Thinking About Naval Surface Fire Support Part II

Moving right along with NSFS (and all hail The Armorer for the image).

Let's look at it from a tactical perspective. Realistically, NSFS is a crucial capability in certain very specific phases of Marine and Army operations. Bear with me in that my discussion of these phases will not jibe with official nomenclature - if you think that this disconnect is telling, chime in with whatever particular scheme you'd like to see the discussion use. NSFS is, essentially, the 'outsourcing' of artillery support to the Navy from the organic fire support elements of the Marines and the Army. There are a couple of reasons it makes sense to do this.

Pre-landing

Prior to any U.S. forces landing from the sea or via air, NSFS is traditionally used to 'soften' the landing area defenses (if any) and to interdict any enemy forces or logistics intended to support defensive forces in the landing area. It makes sense to do this because the organic artillery forces, at this point, cannot be operated - they are still packed aboard ship or aboard aircraft.

During Forced Entry

During the initial assault, again, artillery is not available on-shore since direct combat forces are still flowing into the landing area, and NSFS is tasked to provide both preplanned and on-call fires to support landing operations.

Post-landing

Once U.S. forces have been landed, organic artillery is meant to stand up as soon as possible to begin supporting forces. The further the operation deviates from plan (which, of course, it will) the safer it is to have fire support be tasked from the same service as opposed to relying on cross-service coordination - especially from platforms which have other jobs (ASW, ASuW, deep strike) to handle as well.

The primary advantage to NSFS with the current fleet for fires after there is a U.S. force ashore is one of efficiency. Fires provided from ships do not require any materiel to be moved onshore or mated up with the land-based artillery. They also provide additional capability, of course, so that more missions can be carried out in the same timeframe - until the line of contact moves far enough inland that NSFS cannot reasonably reach targets ahead of it.

In terms of effects, the situation is less clear-cut. While before, using the BBs, it made sense to discuss NSFS as something qualitatively different from land-based artillery, this is no longer the case now that the fleet is limited to the 5"/54 or new 5"/62 mounts. Missile fires can offer the destructiveness of the BB fire missions against point targets with good targeting information by trading on increased precision to offset lower payloads, and can do so out to a longer distance. This has resulted in a sharp increase in the reliance on missiles to perform the NSFS mission, both because of the range advantage and, just like with the BB guns, because they are what is most readily available.

Here we have a bit of a problem, because missiles optimized for ASuW cannot (in most cases) be used for land strike. Dedicated missiles must be used, which means that magazine capacity must be split and allocated in advance. The most significant difference, however, is that of cost. The cost-per-round of missile fires is much higher than that of gun fires. Although the argument can be made (and has been made in the comments) that a full fire mission from a BB is roughly on cost parity with a short-range land strike, say from a Standard missile, this only gets us partway there.

The real problem comes in when the required mission is for suppression, not for interdiction or destruction. Missiles are great at the latter, but for the former, it is more important to cover an area with continuous effects rather than to concentrate destructive power on a point target. In many cases, suppression fires are called for specifically because the observer does not have precise targeting data, or because the target is diffuse - dispersed troops, or an area which enemy forces are required to transit. In this case, using multiple missile rounds swiftly becomes cost-ineffective.

One approach is to use submunitions in your missile fires to achieve area effect, and this has been implemented on the Tomahawk TLAM-D. However, the TLAM-D costs enough that maintaining suppression over a target area for any period of time would be prohibitively expensive in terms of missiles, a scarce resource.

So there is a mostly-limited timeframe in which surface fire support (as presently available in gunfire form) is useful, due to range and payload limits. There is also a limitation on the usefulness of missile fires for the full range of fire support missions due to effects and availability. This gives us a few characteristics of NSFS solutions we can represent as axes: range, lethality per round, and volume of fire. I would add 'responsiveness' to this, to represent how quickly a call-for-fire can be answered using the various systems. The NSFS problem space requires solutions with a variety of these characteristics.

We can put numbers to these later; for the moment, relative ranges will suffice to differentiate the system requirements.

The Pre-landing phase requires systems with short to medium range, high lethality, and low to medium volume of fire, with low responsiveness. Most fires in the pre-landing phase, if not all, will be pre-planned fires against high-value defensive targets using high-quality targeting information gathered prior to action. Destruction is more important here than suppression.

During entry, two types of fires will be needed. Responsive fires will be required to support troop movement and troop security as they move into the operating area. These fires are of short range, low (suppression) to high (reduction) lethality, and will be of medium to high volume depending on the number of targets and the desired effects (over-time denial, suppression, etc.) They will need to be highly responsive to be useful. In addition, interdiction (deep strike) fires will continue to be used against high-value targets of opportunity, especially enemy troop movements or logistics targets. These are medium to high range, high lethality (destruction), of low to medium volume and of medium responsiveness.

Post-landing, organic artillery should be able to take up some of the direct supporting fires. However, continued responsive fires are desirable as they reduce the requirement for artillery logistics and increase capability. In this phase, with the line of contact pushed out from the landing area, responsive fires need to operate at medium range (at a minimum) and ideally out to long range. Lethality for responsive fires remains the same. Volume becomes more interesting, as it may (depending on system) be forced to rise in order to maintain the same lethality levels. Interdiction fires maintain the same requirement as in the entry phase.

So what does this give us? More as I manage to write it (and if I get really ambitious I'll try to put together some graphs because I know how rambly I get).