Saturday, January 11, 2003

Interesting

One thing I've kind of vaguely noticed on Globalsecurity.org is that it lists no separate Army artillery brigades as either in the Gulf or alerted to go. It lists separate air defense, military police, and other brigades and smaller units, but no artillery.

Given the refusal to commit artillery to the Taliban campaign (I think there is one battery in the whole country now in support of our troops) and the cancellation of Crusader, I wonder if this is a deliberate decision to rely on air power and just use the organic divisional artillery. In Desert Storm, we had lots of separate artillery brigades to support the offensive. This might be part of the trade offs we are making to get a force to the theater fast. But artillery is accurate, capable of firing in all weather, and it sure isn't going to suffer from GPS jamming (if the Iraqis can do that, of course). I understand and accept that we need lighter artillery, but we still need it.