Where are the gunners?

“Artillery is the God of war”

—Joseph Stalin

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Happy Thursday everyone. This week I’m picking up another loose end from my Firearm Fail: Pistols series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and following the thread to bring us around the topic of the quote above¹, which is artillery, and its relative absence from film and TV military stories.

Writing about “minutes of angle” in the posts above got me thinking about another way of measuring angles², one which is far more important in the military context. I’m talking about mils. The lack of attention they get in Hollywood is understandable, but also emblematic of a general ignorance about artillery, which is one of the most important arms of any military force. And ultimately, that is my main point today: artillery does not get the attention it deserves from Hollywood screenwriters and we, the viewing public, are poorly served as a result.

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What is a “mil” anyway?

You learn lots of new things when you join the military. How to shoot, how to polish boots, how (and why) to shave a beret. You also learn new ways of doing things you thought you knew how to do. How to iron your shirts (the military way). How to speak to people (the military way). And how to measure a circle (the military way).

Most of us learn in school that a circle consists of 360 degrees. And that’s the end of that. Maybe you came across this other confusing thing called a radian in math(s) class. If you’re anything like me, you just about learned how to use radians in equations but never thought about the reason for using it: I always thought it was mathematical black magic, and largely irrelevant to real-world problems.

What, then, is the military way of measuring a circle? And why does this arise? Well, on Day 1 you get issued with (along with half a ton of other equipment and uniforms) a plastic compass with 6400 ₥ in the circle instead of 360°:

By the time you start navigating mountains in the dark, you’ve gotten used to using these “mils” or ₥ to draw lines on your map and convert these into compass bearings to use on the ground. Before you know it you’re thinking of North as “6400 ₥”, south as “3200 ₥” and so forth. Why not use degrees? At first, you assume it’s just another example of the military being different for the sake of it. After all, there are many normal things that normal people do that you can’t do in the military, such as:

• Putting your hands in your pockets
• Leaving your head uncovered outside
• Calling a rifle a “gun”³

Plus, having to buy a special compass, which is more expensive and harder to find, when your issued one inevitably breaks, makes your life as a trainee more difficult. This, of course, is a good thing from the military’s point of view. It’s only later on in training, when you start doing cool things like calling in mortar fire or sniping, that you learn something else about mils: one mill covers a distance of one metre at one kilometre:

If we know the range to something, mils lets us figure out how big it is, and if we know how big it is, mils lets us get the range. This is really useful for snipers estimating ranges and artillery or mortar spotters calling in adjustments to fire. I never really thought too much about the maths behind it (which is the whole point) until I was an Ordnance nerd. I just thought that there were 6400 mills in a circle, and that a mill was a metre at one  kilometre. Simple, right?

Can we use this to indulge in lazy national stereotypes?

Absolutely. But only because the answer above is not as simple as I, and most soldiers, initially thought. Remember those awful radian things from above? Well, they’ve managed to sneak back via these mils. “Mils” is short for “milliradians” which, as the name suggests, is one thousandth of a radian:

And a radian covers a distance of 1 km at 1 km⁴ (i.e. its own radius, which is where the name comes from), a milliradian covers 1/1000 of this. And a radian is about 57.3°, which means a mil is about 0.0573°, which means that a circle of 360° contains… Well, definitely not a round number of mils. In fact, there’s 6283.3 mils in a circle, but no-one in their right mind would create a measurement system which such an odd number of divisions.

Instead, and this is where our lazy national stereotyping comes in, each country comes up with its own approximation to this perfect milliradian circle:

Stereotypes are fun, but sadly the fastidious Swedes have now also moved to the NATO standard, which I’m sure grates awfully with their artillery professionals in particular. For such a ubiquitous unit of measure, why don’t we ever come across mils in movies or TV?

Why don’t we ever see this in films and TV?

No, of course we don’t want to see filmmakers putting in long expository scenes where characters talk about mills and trigonometry and radians. Even I wouldn’t watch that. My point is that we don’t see artillery in a starring role nearly as often as we ought to, given their importance in war. And because we don’t see the artillery, we miss out on the maps, dial sights, protractors, and compasses which are the tools of their trade.

Sure, we see movie soldiers calling in artillery fire in sticky situations:

However, we’re missing a few things:

• I pity the FOO’: We usually see infanteers (normally the movie protagonists) calling the shots,  rather than an artillery specialist known as a “Forward Observation Officer” (FOO). Although calling in indirect fire⁵ is a skill that anyone (even the infantry) can master, an artillery-trained FOO has more expertise and experience and will do a much better job.
• Hole in one: Hollywood usually skips an important step in the fire mission process, and that’s the adjustment. Hitting the target on the first attempt is rare, especially with a non-artillery unit calling the shots.
• Pen and paper: When we do see soldiers calling in fire, they don’t do a huge amount of paperwork, normally just shouting a rough grid coordinate down the radio. In reality, the gunners will need to know, at a minimum:
  • Where you are
  • Where the target is
  • What the bearing is from you to the target
  • What sort of effect you want to have (there are other options besides pounding them with high explosives, e.g. illumination, smokescreen, or airburst)
• Fire planning: The infantry on the ground calling in fire only represent a small slice (a few milliradians, if you will) of the artillery’s overall responsibility. Artillery batteries⁶ will only be available to support the infantry in ad-hoc requests when their other, more important jobs, have finished. To the infantry soldier on the ground, the enemy right in front of him will always be the most important target. However, you can be sure that the brigade or divisional commander, who will have many batteries of guns under their command, will have higher priority targets and will order their artillery commander to deal with these first. An example of target priorities for the artillery will be something like:
  • Enemy artillery (counter-battery fire—see below)
  • Enemy fuel and ammunition dumps (this can achieve spectacular results, as seen in the Ukraine war in recent years)
  • Roads, railways, and bridges, especially if we are defending and the enemy are advancing
  • Likely concentrations of enemy troops
  • Targets of opportunity, e.g. supporting the infantry in their advance

This last point, fire planning, deserves a little more elaboration. It’s not to say that the infantry are abandoned to their own devices. They will have other means of support, such as from their own mortar platoons⁷. We actually see mortars specifically being used sometimes, which is more realistic:

Normally in all these “calling in fire” scenes, we just see the request and the effect; we don’t see the work that’s happening several kilometres away with the gunners. One great exception to this is a scene from Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan:

Of course there are some inaccuracies with the scene above which I won’t dwell on here⁸, but I would love to see more scenes like the above in films. Let’s see the artillery doing their thing and hustling to rain down hellfire on the enemy. We don’t even need to dwell too much on the firing calculations and range tables, since these are mostly done electronically now. Hollywood could easily build grapping action sequences and dramatic tension around the kind of artillery work which WW1 veterans speak about in the video below:

I was never an artilleryman myself⁹, but I have quite a bit of respect for the service, which is very much (or at least sees itself as) a “thinking man’s” profession. An ordnance colleague of mine who had started out as an artillery officer used to describe himself as “classically trained,” only half ironically. Artillery men and women have to master the science of ballistics and the art of controlling fire; the mechanistic logic of heavy guns and fuzing systems and the attention to detail of sighting systems and aiming markers.

There’s a stereotype, which the artillery themselves love to perpetuate, that they are a coddled elite sitting in the rear with white tablecloths whenever they sit down to eat. This is only half true, since an effective artillery unit needs to constantly be moving their position to avoid “counter-battery fire” from the enemy artillery. As well as that, the job of a FOO is pretty gnarly, requiring the same sets of skills you see in elite reconnaissance units.

Why we don’t see more artillery on screen

It’s definitely the case that artillery are under-represented on screen¹⁰, for such an integral part of military forces. In fact, a gunner I know argues that artillery is the one unique thing which defines an “army”, as opposed to a militia or a gendarmerie. I think you could make a similar argument for main battle tanks or attack helicopters, but otherwise they are correct. In that case, why don’t we see more of them in films and TV?

Part of it is the bias which Hollywood has toward front-line infantry (and, to a lesser extent, cavalry, e.g. Fury). It’s an understandable bias, since these are the forces which close with and kill the enemy, and seeing people (on the “good” and the “bad” side) get shot is an integral part of any action movie. The artillery never (or very rarely) get to see the effects of their actions, so a film about them would either have to leave out this crucial bit of action or else keep cutting to and from the front line disconcertingly, giving the audience an omniscient view which the film’s heroes don’t have.

Another reason, I suspect, is the post 1960s and especially post 1990s predominance of counterinsurgency operations instead of full-on warfighting. Although artillery units deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s and 2010s, their roles were somewhat circumscribed by the constraints of fighting an insurgency. This paper describes the experience of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan a generation prior, where they tried, and failed, to use their artillery-heavy (recall the quote at the top of this article) army force structure to overwhelm the mujahedeen resistance. As Hollywood focused more on Iraq and Afghanistan, there were fewer compelling stories to tell about gunners and their trade.

Conclusion: A challenge to screenwriters

While there might have been good reasons to ignore artillery in film and TV for the last few decades, the post-2022 world has shown us once again the pivotal role that this profession plays in the military. With that, I hope that Hollywood starts to realise that there’s compelling stories to be told about artillery units. They could get around the “action” problem above by splitting the narrative, say between a battery in the rear and a forward observation team in the thick of the action. This way we would get to see the nuts and bolts of how the battery works while also seeing their deadly effect on the ground.

Another source of dramatic tension would be the threat from the “other side’s” artillery. Every time our heroes set up their guns registered them, and carried out their fire missions, it would be a race against time to pack up again and move before the enemy triangulated their position and retaliated. And maybe, if we really wanted to get nerdy about it, we could see how Russian forces and NATO-aligned forces calculate their angles differently… but I won’t hold out hope for that!

That’s all for this week folks, I hope you enjoyed this walk down the garden path of trigonometry and military nerdishness to end up with this homage to the artillery: maybe I should have been an artillery officer after all (although that’s sacrilege to say among cavalrymen, and I will make a similar post fawning over the cavalry some day). Please let me know what you think in the comments below. Are there any classic artillery movies which I need to put on my list? Would you like to see more artillery on screen, or would it be far duller than I’m making it out to be? Maybe you prefer to have your gunners off screen, coming into play only when a grizzled infanteer in a foxhole calls in some heavy rain? Let me know! And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe using the button below so that you’ll never miss a post. Thanks, as always, for reading. Until next week!

Featured Image: Platoon, Orion Pictures (1986)

1. And for the record, I wouldn’t normally be the greatest fan of Joe Stalin, but he was spot-on here. ↩︎
2. Yes, that’s how my sad little mind works. ↩︎
3. A “gun” is an artillery piece, aptly enough for today’s post. ↩︎
4. Naturally, it’s not quite as simple as this. The radian covers an arc whose length is equal to the radius, which is slightly different from the straight line distance between two points that are one radian apart. Thankfully, when we get to very small angles such as milliradians, the difference between the length of the arc and the length of the straight line are negligible. ↩︎
5. A catch-all term for artillery and mortar supporting fire. In short, “indirect” fire means that the gunner can’t see the target, whereas “direct” fire, e.g. in a tank, means that the gunner can see the target. ↩︎
6. A battery is the lowest level of organisation of an artillery unit, and normally consists of six guns. It is equivalent in hierarchical terms to an infantry company or cavalry squadron. ↩︎
7. A mortar has a shorter barrel and points up at a steeper angle. It fires bombs on high arcs to land near-vertically on the enemy. An artillery howitzer fires on a flatter trajectory (but still “indirect”, see above). Some heavy mortars are properly classified as artillery weapons, and are used as part of an overall operational plan. Lighter mortars are more likely to belong to the infantry, and are used in more tactical roles to support infantry troops. ↩︎
8. But I will here, since you have the option to ignore these notes. For starters, and this is probably excusable for dramatic purposes, we don’t see the various chains in the link from the soldier calling in “this is 4-2, heavy contact.” to whomever is calling in the fire mission over the radio. They are calling in a battery fire mission (remember, a battery is six guns), but the order only gets sent to one gun. Then there’s the “standby for coordinates,” but what we get instead is a range and a bearing. Fine, but we need to know where the observer is for those two pieces of information to make any sense. We need the co-ordinates, the range, and the bearing. Then someone (an officer on or near the gun line) needs to crunch the numbers (nowadays this is done with a handheld calculator) and convert the co-ordinate, range, and bearing from the observer to the target into a bearing from the gun, an elevation, and a charge (how much propellant to put behind the shell). This is the information the gun crew needs to do their job. ↩︎
9. I started off my career as a dashing cavalry officer before moving to the ordnance corps. ↩︎
10. If you want some qualitative indication of this, go to the ever-informative Internet Movie Firearms Database and compare the number of film entries for any of the assault rifles on this list with the number of entries for the most popular artillery pieces on this list. ↩︎