Artillery Targeting Process

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Carl S RE:Artillery - Fireplanning For Gulf War I- Where's Carl? 4/1/2006 6:19:35 PM

Cant help you much on specifics of Desert Storm. I was a captain training replacements for the 15,000 casualties (worst case estimate), or a battery for the stratigic reserve. Take your pick. We all had to study stacks of after action reports, read the articals in the Gazette & the Field Artillery Journal, and sat through lectures (yawn) afterwards. I did not retain any organized notes on any of this. In those days it was all fairly transparent at the battery level. We got a fire request from a observer, or a fire order from battalion, and executed it when specified. At that level if you paid very close attention to the message traffic & the map you could follow some of the details. Usually you were too busy staying on time & on target to track much beyond the necessary changes in the coordinating measures. I doubt much has changed there. As a battalion S2 back in 84-85 we had dumped the old computers like FADC & had not recived anything new. This was in part because of the MIFAAS fiasco/cancellation. So, all the plannng was still done with paper schedules. I'd look at the rough target lists from the manuver liasion and our own list and evaluate probable target sizes. The S3 (or I) would use that estimate to pick projectile type/quantity from the effects tables (JEMS or GEMS). The S3 would plot all that out on the schedule forms according to the start/stop times, make the battery assignements, and add any special instructions. When a smooth copy was ready it was transmitted to the batterys. When the Battery Computer System was distributed, post 1985, we could use it to do part of the list & schedule drill, tho it was not designed for the planning end of things. We had to wait untill the older IFASS was passed to us from the army for a complete electronic fire control system. The IFASS did not come onboard officially until circa 1996. From the after action reports & war stories I'd have to say the Marine artillerymen were very creative with the planning, the use of BCS and about everything else during Desert Shield. During the 1980s I'd observed a trend towards regarding doctrine as a sort of guide rather than a rule. This was clearly the case by January of 1991. ie the battalion I was training with was composed initally of a HQ and one SP bty of six M109 from 4/14, and a bty of eight towed M198 from another bn. After a few weeks four M101 (105mm) were swiped from a storage building and added to the towed bty. The the bn comander kidnapped about 90 miscl Marines from the replacement pipeline and had them start training with four of the M198 as cadre for a third bty. With many of the reserve btys added to the active service bns it was common for bns in Desert Storm to have four firing btys. According to legend Lt Col Sachleben managed to field five or six btys in his bn out of creative thinking. I'd worked with him briefly back in 1988 and can say he was the sort who could pull that off. One major problem the Marine artillery had to wrestle with in Desert Storm was the lack of a ''corps' artillery HQ. That command function had been eleminated on leaving Viet Nam. The assumption had been no MEF would operate with more than one divsion HQ & the div arty HQ would then be suffcient. Of course Gen Boomer had two divsions and a independant brigade afloat in I MEF. So, a sort of corps arty HQ was scratched together out of spare field grade officers and SNCOs. Fortunatly there was no shortage of Lt Colonels. Unfortunatly they never had the comm equipment they needed. Post Desert Storm the HQ 14th Marines (a reserve unit) was reorganized to function as a MEF arty command element. I was involved in the refinement of that, the last three years before my retirement. Raids: We did do a little raid planning on the scale of that in Desert Shield back in the 1980s. Mostly it was the helo lifted one or two gun thing from the Viet Nam era. But once in 1985 I was involved in planning a multi battalion 'artillery raid'. The terrain was the crowded Japanses landscape, so route planning was important. The raids in DS were of all sizes. Basicly they were racing guns up near to the berm to fire on targets otherwise out of range. Sometimes a few would be sent. Sometimes a lot. It was done initially to test the Iraqis. After they flunked some of the raids were probably planned with the idea of actually destroying something.

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Carl S RE:Artillery - Automatic Firing - Carl 4/1/2006 6:34:06 PM

neutralizer wrote.... "Computer based scheduling is a tricky one, depending on the number of variables involved, there are some very advanced mathematical techniques for this but I'm not sure if they've been applied to fireplanning applications yet." I'm suddenly drawing a blank on the scheduling interfaces on IFASS. I remember clearly it was a lot easier and faster, but cant recall what the displays looked like. Spent the better part of ten to eleven weeks of real time hammering on that thing from 1995 to 97. What I'd really liked to have had then were JEMs that could be easily/rapidly interpreted.

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S-2 RE:Artillery - Fireplanning For Gulf War I- Where's Carl? 4/1/2006 9:03:15 PM

IFASS system is something that I don't recognize at all, yet you refer to receiving older IFASS from the Army. Are we talking about AFATDS (Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System)? BTW, thanks for the prompt and excellent reply on my earlier thoughts.

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Carl S RE:Artillery - IFASS AFATDS 4/2/2006 1:56:53 PM

Not sure. I need to look around here & see if I retained any docs. What we called the IFASS (Intergrated Field Artillery Supprt System ?) Was a old system designed to to interface with Tac Fire, and the earliest BCS. I cant recall if it was originally intended to do the same thing as Tac Fire in the 'light divisions' or what. There were remarks that the equipment we were issued susposedly came from the 18th Airbourne Corps. It was a Unix based system on 480 platforms that dated to the early-mid 1980s. The Tac Fire links were fairly clear. The BCS interface may have been added on, there was some debate amoung the computer literate on that issue. The first thing I saw that might have been AFATDS was at Ft Sill in 1995. We got a two hour lecture on a system under development from a assistant project officer (a USMC Captain). The two things I recall from his talk were: The specs had originally identified some 45 artillery related tasks for the system, and how after extensive US Army, USAF, USN, & USMC input ballooned to nearly 500 tasks. The contractors programers were wringing their hands over this, which the Captain thought funny. Second he told us the development platform was a RISK workstation, which he said "...Plays a excellent game of Doom." Also the development system had color displays.

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AlbanyRifles RE:Artillery - IFASS AFATDS 4/3/2006 9:31:34 AM

I was working on the CSS counterpart to AFATDS at the time...called Combat Service Support Control System (CSSCS). Some of the major problems we faced were 1) the original requirements called for a system which could do XYZ (this was for all systems). Then as we got into testing and development and TRADOC and the user started adding on requirements which were never part of the original proposal. So now a contractor was expected to do work it never bid on. 2) Each of the PMs was saddled with a POS hardware...at about that time we switched to the CHS which put my system in a 2 year moratorium as all of the preceding code had to be rewritten into UNIX. Once again, the government changed the specs and expected a contractor who had bid on something else to develop a whole new piece. 3) In many ways we were trying to automated long existing manual processes, particularly in the CSS arena. There was no tactical CSS automated system which existed in maneuver units. We were trying to replace grease pencil and acetate overlays as well as checklists with a computer system?.without an organic communications backbone to operate on. 4) Unlike AFATDS, we never had a general officer say that is my system. All of the log generals believed in the business systems (SARSS, SAMS, SAAS, etc) which served their purpose. CSSCS served the maneuver commander. We could never come up with a friend in court. AFATDS (and the other ABCS systems) had commandants who claimed these as ?their? system. I remember a case at FT Hood around 1994/1995 when AFATDS was failing a test. Commander of 1 CD (2 star) started to tear into the colonel who was in charge of it. The CG got a call from the commandant of the FA School (another 2 star) telling said commander to back off, 2 star to 2 star. Division commander backed down and commandant withdrew system from test for further development. It saved the system.

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Carl S RE:Artillery - CSSCS 4/3/2006 10:47:53 PM

That helps in understanding all those articals in the Gazette the last three years, howling about how scewed up the supply system is. The bad part it is the logisitcs specialists that are screaming loudest. ATLASS and ATLASS II have been burned in efigy by the raving mob. AFATDS seems to have performed better. I cought few to none negative remarks post OIF. One thing I noticed was the artillery response times in OIF did not seem significantly faster than twenty years ago. Or sixty years ago for that matter.

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neutralizer RE:Artillery - CSSCS 4/4/2006 4:48:00 AM

Not knowing what the AFATDS performance requirements were and whether or not they were achieved in practice by the system in the field I won't comment. The difficult bit with tac FC is the allotment process of fire units to targets; the amount of human intevention in that process, the tactical rules being applied by the machine, the extent to which these rules can be modified in the field and the algorithms being used for some of the intensive processing. For example selecting the optimum fire unit probably involves finding the one that is most economic ammo wise and possibly balancing this against stock levels held, basically trial and error, then add in doing it for several fire units, and there's other complications you can add in. Then you may want a person in the loop to check that it makes sense for some other extraneous reason that isn't accomodated by the processing rules, if it doesn't they have to alter some parameters to get a different answer or manually overule the machine solution. It takes time. And I haven't touched on the issue of FM priority and qeueing in a target rich environment.

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Carl S RE:Artillery - Fire Control Decisions 4/4/2006 7:00:03 AM

"FM priority and qeueing in a target rich environment." That was the primary question for me when I stood watch in the FDC, or when planning. We had a stock 'Target Priority list' and a decision matrix. But, that would be modified, primarily by the scheme of manuver. Commanders intent, and main point of effort were two internal considerations that I had to keep continually in mind. On the threat side first which enemy unit was doing the most damage, and which was the greatest long term threat were critical. The ops watch officer had to be continually aware of the information flowing from the manuver liasions and the intel links. The language we used for these concepts in the Marines changed during the mid to late 1980s. The basic prinicples did not. We did alter the speed of changes in the manuver plans, and the concept of 'main effort' moved closer to the center of tactical operational thinking. The net result was changes in the fire plans occured more often. We also changed the way we thought about the coordinating measures.

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Tater 2/14/2009 9:58:51 AM

"This was in part because of the MIFAAS fiasco/cancellation. So, all the plannng was still done with paper schedules."

I know three years later someone finally makes a comment. Sue me Im part ent.

MIFAAS fiasco? Didnt happen at least for the test period, It did in fact work without error for those of testing it. The issue was far more simple in what happened. Those of us testing were not arty. To be quite frank Im a woman, Marine, but still a woman. We knew how to use it, we knew how to set it up properly. Problem was there was not a Marine in arty who had been taught.

So what do they do? They go ahead and start testing with arty. Let me tell you, two marines both women who had the only security clearances above secret and the access to the crypto needed is not nearly enough to run around trying to set the batts up. Even then, they still had no idea how to use is.

Sadly if it had been taught, only if it had been slowly brought into the Corps, things might be a bit different.

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Carl S 2/15/2009 3:40:24 PM

Tater. Can you contact me directly about this. I'd like to know more of your side of the story. Its ancient history (and gives away your age :) ) but it may be relevant to some research I am doing.

carlschwamberger@earthlink.net

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