Fort Bliss Monitor

ADA changes to keep pace with changing battlefield

Blair Case
Special to The Monitor

This is the third in a series of articles chronicling the evolution of the air defense artillery branch.
Vietnam emphasized the need for separation by taxing the Artillery and Guided Missile School’s ability to crank out officers for the firebases of Southeast Asia while concurrently maintaining free world air defense artillery employment. At the direction of the Commanding General, Continental Army Command, the Artillery and Guided Missile School and the Air Defense School explored the desirability of dividing the artillery into two branches. Officer personnel policies and their effect upon artillery combat operations in Vietnam, as well as the responsiveness of the Artillery Officer Corps to meet future military requirements, were explored and evaluated.

The Army recognized that a growing division of doctrine, mission, training, equipment and techniques were evolving within the Artillery Branch as a result of the scientific advances within the military. This diversion of interest required a manpower pool with specialized characteristics. The Army concluded that two career branches could provide an improved response for the existing dual mission of the Artillery Branch and could better meet the anticipated professional requirements of future weapon systems while saving men and money.

In line with this, the authors of the Artillery Branch Study of 1966 concluded that integrated training “spawned mediocrity.” The report cited “strong comments from commanders against assigning air defense officers to Field Artillery units in Vietnam since they have considerable difficulty in fulfilling Field Artillery officer responsibilities,” incidents in which air defense officers assigned to Field Artillery fire direction centers were involved in friendly fire incidents and evidence that Field Artillery officers assigned to air defense units were slow to master the intricacies of air defense systems.

A major problem was that the one-year tour of duty in Vietnam left little time for on-the-job training. Field Artillery commanders in Vietnam complained that they did not have the time to train an air defense artilleryman to be competent in Field Artillery. “A Field Artillery outfit in combat can absorb only a limited number of officers who do not have a thorough knowledge of what it takes to get cannon–balls on the target,” said one Field Artillery commander. “The truth of this comment is amplified by the one-year tour here in Vietnam. There is little or no fat in the TOES; everyone has a job to do and there is little room for inexperienced understudies.”

Another Field Artillery officer complained that one air defense major he assigned as a field artillery battalion executive officer “took the attitude that he was qualified for a far more sophisticated weapon system and it was beneath him to dirty his hands with popguns, and furthermore, he did not know a thing about Field Artillery and wondered how he could be expected to learn all this new stuff in just 13 months.”

But air defense commanders expressed an equally dim view of branch integration, with its requisite for cross training and cross assignments, and argued that they also needed “officers who could hit the ground running.”

“The assignment to this command of an officer whose training and experience are limited to Field Artillery does affect the operational efficiency of the unit to which he is assigned,” observed the commander of U.S. Army Air Defense Command.

“The limited introduction to air defense materiel, tactics and techniques of operation presented to this officer during the Artillery Career Course does not provide him with sufficient knowledge or background to become an effective member of the team,” another air defense unit commander stated. “Detailed knowledge of his weapons is essential for any unit commander. In the case of an air defense battery commander, the complexity and sophistication of his materiel is such that it cannot be mastered quickly and easily.”

However, anyone reading the Artillery Branch Study of 1966 cannot help but be struck by the perception that its authors, judging by the preponderance of data they devoted to career issues, seem to have viewed branch integration’s adverse effects on officer efficiency ratings and selections for promotion as a more compelling argument for separation than integration’s impact on unit readiness. By mid-1966, it was clear to the chief of the Artillery Branch, and just about everybody else, that all was not well with artillery officers’ career progressions. On all the barometers of career success, including promotion lists and selection to senior service colleges, Artillery officers showed a lack of competitiveness with their contemporaries from Infantry and Armor by placing third. Reflecting this concern, the 1966 study devoted an entire chapter to an exploration of comments on officer efficiency reports. “His present limitation is his lack of technical experience with Field Artillery,” decreed one Field Artillery rater. “The exacting requirements and scope of work imposed on a U.S. Army Air Defense Command battalion,” wrote an air defense commander, “requires maximum continuing effort and production by assigned personnel and does not permit time for a slow progressive assumption of responsibilities, especially by an officer of his grade [captain] and term of service.”

“The Artillery Branch Study of 1966 contains some arguments for separating Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery that are based on doctrinal considerations,” said Lt. Col. Thomas E. Christianson, then the U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery command historian. “However, the tone of the report suggests that the desire to make Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery officers more competitive with their contemporaries was paramount in the decision to separate Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery.”

Labeling the years of integration as detrimental to both Field and Air Defense Artillery, the authors of the study called for forming two separate branches. Having built up a head of steam, the move toward separation gained impetus. In 1967, the Department of the Army decided to separate advanced courses for Air Defense and Field Artillery. This decision was followed by the final decision to separate the branches and, in June 1968, the separation was established by DA General Order No. 25.

The immediate problem facing the Army was to identify which officers were to be in Air Defense Artillery and which in Field Artillery. The Artillery Branch Career Management Office conducted a comprehensive survey of officers’ files, in the process considering personal preference. Each of the 25,000 files and the officers they represented were individually classified as either Air Defense Artillery or Field Artillery.

Meanwhile, a separate office was established for the career management of Air Defense Artillery officers below the grade of colonel within the Officer Personnel Directorate, Office of Personnel Operations, Department of the Army. Col. Joseph C. Fimiani was selected to head the newly established office. It managed the records of 7,000 officers and warrant officers when it opened for business on Dec. 1, 1968. The Enlisted Personnel Directorate, Office of Personnel Operations, Department of the Army, continued to guide the careers of noncommissioned officers and enlisted Soldiers assigned to the new branch.

Many talented and visionary officers with a grasp of, or at least an intuition for, the evolving nature of warfare immediately volunteered for the new branch. “I chose Air Defense Artillery,” said Tate, “because my experience was all ADA, to include just having completed a tour in Vietnam with Hawk. Also, my father was Coast Artillery and the AAA connection had interested me in the business. Air Defense Artillery was, and is, more progressive, interesting and dynamic than Field Artillery.”

Air Defense Artillery was somewhat at a disadvantage in rallying officers to its banner. The branch’s main drawback was that the handwriting was already on the wall for the Army Air Defense Command (ARADCOM), headquartered at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo. ARADCOM had led an uneasy existence since its creation in 1950, then and always under the operational control of the Air Force. Its organizational pride was high during the 1950s when Americans nervously scanned the skies for Soviet bombers, dug bomb shelters and relied on the Nike missile sites that encircled the nation’s major cities to save them from nuclear’ disaster. Then intercontinental ballistic missiles, which the Nikes could not counter, replaced long-range bombers as the chief threat, and ARADCOM’s days were numbered.

In 1974, ARADCOM was dissolved, leaving but one Nike site in the continental United States. At least eight colonel and six general officer slots were gone forever. Many artillerymen, careerists worried about future promotional opportunities, apparently anticipated ARADCOM’s demise. When the branches were separated, they besieged the Military Personnel Center with petitions opting for Field Artillery.

Another part of the problem was that, in their efforts to promote their own branch, Field Artillery officers in positions to influence future lieutenants frequently bad-mouthed Air Defense Artillery. For example, tactical officers at Fort Sill’s Robinson Barracks, then home of the Artillery Officer Candidate School, told members of Field Artillery Officer Candidate School Class 1-69 they were special because they were the first class to pin on the crossed cannons instead of the crossed cannons and missile insignia that now belonged solely to Air Defense Artillery. The implication was that the new branch was a haven for noncombatants, and candidates who put Air Defense Artillery on their personal preference sheets for future assignments were looking for a way out of Vietnam.

Most air defense assets, it is true, remained in Germany, Korea or the United States, but Hawk batteries were deployed in Vietnam. And news that they were noncombatants would have come as a shock to the M-42 Duster and Quad .50-caliber machine gun crews who were continuously and often heroically engaged with the enemy in some of the war’s most savage fighting. But the stigma, however unfairly applied, plagued the new branch for nearly two decades, handicapping it in the intraservice recruiting wars until a renaissance of high-tech ADA weapons, changing threat scenarios and the “Scudbusters” of Operation Desert Storm gave the branch an altogether different image.

The first branch chief, Maj. Gen. George V. Underwood, went so far as to write a personal letter to all commissioned officers in air defense assignments, prophesying a bright ADA future and pleading with them to stay where they were. This had some effect, but in the end, the assignments desks had to categorically reject bids to go Field Artillery from officers with appreciable ADA experience. Otherwise, there would not have been sufficient talent to man the new branch.

None of this dampened the enthusiasm of the Soldiers who were determined to build their careers in Air Defense Artillery. “New and eager, proud and proficient, the new Air Defense Artillery Branch comes into the Army as a combat arm with more than 7,000 officers and warrant officers on its rolls,” wrote Lt. Col. Federick C. Dahlquist and Maj. David G. Sanford in an article they prepared while assigned to Air Defense Artillery Branch, Office of Personnel Operations. “With a link to its Coast Artillery heritage, the new branch will continue to perform its ever-alert mission of first-line defense of the nation at home and abroad.

“Today the Air Defense Artillery Branch can look to the career development of its officers with a great deal of anticipation and enthusiasm,” they added.

“Today’s challenge is the continued employment of Nike Hercules and Hawk weapons in CONUS and in other critical defenses throughout the free world; the combat usage of the twin 40mm, self-propelled gun M-42 in Vietnam and the deployment of Chaparral and Vulcan weapon systems,” they continued. “Sentinel and SAM-D [Patriot] are tomorrow’s challenge. The quality and quantity of effort that will be demanded by these latest weapon systems are but a continuation of the demand for high quality and outstanding leadership demanded of air defense artillerymen in the past.

“The future, then, is unlimited for the Air Defense Artillery Branch,” they concluded. “Its personnel can walk tall with the knowledge that their branch will lead the way in the field of missilery for the Army, and that they are members of an elite group.”

In retrospect, one wonders if the optimism of Soldiers who rejoiced in the birth of Air Defense Artillery would have burned as brightly had they a fuller knowledge of the trials and tribulations that lay immediately ahead: disillusionment and abandonment in Vietnam, the “hollow” Army of the 1970s, the task of rebuilding the all-volunteer force and the challenge of reshaping and rearming Air Defense Artillery to meet the ever-evolving threat. However, events were to prove their confidence in themselves and the branch well placed.

“Throughout its history as an independent combat arms branch, Air Defense Artillery has proven highly adaptive to change, continuously reinventing and rearming itself to maintain relevancy in times of rapid changes in roles and missions,” said Lt. Col. Joseph P. DeAntona, the director, Office Chief of Air Defense Artillery, U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery School, in 2004. “As we near the 36th anniversary of the branch’s creation, Air Defense Artillery is restructuring and rearming itself to defeat the 21st century’s threat.”

“During my recent visits with air defense Soldiers, I’ve been exposed to the perception that ADA may be a dying branch,” DeAntona continued. “Most of this perception is brought on by the fact that we’re transforming our branch to meet the future air and missile threat. While, in the short term, we will inactivate several divisional Air and Missile Defense units, our branch’s roles and missions in the maneuver force and at the joint level are actually expanding. AMD Soldiers will serve in every Unit of Action and every Unit of Employment the Army fields as it transforms to the future force.”

“Similarly, AMD Soldiers are finding new opportunities throughout the expanding Space and Missile Defense arena,” DeAntona added.

“As you can see, ADA is actually growing and a vital part of Army Transformation,” he concluded. “It will emerge from Army Transformation as a “enhanced” rather than “diminished” combat arm.”



www.bliss.army.mil	Published for the Fort Bliss/El Paso, Texas Community	July 8 , 2004

<map name="boxmap-b4"> <area shape="rect" coords="0, 589, 120, 600" href="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm/privacy-policy.html?o=1" > <area coords="0,0,10000,10000" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=&creative=92501&camp=8117&link_code=dl1&path=subst/misc/amazon-cobrand-cc/v3/marketing-from-associates-step1.html/ref%3Db1_assoc_29" > </map>	ADA changes to keep pace with changing battlefield Blair Case Special to The Monitor This is the third in a series of articles chronicling the evolution of the air defense artillery branch. Vietnam emphasized the need for separation by taxing the Artillery and Guided Missile School’s ability to crank out officers for the firebases of Southeast Asia while concurrently maintaining free world air defense artillery employment. At the direction of the Commanding General, Continental Army Command, the Artillery and Guided Missile School and the Air Defense School explored the desirability of dividing the artillery into two branches. Officer personnel policies and their effect upon artillery combat operations in Vietnam, as well as the responsiveness of the Artillery Officer Corps to meet future military requirements, were explored and evaluated. The Army recognized that a growing division of doctrine, mission, training, equipment and techniques were evolving within the Artillery Branch as a result of the scientific advances within the military. This diversion of interest required a manpower pool with specialized characteristics. The Army concluded that two career branches could provide an improved response for the existing dual mission of the Artillery Branch and could better meet the anticipated professional requirements of future weapon systems while saving men and money. In line with this, the authors of the Artillery Branch Study of 1966 concluded that integrated training “spawned mediocrity.” The report cited “strong comments from commanders against assigning air defense officers to Field Artillery units in Vietnam since they have considerable difficulty in fulfilling Field Artillery officer responsibilities,” incidents in which air defense officers assigned to Field Artillery fire direction centers were involved in friendly fire incidents and evidence that Field Artillery officers assigned to air defense units were slow to master the intricacies of air defense systems. A major problem was that the one-year tour of duty in Vietnam left little time for on-the-job training. Field Artillery commanders in Vietnam complained that they did not have the time to train an air defense artilleryman to be competent in Field Artillery. “A Field Artillery outfit in combat can absorb only a limited number of officers who do not have a thorough knowledge of what it takes to get cannon–balls on the target,” said one Field Artillery commander. “The truth of this comment is amplified by the one-year tour here in Vietnam. There is little or no fat in the TOES; everyone has a job to do and there is little room for inexperienced understudies.” Another Field Artillery officer complained that one air defense major he assigned as a field artillery battalion executive officer “took the attitude that he was qualified for a far more sophisticated weapon system and it was beneath him to dirty his hands with popguns, and furthermore, he did not know a thing about Field Artillery and wondered how he could be expected to learn all this new stuff in just 13 months.” But air defense commanders expressed an equally dim view of branch integration, with its requisite for cross training and cross assignments, and argued that they also needed “officers who could hit the ground running.” “The assignment to this command of an officer whose training and experience are limited to Field Artillery does affect the operational efficiency of the unit to which he is assigned,” observed the commander of U.S. Army Air Defense Command. “The limited introduction to air defense materiel, tactics and techniques of operation presented to this officer during the Artillery Career Course does not provide him with sufficient knowledge or background to become an effective member of the team,” another air defense unit commander stated. “Detailed knowledge of his weapons is essential for any unit commander. In the case of an air defense battery commander, the complexity and sophistication of his materiel is such that it cannot be mastered quickly and easily.” However, anyone reading the Artillery Branch Study of 1966 cannot help but be struck by the perception that its authors, judging by the preponderance of data they devoted to career issues, seem to have viewed branch integration’s adverse effects on officer efficiency ratings and selections for promotion as a more compelling argument for separation than integration’s impact on unit readiness. By mid-1966, it was clear to the chief of the Artillery Branch, and just about everybody else, that all was not well with artillery officers’ career progressions. On all the barometers of career success, including promotion lists and selection to senior service colleges, Artillery officers showed a lack of competitiveness with their contemporaries from Infantry and Armor by placing third. Reflecting this concern, the 1966 study devoted an entire chapter to an exploration of comments on officer efficiency reports. “His present limitation is his lack of technical experience with Field Artillery,” decreed one Field Artillery rater. “The exacting requirements and scope of work imposed on a U.S. Army Air Defense Command battalion,” wrote an air defense commander, “requires maximum continuing effort and production by assigned personnel and does not permit time for a slow progressive assumption of responsibilities, especially by an officer of his grade [captain] and term of service.” “The Artillery Branch Study of 1966 contains some arguments for separating Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery that are based on doctrinal considerations,” said Lt. Col. Thomas E. Christianson, then the U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery command historian. “However, the tone of the report suggests that the desire to make Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery officers more competitive with their contemporaries was paramount in the decision to separate Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery.” Labeling the years of integration as detrimental to both Field and Air Defense Artillery, the authors of the study called for forming two separate branches. Having built up a head of steam, the move toward separation gained impetus. In 1967, the Department of the Army decided to separate advanced courses for Air Defense and Field Artillery. This decision was followed by the final decision to separate the branches and, in June 1968, the separation was established by DA General Order No. 25. The immediate problem facing the Army was to identify which officers were to be in Air Defense Artillery and which in Field Artillery. The Artillery Branch Career Management Office conducted a comprehensive survey of officers’ files, in the process considering personal preference. Each of the 25,000 files and the officers they represented were individually classified as either Air Defense Artillery or Field Artillery. Meanwhile, a separate office was established for the career management of Air Defense Artillery officers below the grade of colonel within the Officer Personnel Directorate, Office of Personnel Operations, Department of the Army. Col. Joseph C. Fimiani was selected to head the newly established office. It managed the records of 7,000 officers and warrant officers when it opened for business on Dec. 1, 1968. The Enlisted Personnel Directorate, Office of Personnel Operations, Department of the Army, continued to guide the careers of noncommissioned officers and enlisted Soldiers assigned to the new branch. Many talented and visionary officers with a grasp of, or at least an intuition for, the evolving nature of warfare immediately volunteered for the new branch. “I chose Air Defense Artillery,” said Tate, “because my experience was all ADA, to include just having completed a tour in Vietnam with Hawk. Also, my father was Coast Artillery and the AAA connection had interested me in the business. Air Defense Artillery was, and is, more progressive, interesting and dynamic than Field Artillery.” Air Defense Artillery was somewhat at a disadvantage in rallying officers to its banner. The branch’s main drawback was that the handwriting was already on the wall for the Army Air Defense Command (ARADCOM), headquartered at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo. ARADCOM had led an uneasy existence since its creation in 1950, then and always under the operational control of the Air Force. Its organizational pride was high during the 1950s when Americans nervously scanned the skies for Soviet bombers, dug bomb shelters and relied on the Nike missile sites that encircled the nation’s major cities to save them from nuclear’ disaster. Then intercontinental ballistic missiles, which the Nikes could not counter, replaced long-range bombers as the chief threat, and ARADCOM’s days were numbered. In 1974, ARADCOM was dissolved, leaving but one Nike site in the continental United States. At least eight colonel and six general officer slots were gone forever. Many artillerymen, careerists worried about future promotional opportunities, apparently anticipated ARADCOM’s demise. When the branches were separated, they besieged the Military Personnel Center with petitions opting for Field Artillery. Another part of the problem was that, in their efforts to promote their own branch, Field Artillery officers in positions to influence future lieutenants frequently bad-mouthed Air Defense Artillery. For example, tactical officers at Fort Sill’s Robinson Barracks, then home of the Artillery Officer Candidate School, told members of Field Artillery Officer Candidate School Class 1-69 they were special because they were the first class to pin on the crossed cannons instead of the crossed cannons and missile insignia that now belonged solely to Air Defense Artillery. The implication was that the new branch was a haven for noncombatants, and candidates who put Air Defense Artillery on their personal preference sheets for future assignments were looking for a way out of Vietnam. Most air defense assets, it is true, remained in Germany, Korea or the United States, but Hawk batteries were deployed in Vietnam. And news that they were noncombatants would have come as a shock to the M-42 Duster and Quad .50-caliber machine gun crews who were continuously and often heroically engaged with the enemy in some of the war’s most savage fighting. But the stigma, however unfairly applied, plagued the new branch for nearly two decades, handicapping it in the intraservice recruiting wars until a renaissance of high-tech ADA weapons, changing threat scenarios and the “Scudbusters” of Operation Desert Storm gave the branch an altogether different image. The first branch chief, Maj. Gen. George V. Underwood, went so far as to write a personal letter to all commissioned officers in air defense assignments, prophesying a bright ADA future and pleading with them to stay where they were. This had some effect, but in the end, the assignments desks had to categorically reject bids to go Field Artillery from officers with appreciable ADA experience. Otherwise, there would not have been sufficient talent to man the new branch. None of this dampened the enthusiasm of the Soldiers who were determined to build their careers in Air Defense Artillery. “New and eager, proud and proficient, the new Air Defense Artillery Branch comes into the Army as a combat arm with more than 7,000 officers and warrant officers on its rolls,” wrote Lt. Col. Federick C. Dahlquist and Maj. David G. Sanford in an article they prepared while assigned to Air Defense Artillery Branch, Office of Personnel Operations. “With a link to its Coast Artillery heritage, the new branch will continue to perform its ever-alert mission of first-line defense of the nation at home and abroad. “Today the Air Defense Artillery Branch can look to the career development of its officers with a great deal of anticipation and enthusiasm,” they added. “Today’s challenge is the continued employment of Nike Hercules and Hawk weapons in CONUS and in other critical defenses throughout the free world; the combat usage of the twin 40mm, self-propelled gun M-42 in Vietnam and the deployment of Chaparral and Vulcan weapon systems,” they continued. “Sentinel and SAM-D [Patriot] are tomorrow’s challenge. The quality and quantity of effort that will be demanded by these latest weapon systems are but a continuation of the demand for high quality and outstanding leadership demanded of air defense artillerymen in the past. “The future, then, is unlimited for the Air Defense Artillery Branch,” they concluded. “Its personnel can walk tall with the knowledge that their branch will lead the way in the field of missilery for the Army, and that they are members of an elite group.” In retrospect, one wonders if the optimism of Soldiers who rejoiced in the birth of Air Defense Artillery would have burned as brightly had they a fuller knowledge of the trials and tribulations that lay immediately ahead: disillusionment and abandonment in Vietnam, the “hollow” Army of the 1970s, the task of rebuilding the all-volunteer force and the challenge of reshaping and rearming Air Defense Artillery to meet the ever-evolving threat. However, events were to prove their confidence in themselves and the branch well placed. “Throughout its history as an independent combat arms branch, Air Defense Artillery has proven highly adaptive to change, continuously reinventing and rearming itself to maintain relevancy in times of rapid changes in roles and missions,” said Lt. Col. Joseph P. DeAntona, the director, Office Chief of Air Defense Artillery, U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery School, in 2004. “As we near the 36th anniversary of the branch’s creation, Air Defense Artillery is restructuring and rearming itself to defeat the 21st century’s threat.” “During my recent visits with air defense Soldiers, I’ve been exposed to the perception that ADA may be a dying branch,” DeAntona continued. “Most of this perception is brought on by the fact that we’re transforming our branch to meet the future air and missile threat. While, in the short term, we will inactivate several divisional Air and Missile Defense units, our branch’s roles and missions in the maneuver force and at the joint level are actually expanding. AMD Soldiers will serve in every Unit of Action and every Unit of Employment the Army fields as it transforms to the future force.” “Similarly, AMD Soldiers are finding new opportunities throughout the expanding Space and Missile Defense arena,” DeAntona added. “As you can see, ADA is actually growing and a vital part of Army Transformation,” he concluded. “It will emerge from Army Transformation as a “enhanced” rather than “diminished” combat arm.”