Quote Originally Posted by Jedburgh View Post
The King and I: The Impending Crisis in Field Artillery’s Ability to Provide Fire Support to Maneuver Commanders
Interesting paper. While I agree with the spirit, I take issue with some of the suggestions.

One thing that I find endlessly infuriating is the supposition that somehow you "need" battalion and brigade commands, and commanders, to get good training and good officers in a branch. The authors suggest that there need to be formed Artillery brigades, and any place where there are separate batteries now must instead be grouped under a battalion headquarters. Battalion and brigade headquarters are very expensive in terms of personnel, especially multiplied over the numbers that we are taking about in the Artillery - depending on how you do the math, it could equate to perhaps a entire brigade's worth of troops. Most of those additional personnel are *not* there to increase the institutional knowledge or training quality of the artillery. Personnel in the battalion and brigade S1, S2, S4, etc are not going to be focused on improving the quality of artillery training. The battalion/brigade commander and his XO will also probably spend plenty of time worrying about "command" issues like maintenance, discipline, the family support group, etc. Grouping batteries into a battalion also requires a forward support company and/or an HQ battery, which at the very least will require additional personnel to command these company(/ies), even if the rest of the support personnel are realigned from the current organization, the same can be said of grouping battalions into brigades. This is quite a few extra personnel, when the whole reason for it, in the white paper, is to get some additional, senior artillery experts - an inordinately high price to pay, when there are other, more direct ways to accomplish it.

I wouldn't be nearly as quick to dismiss the FSE section. In the 3rd ACR, this was a Field Artillery major (no real reason that the billet couldn't be an LTC), a captain, a chief warrant, a senior NCO and a couple of support troops. They could focus solely on the quality of training, and didn't have to worry about all of the other things that a commander, and his staff, do (and some officers are all too happy to focus purely on the training, and not have the headaches of command). The batteries certainly did have time to train, and in tests/arteps often outperformed their "standard" counterparts in the other FA battalions, and even the FA brigades at Sill, in mission that was measurable.

Heck, King Battery (1st How, 1/3 ACR) just set a new record for most rounds fired by a battery in Iraq, over 5,000 rounds safely delivered to their targets, which is much, much more than the average battery gets for training in a year. The FSE sections also picked up the role of the battalion or brigade FDC (battalion and brigade FDC's are not nearly as useful today as they were back in WWII, before the advent of computers and battle command software.)

Other branches (say, MI) have a career progression path that involves staff jobs at the higher levels, where being an S2 on a brigade level staff is a qualifying job, the same could be done with the Field Artillery. I also think that it misses the point that, grouping into brigades, they will simply be an easier target for the "bean counters" to cut. At least in the current scheme, there are still plenty of howitzer batteries out there. A few iterations of reorgs, and that would change if they were in artillery brigades. Finally, the opposition to the two-man crew of the N-LOS C is... misleading. Batteries today have an ammunition carrier (CAT) to resupply each gun, and some flavor of HEMTT to resupply each CAT. Both of those vehicles have Artillery MOS soldiers that are trained as gun crew. (Perhaps the FCS batteries do not have these - if so, then that IS a serious mistake.)

This also ignores the serious training problems that arise from "stovepiped" units. The officers and NCO's in the Cav Howitzer batteries KNOW what their maneuver counterparts need, and have (or at least, had) developed unique TTPs to accomplish their mission and support the line troops.

We simply don't have the personnel to stand up entire brigades, just to get an FA Colonel. If you really want to spend that kind of money, make the N-LOS C as good as, say, the PzH 2000, and highlight the independence and awesome responsibility of a howitzer battery, or even make a few maneuver brigade commands available to (gasp) artillery officers, and you will (continue to) get good officers and NCOs into the branch.