Officer of Engineers

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Classical Fire Support vs. Parallel Fires
April 2001


By Lt. Col. Robert R. Leonhard


The captain peered through his binoculars and scowled.
"Papa three six, alpha one one. Immediate suppression. Over."
"Papa three six. Immediate suppression. Out."
"Bravo victor 48613288. Troops in wood line; at my command. Over."
"Bravo victor 48613288. Troops in wood line; at your command. Out."
"HE delay. Over."
"HE delay. Out."
"Direction 088 ... fire!"
"Direction 088 ... shot. Over."

Way back when, I used to be able to integrate artillery fires with the maneuver of my mechanized infantry company team. No longer. The kind of precise control and coordination of fires depicted above is a thing of the past. We have replaced classical fire support with a system of parallel fires. Our Army's fire-support doctrine and practice has migrated in the course of the last 15 years, and much has been gained and lost as a result. We must now determine whether the gains outweigh the losses.

In the early 1980s, the Army employed a doctrine that I shall refer to as classical fire support. The direct support artillery in a brigade combat team existed to fire in support of maneuver task forces and companies. The system was simple: The brigade commander designated a main effort, typically a battalion task force. Normally, that task force commander was assigned priority of fires. The task force commander would plan his concept of operations and designate three or four priority targets along his expected route of advance. As the task force advanced, the artillery would lay on the next priority target when not otherwise engaged. Hence, the main-effort commander could order immediate responsive fires within seconds.

Fire-control radio nets were voice networks, sometimes encrypted, sometimes not. Although the encrypted nets occasionally restricted accessibility, the commander could nevertheless rely on fairly easy access to his fire-support teams (FSTs), fire support officer (FSO) and even to the fire detection center (FDC) itself, if necessary. When the mission called for it, the maneuver commander could direct shell and fuze combinations and control the lanyard pull for precise timing of fires.

Under this system of classical fire support, the maneuver commander was the judge of what would be fired. He could unleash a barrage on a suspected enemy position in a wood line, if he felt it was necessary to facilitate the advance of his maneuver units. On the defense, battalion and company commanders were trained to adjust their close supporting fires, including the frightening and devastating final protective fire, so that those fires were intimately tied to the ground maneuver plan.

All this is ancient history. Our doctrine no longer emphasizes close coordination between task forces and fires, and the technology and the tactics, techniques and procedures we employ in the field absolutely banish the maneuver commander from the now-mysterious world of fire support. Our new doctrines may work better than classical fire support, but this is by no means proven.

To understand today's dilemma, we must first understand why our fire-support doctrine changed. The forces that combined to destroy classical fire support were the advent of AirLand Battle, technology advances and the culture of the artillery branch.

One of the best things that ever happened to the U.S. Army over the past several decades was the advent of AirLand Battle. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Army was contemplating the problem of the central battle in Europe. Close studies of the potential battle between the Warsaw Pact and NATO revealed a horrifying conclusion: We could not win -- at least not if we allowed Soviet echelonment and mass to hit us on the enemy's time schedule. Even if we had a really great day of battle and all the intangibles and incalculables went our way, we would eventually lose. We needed a way to extend the fight deep into the enemy's rear.

AirLand Battle was a concept that had as its centerpiece the concept of deep battle and eventually deep operations. The idea was that, rather than wait passively for Soviet echelonment to overwhelm us, we would instead extend the violence deep into the enemy's vitals, finding and destroying critically important targets to slow, disrupt and wear down the enemy before it could close on us with its mass.

To accomplish this deep fight, we had to develop new ways of planning and controlling our fire-support assets. Traditional fire support relied on a simple maneuver-based concept of "detect, decide, deliver": The maneuver commanders would detect a threat; then they and the fire supporters would decide to engage the threat; finally, they would deliver the fires. This method works in close battle but not in a deep fight.

We discovered that to prevail in deep battle, we could not wait passively to detect something. To do so would put the initiative in the hands of the enemy and would structure our fire support upon accidentally finding the enemy. Instead, we chose to revise our doctrine for the deep fight according to the idea of decide, detect, deliver: We would decide which targets in the enemy's array would give us the best payoff; then we would go after them with our collection assets (radars, Special Forces, reconnaissance aircraft and so forth); finally, we would destroy the target. The means of destruction in AirLand Battle's deep fight was primarily the U.S. Air Force, with some participation from Army aviation, missiles, rockets and some long-range tube artillery.

It was an ingenious system that worked. As we perfected the art of the deep fight, we structured our equipment, doctrine, organization and training toward more efficient operations. The deep fight would begin with a careful analysis of the enemy's order of battle. A high-payoff target list (HPTL) described the most critical targets in the enemy's array. The fire-support planners would then develop target selection standards and an attack guidance matrix to ensure the most efficient use of fires. The system worked very well.

Then something terrible, yet virtually unnoticed by most of us, happened: Deep battle doctrine was imported into the close battle, a doctrinal disaster from which we have never recovered.

The decide, detect, deliver concept does not work in close battle for several reasons. The most important point to understand about deep-battle doctrine is that it does not matter who finds the target. As long as the radar or soldier who found the target is reliable, we can engage the enemy and achieve our desired results. In deep battle, the only important issue is the nature of the target itself.

In the close fight, however, the question of who finds the target is the most important issue. Hence, if the main-effort battalion commander desires to fire upon a single antitank guided-missile team, then that target is more important than the 20 main battle tanks spotted by the supporting effort's task force scouts. This is true because the defeat mechanism in the close fight is getting the main-effort unit into the enemy's rear where it can cause confusion, disruption and defeat. That is called maneuver warfare.

In maneuver warfare, we attempt not to destroy the entire enemy force but to render most of it irrelevant. We do this by getting tanks and infantry into the enemy's rear, where they can overrun artillery, supplies and headquarters. Most often, maneuver units infiltrate the rear by attacking through weakness and massing fires on that weak spot to speed other units through the enemy's lines.

If artillery, supplies and headquarters are the targets, why not just use fires instead of maneuver? In fact, that is the script of battle simulations and war games. These fictional scenarios and the doctrines developed from them, however, fail to replicate the moral dimension of warfare. In real battle, conflicts do not end with complete destruction of an enemy force. More often, the destruction level is about 10 percent or less, followed by a moral collapse or weakening. Thus, most successful battles end with retreats, surrenders or routs. The role of maneuver forces is to facilitate, exploit and multiply that phenomenon. Indirect fire cannot take prisoners or hold a piece of terrain.

As a maneuver commander, I do not want my FSO showing up with an HPTL in hand. That list of targets indicates that the FSO is serving two masters and has intentions beyond putting fires where I want them. In the close fight, there are no such things as high-payoff targets. In their place we have a main effort, and everything opposing it should be the priority targets, regardless of the threat type.

It is clear that our forces have lost capability in the integration of fires and maneuver that underpin maneuver warfare. In place of classical fire support, there is a system I call parallel fires.

The current system is parallel because the maneuver system and the fires are operating in the same direction and seeking the same goal, but they are not working together. Modern close combat, American-style, features two groups of people both trying to beat up the bad guys. Yet like two parallel lines, they never intersect. If a fire mission happens to aid a ground movement, it is a coincidence. Maneuver commanders cannot make it happen intentionally.

Today, digital fire control nets have utterly banished the maneuver commander from the mysterious world of fire support. Tactical fire-detection system and the advanced field artillery tactical data system have increased the efficiency of parallel fires while rendering tactical synchronization impossible. The old days of time-on-target fire missions closely supervised and coordinated by the ground commander have been replaced by the greater mass of parallel fires. Most maneuver commanders today do not understand artillery as their predecessors did, and most no longer even try to coordinate artillery fires with maneuver. It is common practice today to allow the fire support coordinator and FSOs to control FSTs. Battalion and company commanders often totally lose control over what their FSTs are doing.

As a mechanized infantry battalion S-3, I remember sitting in my Bradley turret looking south toward the Whale Gap and seeing the enemy's AT5s sitting on a little hilltop plinking away at our tanks. I called on both the fires net and the command net to the FSO but could not get him to respond. I leaped from my Bradley fighting vehicle, climbed onto his vehicle and pulled him up through the cargo hatch. He had a combat vehicle crewman mask on and a handset/headset jammed into each ear. After disconnecting him from his web of communications gear, I pointed to the AT5s and shouted, "Fire that now!" Eventually, we brought serious fires down on them, but I thought it was absurd how unresponsive the fires were.

Another illustration of the disconnect between maneuver and fires is the infamous fire support rehearsal. I sat through one once and will never do so again. I sat up all night next to my FSO while the fire support coordinator (FSCOORD) choreographed a perfect parallel-fires scenario over the radio net. It took hours. Basically the FSCOORD worked his way down the HPTL and assigned FSTs to fire the target list. I was aghast -- a fire-support system divorced from the reality of maneuver, with the FSTs clearly taking their cues from the artillery chain of command.

It may well be that parallel fires actually work better than classical fire support. It depends in large measure on how better is defined. For sheer volume of fires or tons of burning enemy steel, then parallel fires is a clear first pick. If, on the other hand, we are looking at increasing the speed and momentum of maneuver units' attacks, then classical fire support is better because synchronized suppressive fires make maneuver units advance faster.

Whichever option we decide is higher priority, we must at least arm ourselves with an accurate understanding of how artillery fires affect maneuver forces.

Long-range weapons are inherently desynchronizing. For example, suppose you are a division commander with three brigades, each of which is supported by a direct-support artillery battalion. Suppose also that the tube artillery constituting those support battalions can fire a mere 20 kilometers. This close-range capability satisfies the close-support needs of the brigade commander and his battalion commanders, and as a result, the brigade combat team develops tactics that closely integrate fires with maneuver.

Now suppose that a technological innovation has increased the range of artillery tenfold. The guns can now fire 200 kilometers, yet this new capability can cause problems. First of all, the brigade commander can now fire at ranges that exceed his ability to see the battlefield. Secondly, fires at such extended ranges will almost certainly cross unit boundaries and affect the operations of other brigades or units. To solve this problem, the division commander, working through his division artillery commander, takes greater control of those guns. The longer a weapon's range, the more likely control of that weapon will go to a higher headquarters.

The benefits of this option, however, are mixed. On the one hand, the division-supporting artillery can mass fires in a way they never could before. On the other hand, this is desynchronizing for the brigade because the brigade has lost fire support. Longer-range ability diminishes capability. For although longer-range and massed fires help destroy the enemy, the close integration of artillery fires and ground maneuver stands alone as the most difficult tactical task and the one most likely to atrophy. To the maneuver commander, most of those distant explosions are irrelevant and do not positively affect his ground maneuver.

We can conclude that we should not eschew long-range weapons. There are enormous advantages to extended-range capability. Yet while we employ improved technologies, we must not neglect the close fight. Until proven otherwise, close combat requires classical fire support in most mission, enemy, troops, terrain and time conditions. Before abandoning this concept of tactics, then there must be proof that the system of parallel fires actually works in real combat.

There is a profound cultural issue at work here. The artillery officer who is conducting classical fire support is clearly in the customer support role: The maneuver commander says, and the artillery officer acts. In this system, the consummate artillery officer is a master of ballistics and positioning, and he excels at assisting the maneuver commander in fire planning.

In the parallel fires system, the artillery officer is in the driver's seat. He plans, directs and controls the fires. He conducts his own assessments and rehearsals. He controls his own FSTs. He is a major player in determining what will be fired.

A branch of professional artillery officers that has self-actualized with the system of parallel fires will not desire to return to the ignominy of customer support. The artilleryman of today clings to the HPTL because it is a device of his own making and a symbol of his authority. Warfighting culture within the artillery branch is as powerful a force as it is within the infantry and armor communities, and it will almost certainly resist a perceived reduction of its authority.

The Army must ask whether the efficacy of parallel fires is worth the cost in close-combat capability. If so, then we should continue to move forward and perfect the art of our new doctrine. But if not, then restore the art and science of close supporting fires responsive to the maneuver commander.

To answer this essential question, the Army must not rely solely upon computer simulations. Such simulations lack the command and control aspects as well as the moral dimension of warfare, which have an impact on the issue. Experimentation on the ground is a bit more accurate, but even the combat training centers lack the moral aspects critical in close combat. Instead, the Army must look primarily to the lessons of real battle.

The most obvious answer to the dilemma of diminished fire support is to encourage the maneuver commander to rely on organic mortars. Many commanders admit that mortars are the only reliable fire support available.

Unfortunately, with only four tubes of heavy mortars and a restricted choice of munitions, as well as limited range, mortars cannot do it all. Supporting artillery fires bring powerful capability to a battalion task force or brigade, and their absence is keenly felt.

Recognizing a problem is the first step toward solving it. Maneuver commanders today do not have the capability to plan, control and synchronize fires, as their predecessors did 20 years ago.

Can the Army recover this lost art?


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LT. COL. ROBERT R. LEONHARD, professor of military science at West Virginia University, has published articles and books on military strategy and land warfare.

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Copyright © 2004 by The Association of the U.S. Army Back

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