How to Read the Army’s Budget Request for More Precision Ordnance

By Luke O’Brien
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American howitzers appear to be making a resurgence after nearly two decades of frequently being relegated to other duties. The 2019 Army ammunition budget allocates more than $376 million toward the purchase of high-explosive and Excalibur rounds, which have been fired more frequently in the fight against the Islamic State than in the previous 40 years. The move is striking, given how marginalized artillery was in America’s post-9/11 wars. A decade ago, as a freshly minted Army artillery officer trained in the fundamentals of setting up and firing howitzers, I could compute ballistics by hand and correct the fall of artillery shells using just a pair of binoculars and a radio. Artillery fired often during the invasion of Iraq and the drive toward Baghdad in 2003. Yet when my first unit deployed to Iraq in 2008, we traded in our self-propelled howitzers for armored trucks and spent the next 12 months of that deployment essentially acting as infantry troops. In the years after the invasion, the United States Army viewed artillery as secondary to having as many soldiers as possible running patrols, staffing guard towers and escorting convoys of supplies.

The same went for Afghanistan, where for years after Sept. 11, many artillery batteries fired few, if any, high-explosive rounds. The rules of engagement were tight, and insurgents typically did not expose themselves in ways that made them easy targets.

ImageAmerican soldiers engaging ISIS fighters with artillery fire in support of Iraqi and Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, July 5, 2017.CreditChristopher Bigelow/U.S. Army

The ongoing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, however, has brought a change.

The Islamic State often acts more like a conventional military than an insurgent force — creating conditions that have returned artillery units to traditional roles. With this change, the Army has requested a sharp increase in its annual purchase of high-explosive shells to resupply its Field Artillery Corps. In all, the service is seeking more than eight times the number of artillery shells in 2019 than it has procured in any recent year.

This request initially spurred questions among defense observers about whether the new expanded Pentagon budget under President Trump signaled preparations for war on the Korean peninsula — an understandable form of speculation, but speculation nonetheless. But the spending proposal did make one point clear: The Army is nudging its artillery force in the direction adopted by modern attack aircraft long ago — toward more precision ordnance.

Broadly speaking, artillery projectiles can be divided into two categories: unguided and guided. An unguided artillery projectile, the standard that is used for generations and that makes up a majority of rounds in the Army’s current stockpile, is unable to correct its path in flight. It travels in a simple ballistic arc toward its target. Wind and temperature changes, variations in air density and even the temperature of its propellant can cause it to stray.

A guided round, on the other hand, is able to calculate its position in flight relative to its target, and use movable fins to stay on or return to course. Though guided munitions can decrease risks of civilian casualties, precision technologies were developed for another reason — to reduce the number of shells needed to destroy a target. The thinking was straightforward: The more accurate a shell, the fewer shells each howitzer might have to fire. This in turn reduces the difficulties of keeping howitzer crews supplied.

For decades, the Army developed purpose-built guided artillery shells that were both extremely expensive and had questionable performance, including a laser-guided 155-millimeter artillery shell known as Copperhead. By 2007, the Army began sending GPS-guided Excalibur shells to operational units in small numbers, and they quickly became extremely popular among ground force commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. But at $68,000 apiece, Excalibur was far more expensive than unguided shells, which each cost roughly $800.

American soldiers firing precision-guided munitions from M777 howitzers while training at the Seventh Army Training Command’s Grafenwoehr training area, Germany, Feb. 3, 2017.CreditGertrud Zach/U.S. Army

In recent years, a compromise has made an era of cheap guided artillery feasible. A new type of fuze called the M1156 Precision Guidance Kit added guidance fins to a standard-size nose fuze, which could turn an old unguided projectile into a near-precision weapon for, on average, $8,000 apiece.

These fins also extended the effective range of Army howitzers a great deal. Not long ago, 19 miles was considered the longest range possible for an “effective” shot, where an unguided shell could still miss the target by as much as 300 yards. The add-on guidance kits made those same shells accurate to within 30 yards of their targets.

The much more expensive Excalibur rounds still serve a purpose, putting rounds within just 10 yards of a target out to a range of 25 miles. That is why the Army is still ordering 2,000 of them in 2019 in the current budget. In the artillery world, these two developments have changed the idea of “effectiveness,” by allowing soldiers to shoot fewer rounds from a further distance.

The 2019 Army ammunition budget shows that the United States is really preparing for two kinds of wars simultaneously. It is expecting more fighting in urban areas like the battles against ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa, as well as possible conventional battles in the Baltic states and North Korea. In both, precision-guided rounds will most likely be standard. And instead of being relegated to rifleman duties as they were soon after 9/11, artillery soldiers could go back to their traditional roles: firing their howitzers in support of the infantry, even when far over the horizon.

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Luke O’Brien, a reservist, former Army artillery officer and military historian who has studied the development of artillery, served on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He can be found on Twitter at @luke_j_obrien.