I've got a concept in mind - technologies/concepts creep inside the armed services from big/heavy/expensive to compact/light/cheap and become useful to more and more units and lower levels of hierarchy.

The first use of an innovation is often clumsy and expensive and found in navy ships (think about AEGIS, for example) or stationary installations, followed by a still expensive but not so bulky anymore application in combat aircraft (think about the early days of radar). Next are often AFVs/artillery and then it trickles down to infantry when the tech is really cheap, light and compact.

The C2 challenge that you wrote about is no perfect example, but almost fits this pattern. Divisional artillery of whole corps was assembled to support single divisional attacks or Großkämpfe (essentially major battles) in WW2 (or earlier).
Artillery coordinators on corps level or higher coordinated that with their small staff's preparation (Arko, for example).

Divisional artillery was not meant to support neighbor divisions, but it did so - and the procedures for it were the hierarchical procedures of that time.
This can and should be done much lower in the hierarchy today - like on battalion/company level or (with some quite uncommon indirect fire armament) on platoon level.
Modern communication technology coupled with modern indirect fire control (which is quite automated) could be used to coordinate such horizontal supporting fires.
Wilf, maybe you've read a version of my skirmisher text that already had that feature. It's really mostly a matter of communication and good prioritization.

It would be wasteful to let one battalion/regiment fight its own fight when a neighbor unit has some support assets that could help but aren't prepared/ordered to do so.
The 'organic fire support' thinking should be replaced with a 'horizontal fire support' thinking.

Maybe that happens, and maybe the natural consequence would be an increase in range till we see integrated regiment-sized combat teams with their own SPH battery instead of heavy mortars.
That is btw something that resembles a concept of the 50's.


Classic artillery - separate from the direct fire forces - will remain necessary because we can't be sure about the survivability of forward indirect fire assets.