It’s an OK article but typical narrow focus - probably written by some guy who makes fire extinguishing systems. The army and the Maines are stuck with the Fort Sill mentality: minimal budgets, labor-intensive firing and logistic systems, and solving precision issues with quarter-million-dollar-per-shot (and vulnerable) guided munitions.
The last big solution from Fort Sill was the 50 ton plus Crusader and they’ve been sulking ever since that pig was cancelled.
The future is highly mobile (fire on the move), very precise (advanced fire control, computer-controlled, MET-Sensing) ballistic systems with no gun crews. If the damn thing is hit and burns, you’ve only lost the machine.
The artillery gurus lost out when their existing systems were too heavy and too difficult to support in Afghanistan and the Iraq counterinsurgency. Now artillery is a backwater and the fossils are still teaching ancient history instead of current fire support.
It’s too bad the next war will be so fat paced that we won’t be able to teach new doctrine until it’s been over for a couple of years.