An article about artillery

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Typical articles about artillery in professional journals look like

Artillery [blah] 21st century [blah] transformation [blah] lethality [blah] network [blah] leap ahead [blah] revolutionary [blah] effects [blah] efficiency [blah] joint [blah] system of systems [blah] excellence !

I stopped reading such articles years ago.

Their illustrations are often neat, but the content of truth or even actual information is 'moderate'. Moreover, often it's important what's not being written (for example that the shiny new gun is already out-ranged by foreign substitutes or that the bureaucracy plans to buy only a small supply of the new ammunition). Ongoing programs are usually being hyped - up to the day when they're being cancelled. Afterwards there's perfect silence about them and whatever is the next move of the bureaucracy is going to be hyped as super-wise.

In short: Most professional journal articles about artillery (or most other military topics) are pretty much an insult to the reader's intelligence.

Luckily, this blog is not professional journal, so I can dare to write an article about artillery without being ashamed.

Earlier blog posts about artillery looked at hardware examples, sub-sets or specific conditions for effectiveness or other specifics:

2011-09: A "15 years too late" analysis on precision munitions and survivability
2011-08: The underrated genius gun
2011-01: A German artillery fire control computer in '45?
2010-08: "Who Says Dumb Artillery Rounds Can’t Kill Armor?"
2010-04: A little bit German artillery and anti-tank defence history
2009-11: The future of multiple rocket launchers
2009-09: On defensive firepower and much else...
2009-05: DM 121 purchase / modern artillery
2009-04: C-RAM
2008-11: Cluster munitions ban
2008-07: Mortars and howitzers

This time I'll try to write about the grand picture, of all artillery since the 20th century. It will also be somewhat applicable to other indirect fire arms (such as mortars).

The purpose of the artillery is to influence a land campaign advantageously by achieving effects through fires (and the threat thereof). These effects were exclusively destructive / lethal / repulsing a long time ago, but jobs such as illumination, smoke screening, disruption, radio jamming were added during the 20th century.

The effects are the centre of attention (or should be), for they are the justification for the effort.

Old photos about arty can be interesting, too...

It's thus interesting to create a list of what influences artillery effectiveness (in a somewhat abstract way). This is the area where public discussions of artillery are especially narrowed-down and dumbed-down. My attempt to create such a list follows:

Artillery hardware-dominated factors

(1) Ammunition quantity (including the availability of ammunition to the firing unit, not just in national depots!)

(2) Ammunition quality (type and quality of warhead/cargo, quantity of sub-munitions, including fuse type)

(3) Duration of munition flight (relevant against moving targets)

(4) Angle of descent (important for unitary fragmentation munitions and in hilly/mountainous terrain)

(5) Reliability of guidance / trajectory correction and fusing (inclusive ECCM)

(6) Vulnerability of ammunition to hard kill countermeasures (C-RAM)

(7) Fuse setting in use (timed, proximity, super quick, quick, delay, mine fuse?).

(8) Quality of ammunition storage (especially for certain white phosphorous rounds) and ammunition age / shelf life.

(9) Fires observability (radar cross section or smoke trail of munition in flight, flash, noise, smoke, trajectory height, manoeuvring munition?) 

(10) Resistance of artillery to non-fires influences (EMP, deep sub-zero temperatures, moisture, heat)

(11) Dispersion of impacts (usually an elliptical pattern, not a simple circle - thus a difference between longitudinal and lateral dispersion)

Other artillery factors

(12) Reliability of artillery personnel (morale, accidents and errors, willingness to fire when civilians are present)

(13) Close security (360°) concerns

(14) Survivability of artillery against dedicated anti-arty measures (camouflage, concealment, deception, hardening, redundancy, mobility, tactics)

(15) Readiness of artillery (On the march? Shoot and scoot? Double crews? In range? Fuelled? Supply times? In need of repairs? Suitable trajectory when mountains are present? Suitable direction (in light of different safety distance requirements for longitudinal and lateral dispersion)? Artillery in a self-defence fight? Authorised/actual strength?)

(16) Accuracy of impacts (or of projected impacts if rounds become effective prior to impact; correct calculation with correct input variables including ammunition characteristics, barrel wear, temperature, altitudes, coordinates, meteorological date and more)

Communication and command

(17) Delay (lag) between arrival of request/command and fires (calculation, checks, deconfliction, loading, aiming weapons, communication between calculating and firing small unit)
 

(18) Resource allocation (Centralised decision-making? Schwerpunkt?)

(19) Reliability of communication (line of sight, range, clarity, inter-lingua, ECCM)

(20) Delay (lag)  of communication (speed of transmission, queuing of messages, procedures)

(21) Timing of fires requests / commands (tactical timing, not = lag!)

Related to observation of the enemy

(22) Accuracy of observation (own and relative position)

(23) Reliability of observation (IFF, recognition of decoys, night and bad weather performance)

(24) Lag of observation (non-digital aerial reconnaissance, acoustic sensors)

Target (area)-related factors

(25) Susceptibility to soft-kill countermeasure reactions (timely warning, taking cover or evading, deploying smoke/chaff/dazzler/decoys against target-seeking munitions)

(26) Surprise factor

(27) Surface quality (Deep snow? High trees?)

and a big one:

(28) Nature of the target (dispersion, cover, hardening, morale, proximity to "blue" troops, size, movement, importance, vulnerability to secondary effects such as secondary fires or explosions, ability to make identification more difficult, exploitation of red cross or protected sites etc)

I suspect the primary utility of such mil porn pictures is to keep readers motivated.

Having thought about this for a while, I'd like to make three comments and leave all else to the reader and later blog posts:

(a) The challenges are much greater and much more diverse than the mere shopping of some fancy precision munitions or new guns. I hope none of my readers will be ever tricked by marketing hype about a supposed silver bullet (again)!

(b) The actual effect is much, much smaller than the potential effect because no force comes close to mastering the first 24 points. An incomplete understanding of these influences leads to a wrong estimation of artillery's actual effectiveness and the relative importance of specific influence factors.

(c) Wouldn't it be great if sometime in the near future we'd be able to read an article about artillery in a professional journal in which the officer-author writes about the artillery of his army and uses a list such as this one as a check list, commenting on every point briefly? I mean, instead of a buzzword mash-up?

S O

P.S.: Word count for buzzwords: 4 x "effects" and once "tactical" (in some contexts that would be a buzzword) in my 'article'. All uses seem justified to me, for they're being applied with the original meaning.

I do sometimes ask others to preview and comment/correct my texts. This time I'm thankful for preview comments by the SWC members "Xenophon" and "GMLRS".

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