Modern Western attitudes towards indirect fires

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The recent wars with major involvement of Western ground forces were forceful occupations.

What's important in occupations? 

"Plan A": Keep the will of civilians to resist broken.

If "Plan B" fails, enact "Plan B": Break their will again.

If "Plan C" fails, enact "Plan C": Muddle through in face of resistance and strive for a not totally embarrassing exit.

So basically you have to keep the masses in check.

The British were especially low on resources in their occupations during the Inter-War Years and kept the masses in check in part by terrorising them with aircraft. Euphemistically this was known as "policing". This approach was as unacceptable in the naughties as was daddy's Hama massacre approach to Assad when the uprising in Syria began.

The face of occupation had to be the troops on the ground. They had to at least feign presence by showing themselves - on the ground.

We might conclude that such a war of occupation would cause a major shift towards less indirect fires, with them being largely useless for showing strength. You can terrorise with their firepower, but not make people feel you could actually exercise control in minor affairs (unless they think that you're really, really cruel).

This shift didn't happen. Sure, there were calls for more infantry (rarely accompanied by calls for less artillery or tanks - bureaucracies prefer growth over any other change).
 

Fights in Afghanistan which weren't intentionally started by the occupation forces all-too-often followed a simple recipe:

Observe what happens, feel outnumbered, stick to the radio like a 14 y.o. girl to her smartphone, call in support (mortars, artillery, helicopters, bombers or other ground troops. The armed opposition was easily able to fix the occupation troops this way, but it lacked combined arms strength and was thus unable to destroy the fixed troops with its own mortar fires et cetera.

Fires from other than the ground manoeuvre element's individual weapons were of great importance to "us", and "they" lacked them almost entirely.

Now if this "Western" behaviour happened in a conflict which by its very nature should have lead to a shift away from indirect fires - then how would modern combat against a capable combined arms opponent (often called "peer enemy" or similar) look like?

The active service officers and the not actively serving people who have their attention aren't stupid, of course. They know that an army with self-propelled guns is more likely to shoot back with the same than a tribal mercenary warband. 

The problem is that a generation of junior officers has been ingrained with a certain style of warfare. Standard operating procedures and intuitive reflexes are deeply ingrained in their brains. They may (and will) fight against this bias, but it's the nature of biases that they still affect the average action.

The knowledge about the current idea of conventional warfare has to wrestle with the intuition gained in occupation warfare, and that's a quite unequal contest. Intuition wins too often.

So what can be done about this? Training, training, training. Also, don't feed more raw lieutenants into the Afghan indoctrination campaign. The perceptions and intuitions from Afghanistan create a bias. Training should have an opposite bias in order to counteract this, or the outcome will still be biased in a predictable way.

Old school officers who were imprinted in the very late Cold War era should determine what shall be trained and how.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

P.S. The emphasis on passive protection (body armour, armoured vehicles) over mobility and the importance of showing presence over elusiveness justify similar concerns and conclusions. Many patterns from occupation wars degrade Western forces' suitability for their noble actual mission; deterrence and defence.

edit: I used "indirect fires" here as representative for non-organic support fires in general (heavy mortars, howitzers, rockets, helicopters, bombs, air/ground missiles strafing runs, gunships); a sloppiness on my part. The normal definition for indirect fires only includes non-line of sight ground/ground fires, of course.

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