Field Artillery Team - Motivation

Motivation

To understand the modern field artillery team concept, it is necessary to understand that modern artillery batteries shoot at targets measured in distances of kilometers and miles rather than the old 18th Century concept of meters and yards, representing a hundredfold increase in range. Because of this dramatic increases in range, in most cases, gunners no longer directly see their targets and so they can not directly engage the enemy with observed direct fire. Typically, they use what is called indirect fire whereby they can not directly see the target(s) that they are engaging. This dramatic range increase has been driven by the development of rifled cannons, improvements in propellants, better communications and technical improvements in gunnery computational abilities. These technical developments have been ongoing since the end of the 19th Century. Since a modern enemy is engaged at such great distances, there is now the need for trained observers linked to the artillery units by modern communications, to find and adjust fire on targets at great distances. In most field artillery situations, because of weather, terrain, night-time conditions, distance or other obstacles, the soldiers manning the guns can not see the target that they are firing upon. The term indirect fire is therefore used to describe firing at targets that gunners cannot see. In most cases, the target is either over the horizon or on the other side of some physical obstruction, such as a hill, mountain or valley. Since the target is not visible these gunners have to rely on a trained artillery observer, also called a forward observer, who sees the target and relays the coordinates of the target to their fire direction center. The fire direction center, in turn, translates those coordinates into first, a left-right aiming direction, second, an elevation angle, third, a calculated number of bags of propellant and finally, a fuse with a determined waiting time before exploding to be set (if necessary). The fuse is then mated to the artillery projectile.