ON ARTILLERY

 By now it is pretty clear that the world of war as we have known it since the end of the 19th century is over. As usual, the military will always be the last ones to know it. Consider that right up until the beginning of World War I we still had massive cavalry formations and the military used to wonder about the proper mix of Uhlans and Dragoons to Cuirassiers and the sabre/pistol armed version that the US Army had come up with instead.  

1914 German Uhlan ready to tear up the trenches

 

1914 French Cuirassiers ready to hack apart some Uhlans

 

What we need to see now is a fundamental and radical change in weapons development, procurement and fielding. We have seen from the exchange of fires in Ukraine that the helicopter and the air mobile soldiers day is done. They cannot survive on the modern battlefield and only a fool would think that the missiles that waste them in Europe won't be in the hands of islamic and other terrorists before tomorrow's dawn.

The Pentagon's flawed weapons acquisition and development system is broken and has been since World War II. There is no fixing it. It needs to be thrown out entirely and a brand new system put into place with people running it who know and will/can make changes as necessary on the fly without sending it to committees of "STAKEHOLDERS" to lard it with fresh pork for contractors and jobs for old soldiers and sailors.

The entire combat drone issue needs to be put into the hands of real artillery men who understand that 2 rounds a minute out the barrel is the minimum requirement and build drones to match that kind of usage rate. That will never happen of course because the Operational Requirement Document will be written in such a way that the drone must be 100% reusable, 100% common with NATO drones, 100% commonality of parts with all other military drones, etc. The first thing they ORD drafters will get rid of is the very idea that they are tasked with building a 100% expendable warhead. 

A sad case in point. The USN built a whole class of Destroyers that they called, for a time, Land Attack Destroyers. We know of them as the very sad and mostly useless Zumwalt Class destroyers. (Sorry Sarge). The ships were armed when constructed and commissioned with a cannon that fired very long range artillery shells that each cost roughly as much as a Tomahawk missile. The significant difference between a Tomahawk missile and a piece of unguided ordnance is that the Tomahawk usually hits its target and does so with a variety of warheads. Artillery? Not so much.

Surveillance drones are a little bit different from artillery drones but they should still be the purview of the artillery because otherwise the flyboys will get involved and decide that it has to be so gold-plated with stealth, commonality, maybe room for a pilot or observer with the obvious introduction of systems to incorporate them and of course it must be totally reusable the way SpaceX rockets are. What they are going to lose sight of instantly is that an unmanned expendable surveillance drone that has thousands of equally cheap buddies can be used over any battlefield and still be wildly effective even with high attrition compared with a tiny and extremely expensive handful of hideously expensive and ridiculously overbuilt/overdeisgned 'compromises'. Again, a comparison of SpaceX and that hideous thing NASA built with ULA that costs billions to launch and is only useable once and was forced by Congress to incorporate all the old STS rocket engines is eye-popping.

I know, the ready reader will wonder how can I slang off at artillery while proposing to put the hands of our future massive drone fleets in their hands? It's pretty simple. Artillery men buy a few varieties of cannons and an enormous, even shocking amount of ammunition to fire from them. The ammo they want is usually cheap and it is always 100% expendable.  We need that. The last time I saw anything like that out of the USN was the sonobuoys we used all through the Cold War and entire squadrons of P3 patrol aircraft would drop thousands of them every day during some of our more ambitious operations hunting down and riding herd on Soviet ballistic missile submarines. The Navy, in its wisdom ended production of them and decided, as they did with the Tomahawk production lines that they shuttered, that they had enough and didn't ever need any more.

The best contract minds need to pair with the best ORD drafters and signers to get a contract that is both IDIQ and has fixed numbers of annual procurement of thousands of killer drones every year from now on. The contract has to take into account that the drones will be effectively obsolete within a couple of years of fielding and the process to design and build better and more dangerous drones is one that must not languish in some ridiculous government lab.  This is where the guys from Robot Wars can make a buck or two.

We have lost effective control or command of the seas to drones. We won't get it back unless we start to consider some really radical ideas that will make the flag and general officers sick and will lead to some impressive startup companies prepared to enter the ridiculous world of Defense Contracting. If the youngsters are very smart though they'll read the small print and take advantage of the pre-DEI crapworld that decided that offers would go first to small, minority owned, disadvantaged, veteran and women owned companies. I'm sure no amount of reality will ever change that ludicrous idea.