PPT Slide
General (Retired) Glenn K. Otis, Former Commander of NATO’s
Central Army Group and Commander-in-Chief of US Army Europe
The Evolution of the Combined Arms Team
by Patricia Slaydon Hollis, Editor Field Artillary (June 1995 Page 18-19)
In “Field Artillery Vision 2020” [by Brigadier General Leo J. Baxter, December 1994], we explore possibilities for
maneuver and fires, both direct and indirect. As the Army develops Crusader, extended-range rockets and missiles,
precision munitions along with the Comanche helicopter and Tank 1080, how do you see the combined arms team changing?
I believe we’re at the threshold of major change for the combined arms team - the ascendancy of fires. What that means is that we, as a nation, will fight conventional battles using firepower of all kinds from longer ranges, much of it indirect - not eyeball-to-eyeball using direct fire. We’ll use long-range fires as the spearhead of the attack to the extent that the ground maneuver forces may only need to mop up after the fires. That’s a totally different concept of operations. This concept aims at achieving decisive results while minimizing the usual high casualties of the direct fire battle.
As I see it, there are two reasons for this ascendancy of fires. One is that we have superior capability to locate the enemy forces with precision. The second is that we have now and are further developing artillery, precision munitions and associated systems to such an extent that we can devote more of our battlefield efforts to raining accurate - highly accurate - volumes of fire on the enemy. As another element of this capability, we have attack helicopters with great firepower and wonderful accuracy that provide both fires and movement, which are key to success in combat. Add to these fires the capability to integrate fires from fixed-wing aircraft and sea-based platforms, and it is easy to imagine the devastation possible when fires are orchestrated by a know-ledgeable battlefield commander.
In your more than 35 years in the Army, how have you seen the combined arms team evolve?
When I came in the Army in 1946, it was an Army of foot soldiers. When we started World War II, the normal employment of tanks in most of our forces (Patton’s division was different) was to take a couple of tanks from an armor company and give them to an infantry platoon and so on until each infantry platoon or company had one to three tanks. We focused on the infantry and used tanks to support them - a totally wrong concept of employing armor.
By the end of World War II, we realized the tank was the mobile firing platform of shock action and the hallmark of ground combat capabilities. So it became the centerpiece of combined arms team and our modern, mechanized army.
Now, 50 years later, we’re evolving into the next stage of combined arms wherein fires become the centerpiece. In this stage, ground movement (tanks