How Americans Mastered the Indirect Fire Battle and Became a Global Superpower

A 4th of July book review

Fire for Effect: Field Artillery and Close Air Support in the US Army. John J. McGrath, USAR, retired. Combat Studies Institute Press, 2010. 178 pages.

Calls for fire became a defining feature of American land arms in the 20th Century. In Fire for Effect: Field Artillery and Close Air Support in the US Army, retired Army Reserve officer John J. McGrath offers a concise history of how Americans came to master indirect-fire warfare.

Examining the development tracks of field artillery (FA) and close air support (CAS) in parallel, McGrath finds they work best as complementary assets. Whenever the United States has attempted to substitute one for the other, the results have been “uneven at best,” he concludes. When they work together in combination with armor or infantry, victory is all but certain.

Although McGrath’s 2010 monograph stops at the threshold of America’s quasi-war in Syria, it is a valuable point of departure for understanding that conflict. To defeat the Islamic State, FA and CAS had to be interchangeable options as conditions required. US forces inside Syrian borders were minimal, but still included almost the same ratio of artillery to maneuver units as Vietnam or World War II. In every conflict, maximum firepower made up for the inexperience of ground forces.

Artillery was not new to the US Army in 1917, though it was the first war in which indirect fire played a major role. Apt pupils of their allies, Americans distinguished themselves in FA and CAS battle during 1918. However, the role of tactical air support was deprecated by veterans.

According to McGrath, CAS successes required massed force at one location, leaving much of the sky over the American sector seemingly empty of planes at any given moment. Partly as a result of these misperceptions, US warplane designers neglected the fixed-wing CAS role altogether in favor of fighters and strategic bombers, a pattern that continued until the 1970s. Tactical air support had to be re-learned in the crucible of each war.

With the Air Force neglecting CAS after 1950, the Army started developing its own helicopters and attack aircraft, resulting in a political dispute that lasted for decades. After agreeing on a separation of powers, the American land component perfected CAS in the crucible of Vietnam. The air component developed close support aircraft, most notably the A-10, in order to prevent further loss of their CAS mission to the Army.

Success at artillery on the ground was more even because it took place within one branch rather than among rivals. During the 1930s, the US Army developed the field radios and networking needed to control scattered gun batteries from central locations in response to calls for fire from observers of the scene of battle, and then move all the said batteries to continue the battle.

These skills would make American artillery the most responsive and effective of the Second World War. Altogether, almost as many artillery units as maneuver units (infantry, armor) were deployed overseas, about the same ratio as in Syria.

While American CAS scored significant successes in World War II, it generally failed when called upon to replace FA altogether, for example during the Buna campaign in Papua New Guinea. This was also the US Army experience in the Korean War and the invasion phase of the American war in Afghanistan. Wherever CAS and FA have been complementary, American forces have dominated the field. Substitution of one entirely for the other is not a good strategy.

McGrath has written a useful resource for the novice or the scholar in need of a nontechnical precis on how Americans came to dominate battlefields with indirect fire. Little wonder that the Ukrainian Army is quite eager to learn American artillery technique, as they are fighting a superpower, and mastering indirect fire doctrine is an important part of how the United States became a superpower.