2010 Fires Seminar - Fort Sill, OK

[Pete]

When I went through FAOBC in 1978 we were taught manual gunnery first and later using computers, then FADAC, a Vietnam-era system. My Advanced Course in 1981 was the first one to be taught TACFIRE, another obsolete gunnery computer. Back around 9/11 when most Army publications were still online FM 6-40 resembled the versions I used, so it appears that things haven't changed that much. The one thing I thought Fort Sill ought to have been doing was provide pre-canned fire missions for FDC training with all the input data--grid coordinates, azimuths, met, propellant temperature, etc--as well as school solutions to the fire missions. That way it would be easier to present training for FDCs without having to do all the computations in advance. If I recall correctly something like that was available for 155mm; at my first assignment I was in a 175mm gun battalion and we didn't want to repeatedly reprogram FADAC from one caliber to another. FDC skills decline rapidly, as one can find out the hard way during live-fire exercises. I imagine many 13Bs are rusty on laying pieces and so forth after years of being infantrymen overseas.