Taiwan — 1,360 Towed Artillery Pieces

Taiwan’s towed artillery inventory reflects a fundamentally defensive posture shaped by the island’s geography and the enduring cross-strait standoff with the People’s Republic of China. With 1,360 pieces, Taipei fields a meaningful conventional deterrent that complements its missile and armored forces. The backbone includes aging but serviceable M114 155mm howitzers alongside more capable M198 systems, providing indirect fire support across the island’s varied terrain — from coastal approaches to mountain passes in the Central Range.

Doctrine here is explicitly about making any amphibious assault or airborne landing prohibitively costly. Towed systems can be rapidly concealed in tunnels and pre-surveyed firing positions, a strategy Taiwan has developed over decades against the threat of PLA precision fires. Modernization is ongoing: Taipei has invested in extended-range munitions and improved fire-control integration, though legacy systems still dominate the count. Given the island’s limited strategic depth — roughly 145 km at its widest — every artillery piece serves a defined role in layered defense planning.

China — 1,400 Towed Artillery Pieces

At first glance, China’s position at ninth — with only 1,400 towed pieces — seems paradoxical for the world’s largest standing army. The explanation lies in the PLA’s deliberate strategic pivot. Beijing has aggressively retired legacy towed platforms in favor of self-propelled howitzers, multiple-launch rocket systems, and long-range precision missiles under the People’s Liberation Army’s ongoing modernization drive. The PLZ-05 self-propelled series and the PHL-03 300mm MLRS now anchor Chinese indirect fire capability, leaving towed systems to secondary roles and reserve formations.

What China’s figure obscures is industrial capacity: in wartime, Chinese state arsenals could reconstitute artillery inventories at a pace no Western nation could match. The 1,400 figure should not be read as weakness but as deliberate de-emphasis — Beijing is buying precision, speed, and survivability over raw tube count. Regional rivals India and Russia, as we will see, have made very different calculations. For Taiwan — ranked just below — the shift from massed PLA artillery to precision strike packages is, in some respects, even more alarming than the legacy numbers suggested.

Myanmar — 1,680 Towed Artillery Pieces

Myanmar’s 1,680 towed artillery pieces make it the largest holder in Southeast Asia by this measure — a figure that startles most defense analysts encountering it for the first time. The Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, has historically prioritized mass over sophistication, accumulating Chinese- and North Korean-supplied systems alongside domestically produced pieces over decades of armed conflict with ethnic minority insurgencies. This is not a force structured for peer competition; it is one shaped by counterinsurgency on a continental scale.

The February 2021 coup and the subsequent civil war against the People’s Defence Force and allied ethnic armed organizations have placed these guns in active operational use in ways rarely seen outside declared interstate conflicts. Strikes on civilian populations using artillery have been documented by UN investigators, casting this inventory in a deeply troubling humanitarian light. From a purely military balance perspective, the numbers reflect an institutional culture that has treated artillery as the decisive arm in internal pacification campaigns for over sixty years. Modernization investment is minimal; many pieces are aged systems maintained out of necessity rather than doctrine.

Iran — 1,803 Towed Artillery Pieces

Iran’s 1,803 towed artillery pieces sit within a broader conventional arsenal that Tehran has painstakingly rebuilt since the devastating losses of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. That eight-year conflict, in which Iraqi forces used massed artillery with devastating effect, left a lasting institutional scar — and a determination never to be outgunned in a positional fight. Today Iran fields a mix of Soviet-era D-30 122mm howitzers, reverse-engineered copies, and domestically developed systems such as the Raad and HM-41, spread across both regular Iranian Army formations and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units.

The IRGC’s parallel command structure is particularly significant: it maintains independent artillery brigades capable of area denial operations across Iran’s mountainous western and northern borders, where vehicle mobility is limited and towed systems have enduring tactical relevance. Iran’s declared development of the Howitzer 2000 — a 155mm system with claimed GPS-guided munitions — signals ambitions to close the precision gap with Western competitors. Regionally, Iran’s artillery posture is calibrated against Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States simultaneously — a three-front deterrence calculus that demands numbers as much as capability.

United States — 1,878 Towed Artillery Pieces

The United States at sixth — fielding 1,878 towed pieces — reflects the same deliberate strategic logic that placed China at ninth. Since the 1991 Gulf War validated precision guided munitions as the decisive tool of modern land combat, the U.S. Army has consistently traded raw tube counts for lethality per round. The M777 155mm ultra-lightweight howitzer has become the signature American towed system, prized precisely because it can be sling-loaded under a CH-47 Chinook and delivered to mountain positions where no wheeled system can follow. Thousands of M777s have been transferred to Ukraine, Afghanistan, Taiwan, and other partners — reducing the domestic count while multiplying American strategic influence.

American artillery doctrine is also deeply integrated with air power. In any peer conflict the U.S. expects to suppress enemy artillery with Air Force and Navy strike packages, reducing the premium on survivable towed pieces. The Excalibur GPS-guided 155mm shell, the M270 MLRS, and the Precision Strike Missile all do work that formerly required ten times as many conventional rounds. This does not mean American towed artillery is obsolete — the M777’s combat record in Ukraine has been exceptional — but it explains why the tube count is lower than raw power comparisons would suggest.

Pakistan — 2,629 Towed Artillery Pieces

Pakistan’s 2,629 towed artillery pieces — a figure that jumps sharply past the American total — tell the story of a nation whose military planning has been dominated by one adversary for seventy-seven years. Every Pakistani military acquisition can ultimately be traced back to the India calculus: how does it improve the balance against a neighbor that outweighs Pakistan roughly seven to one in population and GDP? Towed artillery, particularly 155mm howitzers supplied by China and the U.S. over different political eras, provides dense fire support along the Line of Control in Kashmir and the Punjab plains where a conventional war with India would almost certainly be fought.

Pakistan’s artillery corps operates the U.S.-supplied M198, Chinese-supplied Type-54-1 122mm pieces, and the domestically developed Buraq self-propelled variant — though towed systems remain dominant by sheer count. The western frontier with Afghanistan adds another dimension: lighter mountain howitzers and pack artillery give Pakistan options in terrain where mechanized systems cannot operate. Islamabad has also invested in guided artillery munitions, aware that India’s precision programs are narrowing the effectiveness gap. For Rawalpindi, towing more guns to the line of departure remains a strategic hedge no precision missile program has made fully redundant.

Vietnam — 3,250 Towed Artillery Pieces

Vietnam’s 3,250 towed artillery pieces are not simply a logistical artifact of Soviet-era surplus — they are the material expression of a military culture that used artillery as the decisive arm against France, the United States, and China in three of the twentieth century’s most consequential conflicts. The People’s Army of Vietnam codified massed artillery fires at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, physically hauling D-74 and M1942 pieces up jungle slopes in an operation so audacious it destroyed France’s will to fight in Indochina. That institutional memory runs deep in Hanoi’s defense planning.

Today Vietnam’s artillery inventory is overwhelmingly Soviet-era D-30, 2S1, and BM-21 systems with limited modernization. Hanoi has pursued upgrades cautiously, acquiring Israeli and Russian fire control systems for some platforms while maintaining mass as the fundamental deterrent against China — the neighbor that invaded briefly in 1979 and against whom Vietnam maintains the most significant conventional threat calculus in Southeast Asia. Vietnam’s defense budget has grown at roughly 8 percent annually through the 2020s, and the People’s Army has identified precision indirect fires as a modernization priority, but the towed piece count alone remains a formidable baseline that even major powers must respect.

India — 5,640 Towed Artillery Pieces

India’s 5,640 towed artillery pieces place it third globally — and the number carries enormous strategic weight when mapped against the terrain where these guns would actually fire. The Himalayan front with China and the long border with Pakistan both demand artillery that can operate at altitude, in extreme cold, and in supply conditions that would ground most self-propelled systems. India’s artillery corps is consequently one of the most operationally experienced mountain artillery forces in the world, having maintained continuous deployment along the Line of Actual Control through freezing winters that killed vehicles but not towed pieces.

New Delhi’s artillery modernization story is one of the Indian defense establishment’s most significant recent achievements. After decades of stagnation — the Bofors FH-77B scandal of the 1980s poisoned procurement for a generation — India has signed for the M777 Ultra Lightweight Howitzer for Himalayan deployment, the K9 Vajra-T self-propelled system for the plains (100 built under license by Larsen and Toubro), and the indigenous Advanced Towed Artillery Gun System. The ATAGS, developed by DRDO and built by Bharat Forge and Tata, represents India’s ambition to field a world-class domestic 155mm system — and its trials performance in high-altitude conditions has drawn serious international interest. With 5,640 pieces in hand and a modernization pipeline finally delivering, India’s artillery arm is better positioned today than at any point in the past forty years.

South Korea — 5,800 Towed Artillery Pieces

South Korea’s 5,800 towed artillery pieces — the second-largest inventory on Earth — reflect a nation that has lived under the shadow of one of the densest artillery threats in modern military history. North Korea’s 8,000-plus gun and rocket systems, many pre-positioned in hardened caves within range of Seoul, set the requirements: the Republic of Korea Army must be able to suppress, destroy, and counter-battery fire against a massed artillery force in the opening hours of any conflict, while defending a population of twenty-five million people less than 40 kilometers from the Demilitarized Zone.

South Korea has simultaneously become a world-class artillery exporter. The K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer — built by Hanwha Defense — has been sold to Finland, Norway, Poland, Australia, Egypt, India, and Turkey, making it arguably the most commercially successful artillery system of the twenty-first century. The domestically produced KH179 and KH-178 155mm towed howitzers form the backbone of the towed inventory, complemented by legacy U.S. M198 systems. What distinguishes the ROK artillery arm is not just mass but integration: its counter-battery radar network, drone reconnaissance assets, and digital fire control systems mean those 5,800 tubes can be brought to bear with speed and precision that the raw number does not convey. Seoul is also investing in precision munitions — ensuring the gun count is matched by qualitative improvement.

Russia — 5,920 Towed Artillery Pieces

Russia holds the world’s largest towed artillery inventory in 2026 with 5,920 pieces — and unlike virtually every other nation on this list, those guns are not sitting in storage depots or training ranges. They are firing. The conflict in Ukraine that began in February 2022 has turned the Russian artillery arm into the most intensely observed conventional fire force since the Korean War, and the lessons extracted — about logistics, barrel wear, counter-battery vulnerability, and the interaction between towed pieces and drone reconnaissance — are reshaping artillery doctrine in every major army on Earth.

Russia’s towed inventory spans generations: the 122mm D-30 howitzer that first entered Soviet service in 1960 still fires alongside the 2A65 Msta-B 152mm system, the 130mm M-46, and the D-20 gun-howitzer. What Russia provides that no other military can is operational data at industrial scale. Russian artillery units in Ukraine have fired estimated hundreds of thousands of rounds per month at peak intensity, providing test conditions for shell fuzes, propellant performance, and counter-battery evasion that no peacetime exercise could replicate. The cost has been severe: Ukrainian HIMARS, M777, and drone-directed counter-battery fire has destroyed hundreds of Russian pieces, and the attrition rate has forced Russia to pull systems from strategic reserves and accelerate production at Motovilikhinsky Zavod.

Doctrinally, Russia remains committed to the principle of fire superiority — the belief that an enemy force subjected to sustained artillery bombardment will lose cohesion before it can close to direct-fire range. This approach, inherited from Soviet deep battle theory, views the artillery arm as the primary engine of offensive action and the ultimate guarantor of defensive stability. With 5,920 towed pieces, Russia has more raw capacity to execute that doctrine than any nation on Earth — and the institutional knowledge accumulated through years of intensive conventional warfare to employ it effectively.