otherwise fall to soldiers at the worst possible moment.

This reaches into the maritime domain too. The future Fleet Solid Support (FSS) ships will have to hold this ammunition in their afloat support stowage and plan their loads around the battle-ready configuration, not the warehouse one. A solid support ship that stows storage-configured pallets has simply carried the re-configuration problem out to sea. Load planning that starts from the Batched Unit Load keeps the combat power intact from depot to deck to gun.

Personnel and Safety Considerations

The MFP requirement asked for a 20% cut in the people needed to deliver and support new capability, and a crew of no more than three. The only route to that was an autoloader, which drove cost and complexity into the gun and pushed the labour somewhere else. Someone still has to restock the turret. For scale, a full AS90 detachment was nine gun numbers, and five of them, close to two thirds, did almost nothing but prepare ammunition. Cut the crew without cutting the handling task and the task lands further back down the chain.

The safety case is not abstract. Unfuzed rounds, manual handling from pallet to breech, and a debanded pallet that cannot be moved are explosive-safety and manual-handling hazards in their own right. Smith cites a Munition Incident Defence (MID) report in which an L21 HE projectile fell from a rack while being moved from the ammunition point to the gun line, cracked its L166 fuze, and was declared unsafe. That is the failure mode, on a UK range, already on the record.

The Procurement Trap

Smith’s short-term fix is almost dull. Buy more ULCs. The design is simple, proven, and Defence already owns the intellectual property rights. He calls it hard to imagine a more ‘oven ready’ project, then lands the sting: the defence procurement process has made it all but impossible to deliver. The money has to be found through the annual balance of investment, where a humble container competes against Boxer, Ajax and Challenger 3. Unless the fix is bolted onto a bigger programme such as MFP, nobody notices it.

A NATO Partner Already Built It: Australia’s ULAC

While the United Kingdom debates how to repackage its shells, a close ally has already fielded the answer. Australia procured the Unit Load Ammunition Carrier (ULAC) for its M777A2 155mm lightweight towed howitzer. The ULAC is a single rugged carrier that holds both the projectiles and the propellant bags, cutting the manual lifting of rounds that weigh upwards of 40kg each and speeding resupply in the field. In 2015 BAE Systems Australia signed a A$2 million contract with the Australian Department of Defence to supply 80 ULACs, delivered during 2016. BAE was prime, designing, testing and managing the programme; Century Engineering manufactured the carriers in South Australia, ahead of schedule, with all but one component sourced from Australian suppliers. BAE’s Bob Holdcroft noted it was the first time the ULACs had been manufactured in Australia for the Australian Defence Force (ADF). By combining projectiles and propellant in a single reusable carrier, the ULAC removes the shell-and-charge mismatch and the repeated lifting of 40kg-plus rounds that the ULS 291 forces onto UK gun positions.

The detail that should sting in Whitehall is the heritage. The makers describe the ULAC as a modern version of equipment originally produced by Royal Ordnance in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, more than 28 years before the Australian build. The design DNA is British. A NATO partner re-engineered the British unit-load container, built it at home, and put it in the hands of its gunners, while the British Army let its own stock rust and fell back on storage pallets. Smith says the UK owns the intellectual property and calls the fix oven ready. Australia is the proof that the oven works.

Feeding the Autoloader: How Allies Solved the Other Half

A battle-ready unit load is still only half the system. The other half is the machine that moves it and reloads the gun under pressure, and allies have engineered that half too. The United States holds its ammunition unit loads to a tested standard, MIL-STD-1660 (Design Criteria for Ammunition Unit Loads), which puts a load through stacking, repetitive shock and vibration, edgewise rotational drop, incline impact, and sling and forklift compatibility before it enters service. It then pairs the gun with a dedicated reloader. The M992 Field Artillery Ammunition Support Vehicle (FAASV) is a tracked carrier on the M109 chassis that holds up to about 95 rounds with their charges and primers and passes them to the M109 Paladin on a hydraulic conveyor at up to eight rounds per minute. The current M992A3 is in production alongside the M109A7.

Germany has gone further still with the gun the UK has chosen for the Mobile Fires Platform. The RCH 155 runs a 30-round autoloader fed by 144 modular charges. KNDS supplies it from a 20-foot container holding more than 60 shells and 288 charges, enough for two guns, using a crane arm built into the container and a mobile platform to pass charges into the propellant magazine. A trained crew reloads in about ten minutes. The lesson for the UK sits in plain sight. It is buying the autoloader. The tested unit-load standard, the battle-ready packaging and the resupply system that feed it are separate decisions, and Smith’s warning is that they have not yet been taken.

Technical Clarifications and Enhancements

Since the core analysis rests on Lt Col Smith’s essay, ISC has cross-referenced key claims against open-source material. The following technical points expand or confirm elements of the argument for the benefit of WOME and logistics practitioners:

• Modular Charge Arithmetic: Smith’s own figures imply six modules per full charge: a pallet of 20 full charges holds 120 modules, which works out at six per charge. That is broadly consistent with NATO 155mm modular charge systems, which typically use five or six modules for a full charge; the exact count is system-specific, so this is the ratio his numbers describe rather than a universal norm. Pairing that pallet against the ULS 291’s 34 shells produces the mismatch he sets out: 16 shells left without charges, or 38 charges left without shells. The deeper cost is that it breaks the one-to-one shell-and-charge pairing the legacy ULC enforced, and that gun drill, propellant accounting and rate-of-fire planning all assume.
• Legacy ULC vs Modern Requirements: The original Unit Load Container was engineered around the L15 high-explosive shell (approx. 43.5 kg) and associated bagged charges (L8 or equivalent series). It delivered a complete, fuzed, matched all-up round ready for the breech. Contemporary projectiles are often heavier (up to ~48 kg for certain natures) and fuzing increasingly involves modern multi-option and electronic fuzes, which require different handling sequences and environmental protection. Any replacement packaging or unit-load design must accommodate these and, where feasible, integrate with automated or semi-automated fuzing and primer insertion at the depot or forward location.
• Explosive Safety and Manual Handling: Issuing unfuzed shells on an unstable debanded wooden pallet creates both explosive-safety risks (on-position fuze setting in the open, potential for impact damage or contamination) and manual-handling risks (repeated lifting and manipulation of 40+ kg items at the gun position under fatigue, time pressure or low light). The Munition Incident Defence (MID) example cited by Smith (an L21 HE projectile cracking its L166 fuze during movement) is illustrative of real failure modes already recorded on UK ranges, and shows why storage configurations must not be treated as battle configurations.
• Resupply System Alignment for MFP: The RCH 155’s 30-round autoloader and the associated KNDS 20 ft ISO resupply container (holding more than 60 shells and 288 charges, sufficient for two guns, with integrated crane and mobile charge-handling platform) presuppose that ammunition arrives in a configuration that can be efficiently transferred into the propellant magazine and projectile ready racks. Storage-configured ULS 291 pallets would require additional on-site reconfiguration before they can feed that system efficiently, recreating at the point of resupply the very bottleneck the autoloader and MFP programme were intended to eliminate.

Cross-Referrals & Further Reading

• UK Defence Journal – MOD announces £58m tender for munitions packaging (1 January 2025) – direct institutional corroboration of the packaging, tracking and stock-management gap described by Smith.
• CHACR / British Army Review, Issue 198 (Summer 2026) – full professional context of Lt Col Smith’s essay within the wider debate on training, sustainment and the Recce-Strike model (available via CHACR channels).
• International Ammunition Technical Guidelines (IATG) 03.10 – Inventory Management: authoritative NATO-aligned guidance on unit-load configuration, the imperative to maintain ready-to-fire configurations, and minimising handling at the point of use.
• BAE Systems Australia & Century Engineering case studies on the Unit Load Ammunition Carrier (ULAC) for M777A2: a proven, fielded solution that re-engineered earlier UK unit-load concepts into a rugged, combined projectile-and-charge carrier. Demonstrates both technical feasibility and the value of protecting intellectual property lineage.
• US Department of Defense MIL-STD-1660 – Design Criteria for Ammunition Unit Loads: the benchmark environmental and handling test regime (stacking, repetitive shock, vibration, edgewise rotational drop, incline impact, sling and forklift compatibility) that any new or revived UK 155mm unit-load design should meet or exceed to ensure NATO interoperability and safety certification.
• Related ISC WOME Intelligence: Forthcoming analysis on full Mobile Fires Platform sustainment (packaging alignment with autoloader and resupply container, primer/fuze logistics, environmental conditioning, and end-to-end distribution under high-intensity operations).

Data Gaps and Confidence

ISC has worked from the two published pages supplied, 50 and 51 of The British Army Review Issue 198. The essay continues beyond them, so Smith’s full conclusion is not reproduced here. Figures attributed to Smith, including the residual ULC stock of about 5,000 shells and the ULS 291 dimensions and characteristics, are his, drawn from official references he cites (ACA L245 and MID reporting), and are not independently confirmed by ISC in this assessment. Current 155mm stockpile depth is assessed as low by several open sources but is not quantified here.

Updated confidence assessment (post-publication cross-check, 20 June 2026): Confidence remains HIGH that the packaging and tracking gap is real and officially recognised (the department’s own £58 m Munition Packaging Services tender notice and the explicit requirement for NSN-level warehouse stock management constitute direct corroboration). Confidence is now HIGH on the MFP platform decision and scale (72 Boxer RCH 155 systems contracted with Artec for about £1 billion in May 2026; see references). Confidence is MODERATE on the precise residual ULC inventory numbers, pending primary MoD confirmation. The battle-ready unit load detail (Shell Unit Load, Charge Unit Load and the 155mm Batched Unit Load), the 105mm commando-pack configuration and the afloat-support read-across remain ISC WOME technical analysis, consistent with United Kingdom unit-load doctrine and IATG principles. The Australian ULAC detail (a 2015 A$2 million contract for 80 carriers delivered in 2016, manufactured by Century Engineering under BAE Systems Australia as prime, and the British design lineage) is drawn from the BAE Systems Australia announcement of 19 October 2015 and Century Engineering, and reflects their characterisation. All comparator data on US and German systems and MIL-STD-1660 are drawn from the cited authoritative sources.

The Royal Logistic Corps cap-badge ‘mark of shame’ remains regimental legend (the cannon-and-shot motif predates the Crimean War per the RLC Museum). It is presented as enduring folk-memory of a recurring logistics truth: ordnance that arrives in the wrong configuration is, at the point of need, equivalent to no ordnance at all.

Corrections & updates welcome. If you hold open-source data that refines or corrects any parameter in this article, please contact [email protected] citing the specific claim and your source. Verified corrections will be incorporated and credited in the revision history. U.S. Department of Defense imagery appears courtesy of DVIDS and is in the public domain; its appearance does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. AI-assisted technical assessment based on open-source material and one named primary source (The British Army Review, Issue 198). Not a formal intelligence product.