A gun that never goes out of style
MKE Boran 105 mm howitzer
The light 105mm howitzer class is nearly a century old, yet it continues to be redesigned. A recent example is the Turkish MKE BORAN. This article examines weapon NATO countries.
The helicopter hovers over a mountain slope, and the gun—barrel, carriage, and shield, all weighing less than two tons—is lowered from its external sling. A minute after touchdown, the crew is already aiming it at the target. The scene looks like a scene from the last century—and partly it is. The towed 105mm howitzer was conceived before the jet. aviation. What's strange is something else: self-propelled guns, drones- spotters, high-precision projectiles - but someone is still designing a towed 105mm from scratch. Moreover, for the first time in stories This country is exporting it. We are talking about Turkey and its product with the name BORAN.
Why do we need a lightweight 105mm?
It's worth starting with the caliber. One hundred and five millimeters is a compromise reached almost a century ago and has remained in place ever since. A shell weighing about fifteen kilograms can still be manually loaded into the breech by a person, shot after shot, without hydraulics or an automatic loader. Its lethality is already significant—not a mortar shell, but also not a 155mm "suitcase" weighing nearly fifty kilograms, which requires a completely different vehicle. Heavier than a mortar, lighter than a large-caliber howitzer—the 105mm has always maintained this middle ground.
The second word in the class's name is "light." A howitzer weighing approximately 1,7 tons weighs about the same as an average SUV. This is crucial: it can be carried externally by a transport helicopter, towed by a light truck, and dropped from a parachute platform. A self-propelled gun weighing two or three dozen tons can't do any of this—but a light howitzer can be deployed where there are no roads at all: into the mountains, onto a bridgehead, or behind airborne lines.
This explains the class's survivability. Airmobile brigades, mountain rifle units, marines, special operations forces—they all need it. artillery, which arrives with them, rather than being pulled up three days later along a broken track. The drone adjusts fire, the precision-guided projectile hits its target—but both the spotter and the projectile still need the barrel, which someone dragged to its position. In this sense, the lightweight 105mm has already survived more than one declaration of its uselessness.
From M101 to L118: How the Standard Was Formed
The ancestor of the family is the American M101, which entered service in the late 1930s and early 1940s. By its class standards, it's a heavyweight: over two tons, designed primarily for towing by a tractor and for divisional artillery during a major war. It cemented the 105mm as the standard for infantry field support—through World War II, Korea, and the dozens of armies it served in afterward.
A 105mm M2/M101 howitzer crew working in position during the Korean War.
The first step towards real lightness was taken in Vietnam. American M102The system adopted in the mid-1960s was noticeably lighter than its predecessor—it was already being adapted to the logic of helicopter airlift, whereby a weapon is airlifted from one firing point to another. The class was exploring a new role: not to stand in the rear of a formation, but to move alongside airmobile units—by air, from one line to another.
105mm L118 light howitzers used by the British Royal Artillery during training exercises
The British finally took over this role. L118 Light Gun, which entered service in 1976, is the model by which the entire class has been measured ever since. Lightweight, accurate, with a 37-caliber barrel and a range of about 17 kilometers with a standard projectile and significantly longer with a gas generator projectile. It was adapted to use American ammunition (variant L119), and the US Army adopted its own version - M119, the standard howitzer of light and airmobile brigades. Half a century later, this family is still in service with the US, Britain, and a dozen other armies.
The M119 105mm towed howitzer, used by the US Army for infantry support.
Durability, however, has its downside. Many barrels in service with the military last for decades and are approaching the end of their service life, while the basic version of the British-American line is a classic optical sight; the digital fire control system is added as an upgrade, a separate package. The standard remains the standard. However, this design is already over forty years old, and the sight is the first to reveal its age.
BORAN: Turkey's "light gun" and its compromises
Turkish BORAN The MKE development fits neatly into this tradition. According to publicly available data, it entered service with the Turkish army around 2021; the manufacturer is not disclosing the exact development timeline. The concept is clear at first glance—it's a national "light gun": a lightweight, towed 105mm caliber chambered for NATO-standard ammunition, for the same mountain, airborne, and mobile missions.
Turkish 105mm light towed howitzer MKE Boran
Specifications should be cited with a caveat—most of them come from the manufacturer itself and industry publications, not independent testing. According to these sources, the weight, including the fire control system, is approximately 1700–1775 kg, the range at sea level is approximately 17 kilometers, with some descriptions stating up to 18. The barrel is a 30-caliber caliber. The rate of fire is up to six rounds per minute at a normal rate and up to twelve in short bursts. Deployment from the stowed position is less than a minute.
But what's more interesting than the numbers is what lies behind them. The 30-caliber barrel is a deliberate tradeoff: shorter and lighter than the 37-caliber L118. The shorter barrel has a lower theoretical range, but the ammunition and ballistics keep the BORAN at the upper end of its class. Simply put, compactness is sacrificed primarily for weight and ease of transport, not for the current range figures. Then there's the ability to fire directly from the wheels, without hanging the gun on a support plate: this speeds up engagement, although the standard gun mount usually provides all-round fire and ultimate stability. And the main difference from older models is that the digital fire control system is included in the basic configuration, rather than as a separate package: satellite navigation, an inertial unit, a thermal imager for direct fire, and trajectory calculation using the NATO-standard NABK ballistic core (a unified algorithm shared by the armies of the alliance). What was the subject of a separate upgrade for the M119 is factory-installed for the BORAN.
This novelty has its downside. The system doesn't yet have the decades of service experience accumulated by the British line—the barrel's lifespan and long-range reliability have yet to be confirmed by military service. The customer is tied to a single supplier: both spare parts and electronic upgrades come from Turkey, without the developed secondary market that has developed around the M119. The price of youth is the same as the L118 once paid: forty years ago, it too was an untested novelty.
The export aspect of the story is instructive in its own way. Until recently, Turkey hadn't sold towed howitzers abroad at all. BORAN broke new ground: Bangladesh became the first foreign customer in 2024, acquiring 18 systems operated in conjunction with Mi-171Sh helicopters. European customers followed—North Macedonia in 2025 and Albania in 2026. The light 105mm howitzer niche, dominated for half a century by the British and Americans, now has its first mass-produced competitor not from the Anglo-American camp, but from NATO's southern flank.
URAN and where the class is heading
A logical follow-up quickly emerged—and became faster, literally: the next version drives itself. In May 2026, MKE unveiled the system. URANUS: the same ballistics as the BORAN, but on a 4x4 wheeled chassis rather than a towed mount. The rationale behind this conversion is simple. A towed gun needs to be uncoupled, deployed, and aimed—while a self-propelled gun simply drives to its target, fires a salvo, and retreats before a counterattack. In artillery, where counterbattery fire is a matter of minutes, the time it takes to fire and reposition is more valuable than an extra kilometer of range.
MKE URAN, a Turkish 105mm self-propelled howitzer mounted on a 4x4 tactical vehicle chassis
The URAN isn't some Turkish exotica here. The entire class is moving in this direction now. The lightweight 105mm isn't disappearing—it's moving from a carriage to wheels, retaining its key feature: light weight and the ability to reach places where a heavy self-propelled gun can't. The towed version, however, won't go away: for airborne troops on an external sling and for mountainous positions where even a jeep wouldn't be able to reach, a barrel on a trail remains simpler than a wheeled vehicle.
The gun is hundreds of years old as an idea, and they started to bury it more than once - first with self-propelled guns, then with rockets, now with drones. While they're still re-drawing it—on three continents at once—it's too early to consign it to a museum.
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