George Wallace said:
... Is this train of thought a contemplated act on the part of the Artillery Branch to create a niche or Empire and defeat any hopes of making ISTAR an effective endeavor that could be an efficient tool? As is it is hamstrung by the lack of cooperation between the various 'sources' and their unwillingness to cooperate.
Or have I completely misinterpreted your reference to Surveillance and Target Acquisition?
I don't believe the Artillery world has any designs of empire building, as for niche building, I suppose to some degree that is true, but not by design. The STA capabilities that the Artillery are currently manning is either the result of past history with it, or no one else has the manpower or time right now to take it over. In the future locating radar might merge into the air defence realm should medium range radar, with an air space coordination component to it, come on line (hopefully in the near future ie within 10 years). As for the other capabilities there are decades of experience within the Artillery on them.
Sound ranging goes back to WW1, UAV's back to about the 70's, and a specific type of radar also was developed for the same reasons as Scotty alluded to; as a capability for counter battery use. This capability withered somewhat through the 80's and 90's, the skill set being maintained somewhat in the Artillery largely by select IG's and AIG's attending "Locating" courses in the UK. I'm not aware of any other trade doing this.
The ISTAR concept has always been around, somewhat, but as it became more defined the capability requirements looked a lot like what the Artillery had already been looking after, or trying to maintain some kind of skill sets for, albeit for the more specific counter-bty role. So I would say more by default the task went to the Artillery to look after those specific capabilities. As for the coordination aspect it certainly does not belong to the Artillery alone, but the task of coordinating fire support resources has been for some time the role of Arty FSCC and ASCC's within the construct of the Bde FSCC.
Only recently have we seen any real commitment to acquire modern technology (HALO, MUAV and LCMR) to actually put something in the hands of soldiers, it just so happens they went into Artillery ones simply because that's were the skill set resided. In the case of UAV's the original intent was the traditional recce units within the Armoured and the Infantry were to look after the mini, which only made sense, but for manpower and training time reasons this has happened yet, and might not because of technical reasons.
Skylark, the MUAV capability the CF has right now, is operated by the Artillery because they had experience with UAV's, and the demand for this capability in theatre was urgent to the point it was more sensible to leave the capability in the hands of where there was at least some experience, rather than delay deployment while training was delivered to where there was none. I'm not so sure the other trades wanted the training bill that went with along with it anyway. This type of aircraft does have some limitations, so it might be replaced by a somewhat larger UAV, a Small UAV as opposed to a Mini, so that this capability has a higher availability rate. This means the UAV capability will probably remain within the Artillery.
Gunners are also still providing the launch and recovery teams for the TUAV for who knows what reason since Spewer is controlled by the airforce, which leads to one of the consequences of these ISTAR demands is that it is playing hell on career management.
That's quite a lengthy explanation I suppose, and it could be more twisted than I intended, but hopefully that does give a better idea of why those specific STA capabilities are managed by the Artillery right now.
