Firepower in Limited War: Revised Edition

“Bar none, the best book on fire support in the English language and one of the most accessible works on tactics I have ever read.”—Bruce Gudmundsson, author of On Artillery

The military of the United States is the world's strongest. Our armed forces are equipped with weapons of remarkable accuracy and unprecedented destructive power. In the Gulf War, allied forces used these weapons in what turned out to be a high-tech shooting gallery. The pinpoint accuracy of the sharpshooter's rifle is now routinely expected in the delivery of thousand pound bombs.

Events in Somalia and the Balkans have aptly demonstrated, however, the profound limitations of firepower in limited conflicts of low intensity. Yet, these are the kinds of war we are most likely to encounter as we proceed down the path of the new world order.

Robert Scales examines this problem through his analysis of the role of firepower in the wars in Indochina, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Falklands War, and the Gulf War. Chosen for the prestigious Marine Corps Commandant's Reading List, Firepower in Limited War is must reading for everyone interested in national defense and all military professionals.

1
Firepower in the
American Way of War
 
 
The Civil War was the first American conflict observed closely by professional European soldiers. Beginning in 1862, members of the Greater Prussian General Staff, as well as representatives from Great Britain and France, visited Union and Confederate field commands. The views of these men were remarkably alike—and uniformly unkind. They were appalled by what appeared to be a singular lack of field discipline on both sides. Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, eminent nineteenth century British military thinker and writer, noted in his biography of Stonewall Jackson,
 
Neither was the fire of the Confederate infantry under the complete control of their officers, nor were their movements always characterized by order and regularity. It was seldom that men could be induced to refrain from answering shot for shot; there was an extraordinary waste of ammunition, there was much unnecessary noise, and the regiments were very apt to get out of hand.
 
Observers noted that the Americans would rarely close with the enemy but chose instead to fight at ranges of a quarter mile or more and throw enormous quantities of lead at each other, often for hours without end. What these observers witnessed first hand has become immutably associated with the American way of war—the willingness of Americans to expend firepower freely to conserve human life.
 
Americans have routinely emphasized the value of firepower in their military method for a number of reasons, some of them based on a continuing military practice that began in the Civil War, others, more complex, arising from the essence of American national character. America’s preoccupation with preserving the lives of its soldiers is deeply rooted in its liberal democracy. Jefferson’s elevation of life as one of the inalienable rights of an individual underscored the obligation felt by American political philosophers in the new republic to provide for the protection of its citizenry. The inherent value of human life has become a political and moral imperative carried down and amplified through generations and passed into the ethic of American military men.
 
General Eisenhower, in his conversations with Marshal Zhukov, was struck by the different value that Soviet and American leaders placed on their soldiers’ lives. In one instance, Zhukov explained that minefields were best cleared by marching soldiers through them, reasoning that a few losses to mines were acceptable to maintain the momentum of the attack. Eisenhower noted in his memoirs that such methods, regardless of their tactical utility, had no place in the armies under his command. “Americans assess the cost of war in terms of human lives,” he wrote, “the Russians in the overall drain on the nation.”2 Throughout American history, from Antietam to Hamburger Hill, a victory won with too many lives was not considered a victory at all.
 
The proclivity to conserve lives in combat has been made all the more difficult by a parallel distinction of the American military tradition—the distrust of large, standing armies. Reliance on the citizen soldier to fight its wars has customarily given America a strong militia—but a less strong military. It has meant that American armies have had to learn to fight by fighting. Firepower lessened the price of this education. Americans learned as early as the Civil War that firepower steeled and coalesced unsteady troops and lessened the harm done by an enemy far out of proportion to its killing effect. S. L. A. Marshall, in his pioneering studies on the personal qualities that made Americans fight, noted, “Artillery fire which is promptly delivered is like a shot in the arm. It moves the man mentally and sometimes bodily, thereby breaking the concentration of fear.”
 
In its major wars, the United States has been willing (and rich enough) to compensate in materiel wealth for what it lacked in preparedness for war. Once mobilized, America’s war industry in the 20th century overwhelmed its enemies with weaponry. The challenge for strategists and field commanders was how to translate quickly the huge quantity of war materiel into the most destructive machines of war. Artillery and aircraft have been best suited for this purpose; bombing and shelling from great distances have proven to be the most efficient and cost effective means of delivering explosive power while avoiding direct, bloody contact with the enemy.
 
The appearance of an effective long-range muzzle-loading rifle in the mid-19th century led to the beginning of modern field artillery. In previous centuries, cannons were simply trotted in front of converging lines of infantry, pushed to a range of approximately 300 yards, and fired point blank into ranks of enemy infantry. This “assault artillery” was relatively safe in such maneuvers because the muskets of the opposing infantry were accurate only to about 50 yards. But a Civil War muzzle-loading rifle in the hands of a marksman could hit an area target such as a gun crew at 1,000 yards. Outranged by the rifle, artillery of the attacking force was pushed back beyond effective range. Without protective artillery, infantry were faced with charging across a half-mile of bullet-swept terrain against an entrenched, unshaken enemy. Technology thus favored the defense, and in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War four years later, the cost of the attack quickly became prohibitive.
 
The Prussians, although victorious, suffered terribly from French rifle fire.5 They sought immediately to improve their artillery as a means of reducing the destructiveness of defensive firepower. Their solution was to adapt conventional siege artillery techniques to light field guns supporting the infantry. To protect itself from the fire of a besieged fortress, artillery of the siege train developed the means to fire from behind cover. Siege guns fired in a high-arcing trajectory that permitted the shells to clear protective cover and plunge down into a fortress. Since the gunners could not see the target, they aimed indirectly, by measuring bearing and distance to the target from a map and then calculating the azimuth of aim using a compass and the proper elevation necessary to raise the tube so that the projectile would reach the target. An observer placed on a flank spotted the fall of the shells; he used flags to telegraph corrections back to the guns.
 
Indirect fire remained with the siege train until late in the 19th century because firing was slow and imprecise, and because siege guns were too heavy and immobile to accompany a field army.6 But the Germans recognized that new technologies could overcome many of these problems. The development of wrapped steel gun tubes and efficient breech loading lightened artillery to the degree that siege-caliber guns could be taken to the field. Gun cotton, or nitrocellulose, replaced black powder propellants for artillery in the 1880s. Nitro burned more slowly and lessened recoil shock. Less recoil made possible the development of a pneumatic device to halt the rearward movement of a gun and to return the tube to the same spot after each round was fired. This change permitted guns fired indirectly to be aimed with greater precision.7 Because gun cotton was smokeless, artillery hidden behind a hill no longer gave away its position when it fired.
 
Other technologies applied to artillery at the turn of the century permitted “fire support artillery” to be as flexible and mobile as assault artillery had once been: modern instruments made indirect aiming an exact science; improvements in topography made possible shooting from map measurements with enough precision to hit unseen targets; the field telephone freed the artillery observer from the guns, allowing him to move forward with the infantry and adjust fire from the front; and the introduction of trinitrotoluene (or TNT) and improved metal fuzes made artillery shells tremendously more lethal and reliable.8 By 1914 all of the elements of fire support artillery had been developed; they have remained essentially unchanged to the present.
 
In the process of this transformation, the nature of artillery combat was fundamentally altered. The direct-fire muzzleloader was replaced by the field gun and howitzer, capable of accurate curved fire, which with their precise machinery and optical devices became more instruments than weapons of war. The general adoption of this instrument by all modern armies after the turn of the century symbolized acceptance of the reality that science and industry had replaced the ubiquitous, dashing gunner of Napoleon’s day with a sophisticated yet sinister technician.
 
The American Army remained until the end of the 19th century a coastal and frontier garrison force. Modernization came slowly, particularly in the technical branches. By the time World War I began, American artillery consisted of an amalgam of various obsolete types. Safe behind its protective seas, the artillery arm was content to watch that conflict unfold and follow the tragic course of ruinous war with curiosity and growing concern.
 
America entered the Great War after three years of destructive trench warfare had caused enormous suffering among European armies. The small-bore rifle and machinegun continued to make the defense predominant. The tactical problem faced by military leaders of the untried American Army was how to restore tactical mobility to the battlefield without suffering the same fate as the Europeans.
 
By reputation the most innovative of senior American tacticians was a gunner officer, Major General Charles P. Summerall. He believed that the deadlock could be broken by perfecting cooperation and communication between artillery and the infantry. Attacks faltered when the infantry went “over the top” and immediately lost contact with the guns. Infantrymen had no way to shift or concentrate firepower on unexpected areas of resistance, or to stop and start a preplanned barrage to keep pace with the momentum of the attack. Summerall also observed that even when attacks were successful, a fatal pause occurred as the guns attempted to move forward across a shell-scarred no-man’s-land to stay within range of the infantry. All too often, the enemy chose this vulnerable moment to counterattack and restore the defensive line.