Quote Originally Posted by Cole View Post
Cliff, I made the same comment to Ken in a PM about coordinating altitude being the cut-off for ground commander's air control. I only recently learned about blue (ground up) and purple (lower and higher altitude) kill boxes. Is anyone out there using the term Joint Fires Area in the real Army/Joint world? Is the Air Force allowing Kill Boxes to be split up to allow airspace users to share the same area by restricting themselves to just one Keypad within a Kill Box? Did that UH-60 in your video bust a Position Area for Artillery big time...or is that artillery unit never going to get resupplied by air again?
Cole-

The ALSA website has links to FM 3-09.34 Kill Box Tactics and Multiservice Procedures... distribution is restricted, so you will need a CAC card to look at it.

Kill Boxes can in theory be opened and closed by keypad, but that is not as likely due to the smaller size of the keypads. I'll have to ask my sources to see what is happening right now in the field... Kill boxes are a pretty flexible means of doing FSCMs, and they work well for a fluid fight like Afghanistan because you can open and close them with less work since everyone (in theory!) already knows where they are- unlike a ROZ.

As for the video, I have heard (anecdotally) that the artillery folks hadn't coordinated their fires, but I don't know all the details. That is a case of Army vs. Army coordination, so I can only speculate...

My only other comment is that it seems like the "ownership" issue gets pretty emotional... like I said before (and I'm agreeing with the majority here I think), having a system of coordination seems to be more important than who owns what.

I'll post again if I can get some current data from bros at the CAOC.

V/R,

Cliff