Cedat Fortuna Peritis

347 Pages·2011·2.15 MB·English

Cedat Fortuna Peritis
A History of the Field Artillery School
Boyd L. Dastrup, Ph.D.
Combat Studies Institute Press
US Army Combined Arms Center
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Cedat Fortuna Peritis
(Let Fortune Yield to Experience)
A History of the Field Artillery School
By
Boyd L. Dastrup
Field Artillery Branch Historian’s Office
US Army Field Artillery School
Fort Sill, Oklahoma
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dastrup, Boyd L.
Cedat fortuna peritis (Let fortune yield to experience) : a history of the Field Artillery
School / by Boyd L. Dastrup.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-9837226-0-1
1. Field Artillery School (Fort Sill, Okla.)--History. 2. United States. Army. Field Artil-
lery--History. 3. Artillery, Field and mountain--United States--History. I. Title. II. Title:
Let fortune yield to experience, a history of the Field Artillery School. III. Title: History
of the Field Artillery School.
U428.F53B68 2011
358.12’5--dc23
2011024277
FIELD ARTILLERY SCHOOL
Brigadier General Thomas S. Vandal Commandant
Colonel Matt R. Merrick Assistant Commandant
Dr. Boyd L. Dastrup Field Artillery Branch Historian
Foreword
From its humble beginnings as the School of Fire for Field Artillery in 1911, the Field
Artillery School emerged as a worldwide leader in training and educating field artillerymen
and developing fire support tactics, doctrine, organizations, and systems. Recognizing the
inadequate performance of the Army’s field artillery during the Spanish-American War
of 1898, the emergence of modern field artillery, and indirect fire, President Theodore
Roosevelt directed the War Department to send Captain Dan T. Moore of the 6th Field
Artillery Regiment to Europe in 1908-1909. While there, Moore observed European field
artillery training and found the German Artillery School at Juterborg with its emphasis on
practical exercises, new methods of shooting, and testing new material to be particularly
impressive. Based on this, Moore enthusiastically encouraged the War Department to
develop a field artillery school along the lines of the German school and received the
mission to establish the School of Fire for Field Artillery at Fort Sill.
Although the School of Fire experienced a few rocky years after opening in September
1911, the passage of time validated its efforts. During World War I, the school trained
officers in observed and unobserved indirect fire for duty in France using classroom
instruction and practical field exercises. According to the Chief of Field Artillery, Major
General William J. Snow who served as commandant of the school in 1917, the school
produced officers who performed with distinction in France and provided the core of the
Army’s field artillery training.
Following the war, the school, redesignated as the Field Artillery School in 1919,
continued employing innovative training techniques in the classroom and the field in the
1920s-1930s. While the classroom instruction provided theoretical training, practical
exercises honed the skills of field artillerymen in realistic field settings. Besides providing
classroom gunnery training, Major Carlos Brewer and Major Orlando Ward, who were
directors of the Gunnery Department early in the 1930s, pressed to make observed indirect
fire more responsive by developing the fire direction center. Along with the graphic
firing table introduced in 1939 and the portable radio, the fire direction center provided
unprecedented, flexible massed fires during World War II.
After the war, the Field Artillery School retained its leadership in training and
participated in key combat developments. While undergoing name changes in the 1940s
and 1950s, the school trained officers and enlisted soldiers on emerging conventional and
nuclear field artillery systems as part of The Artillery Center, which included the Antiaircraft
Artillery School at Fort Bliss, Texas, renamed the Air Defense Artillery School in 1957.
Such training complemented the school’s involvement in the development of the Field
Artillery Digital Automated Computer to make the school a leader in Army automation and
the airmobile artillery concept used in the Vietnam War of the 1960s.
Although the Vietnam War caused the Field Artillery School’s operational tempo
to increase and to focus on fire support in counterinsurgency warfare, it returned to
conventional warfare in the 1970s. Through the remaining years of the 20th century, the
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school introduced counterfire and the fire support team, among other doctrinal and force
structure changes, and played a key role in developing the Multiple-Launch Rocket System,
the Paladin M109 self-propelled howitzer, and other field artillery systems.
As it helped modernize the Field Artillery, the school updated its classrooms and
instructional methodologies. It adopted advanced information technology for classroom
instruction and distributed learning to deliver instruction beyond the school house,
introduced small group instruction to develop adaptive leaders, and strengthened its ties
with the reserve components through the Total Army School System.
As the school moved into the 21st century, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan
and Operation Iraqi Freedom shaped more change. To support those operations, the school
introduced practical exercises on counterinsurgency warfare, trained students in precision
fires to minimize collateral damage, and trained officers and soldiers to employ non-lethal
effects, such as electronic warfare and tactical information operations, to complement
lethal effects.
During the Field Artillery School’s centennial year of 2011, it carried on the traditions
established by the School of Fire for Field Artillery many years ago. Constantly adjusting
to meet the nation’s defense requirements, the school trained Army and Marine field
artillerymen and other nations’ field artillerymen to be technically and tactically proficient
and to provide lethal and non-lethal effects in support of full spectrum operations. As a
key member of the progressive Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, a product of the
Base Realignment and Closure 2005 which collocated the Air Defense Artillery School on
Fort Sill, the school became a partner in producing fires officers and soldiers for the 21st
century.
Artillery Strong!
Thomas S. Vandal
Brigadier General, USA
Commandant
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Preface
Over the years, the Field Artillery School transformed itself to meet the needs of the
Army. During the 20 years preceding the opening of the School of Fire for Field Artillery at
Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1911, the War Department candidly acknowledged the requirement
for trained field artillerymen, but training had been sporadic and ineffective since the
American Civil War because artillery schools opened and closed with regularity and
furnished little training even when opened. While the Artillery School at Fort Monroe,
Virginia, renamed the Coast Artillery School in 1907, focused on coast artillery training,
the garrison schools concentrated on drill and ceremony and rote memorization but not
firing.
The Mounted Service School at Fort Riley, Kansas, was created by the War Department
in 1907 to replace the ineffective School of Practice for Cavalry and Field Artillery at Fort
Riley that had opened in 1892. It operated under several names over the years with the
mission of teaching equitation and field artillery tactics, but it failed to fill the void created
by the Coast Artillery School’s decision to furnish coast artillery instruction exclusively.
Inadequate training, modern field guns, indirect fire that was supplanting direct fire,
and the Field Artillery’s poor performance in the Spanish-American War of 1898 prompted
the War Department to organize a school devoted to training field artillerymen. On 15
September 1911, the School of Fire for Field Artillery opened its doors.
Outside forces continued shaping the school following World War I, which caused
the school to expand its operations. Facing the imperative of improving indirect fire
tactics, techniques, and procedures to make fire support more responsive on a more mobile
battlefield, the school developed the fire direction center to facilitate massing and shifting
fires more rapidly than ever before. The school also participated in testing motor-drawn
and self-propelled artillery, and played a role in the adoption of organic field artillery aerial
observation.
During the four decades after World War II, pressures beyond the school reinforced
the need to adapt. The shortage of field artillery and antiaircraft artillery officers and the
Army’s push to save money generated the need for flexibility in officer assignments. This
caused the school to conduct cross training in the late 1940s to the 1960s during which field
artillery and antiaircraft artillery officers were trained in both artillery branches so that they
could serve in either. Meanwhile, the Army entered the atomic and nuclear age, forcing
the school to develop courses and doctrine for a conventional and nuclear battlefield.
Subsequently, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s prompted the school to shift its
focus from conventional and tactical nuclear warfare to guerilla warfare, while the Army’s
return to Europe in the 1970s rekindled interest in conventional and nuclear warfare and
suitable weapons and equipment.
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National and international events during the last decade of the 20th century and the
first decade of the 21st century once again sculpted the school. Fearful that the Army would
become irrelevant in the small wars springing up around the world, General Eric K. Shinseki,
Chief of Staff of the Army, tore the Army and school away from a Cold War orientation
with its emphasis on heavy units and moved training to lighter and more mobile units for
fighting throughout the world. The War on Terrorism following the terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001 pulled the Army and school even further from the Cold War moorings.
Although the school trained soldiers and officers to fight on the conventional battlefield,
non-standard missions in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in
Afghanistan – patrolling, civil affairs, and psychological warfare, among others – during
the early years of the 21st century eroded field artillerymen’s core fire support skills. Non-
standard missions also stimulated the school to emphasize resetting (retraining) the field
artillery force in its core field artillery competencies and to adopt non-lethal effects –
tactical information operations and electronic warfare – as core competencies.
Although outside forces drove the school’s program of instruction and involvement in
combat developments, individual efforts did not go unnoticed in an organization devoted to
team play. Against tremendous odds, Captain Dan T. Moore opened the School of Fire for
Field Artillery in 1911. Years later in the 1920s and 1930s, Major Carlos Brewer, as a director
of the Gunnery Department, reformed gunnery techniques to mass fires more rapidly, while
his successor, Major Orlando Ward, created the fire direction center. Lieutenant Colonel
H.L.C. Jones, director of the Gunnery Department, subsequently improved upon the center
and paved the way for its acceptance throughout the field artillery community. Starting out
as an early advocate of cross training late in the 1940s, Major General Thomas E. de Shazo,
the Commandant of the US Army Artillery and Missile School late in the 1950s, became an
outspoken opponent of cross training after witnessing its deleterious impact on officers and
unsuccessfully pushed to revoke it. Only the Vietnam War ended that disastrous program.
Major General David E. Ott developed the fire support team to facilitate coordinating
fires from attack helicopters, tactical aircraft, mortars, naval guns, and field artillery and
counterfire to engage enemy indirect fire systems in the 1970s to overcome the numerically
superior ground forces of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Years later, Major General
David C. Ralston initiated reset efforts to retrain field artillerymen in their core fire support
skills that had deteriorated after serving in non-standard missions in Operation Iraqi
Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) during the first years of the 21st
century. These individuals and others met the changing demands placed upon the school to
train high quality field artillerymen and develop new field artillery systems.
This book starts with the school at the beginning of the 20th century and carries the
story through the first decade of the 21st century. Although the school’s early years fell
short of Captain Dan T. Moore’s vision of creating a field artillery school comparable to
the German one at Juterborg, the ensuing ones saw the rise of a first-rate institution that
fulfilled the captain’s dream.
I would like to thank Mark Megehee of the Field Artillery Museum at Fort Sill, Dan
Scraper who has played a key role in developing training for field artillery officers, and
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David A. Christensen, the Air Defense Artillery School historian, for taking time to read
the manuscript and offer suggestions for improvement. I would also like to acknowledge
Dr. Donald P. Wright and Jody Becker of the Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas, for their outstanding attention to detail and advice during the editing process. Any
errors in fact are mine.

Boyd L. Dastrup, Ph.D.
US Army Field Artillery School
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To my wife, Karen, for all of her support.
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