Army 2020 in detail: Royal Artillery

Previous parts:

1 - Force Troops Command and Royal Engineers

2 – Royal Signals

3 - Royal Artillery

The following tables show the intended restructuring that the regular regiments of the Royal Artillery are to undergo as part of Army 2020. The information dates back to December 2012, and reports on the shape of the force as decided in September 2012. A number of changes had already taken place by that point, with some of the batteries of the disbanded 40th Regiment RA having been re-subordinated to other regiments. The changes outlined in the tables give the final intended Army 2020 structure of the Royal Artillery.

Despite the time that has passed, the information should still be valid in its entirety. Several of the changes outlined in the tables have already happened, others are underway. The fate of 29 Commando Royal Artillery should include the survival of all its batteries, but with a rather savage cutback in manpower: the three gun batteries seem to only line 12 guns in total, or four guns each, down from a normal figure of six. The regiment, according to a note from the commander, had been asked to modify its ORBAT to account for a reduction in manpower going as far up as 20%. The effect of the cut, however, was somehow softened by the uncomfortable truth that the regiment already was understrenght, so the number of redundancies was kept to a minimum.

For a long while, 148 Battery sat on the edge, about to be removed from the ORBAT, but it was eventually saved, thanks to the resistance put up by Royal Marines command and Navy HQ.

Possible further changes beyond those outlined here might come in the training regiment and in the various batteries employed in the training role as the Royal Artillery plans out the future.

The restructuring of 12 Royal Artillery regiment appears confirmed by the Force Troops Command document, which confirms that there will be three Stormer HVM batteries, one aligned with each of the armoured infantry brigades. The third battery on Stormer will be obtained by the re-roling of the current HQ Bty. A new battery identity, coming out of suspended animation, goes to the new HQ for the regiment.

16 Regiment Royal Artillery restructures on four Rapier batteries, and the two regiments share 42 Battery as an air defence support element.

49 Battery remains independent, as the user of the LEAPP system.

The Reserve will no longer supply Rapier formations, but 106 RA will instead deliver two reserve Stormer HVM (295 and 457 Bty) batteries and one LML battery (265 Bty).

Of particular interest is the evolution of the UAS force, which is already switching away from its current campaign posture, meant to support the enduring operations in Afghanistan, to a new structure aligned to the Army’s new shape.

This probably means that at least one battery will lose its “full spectrum” capability to focus only on mini-UAVs. Currently, the batteries are structured to include T-Hawk detachments for the support to EOD work in the Talisman convoys; Desert Hawk III detachments in support of both bases and mobile forces; and Hermes 450 task lines.

The force continues to support operation Herrick, and is also working towards consolidating in Larkhill, with 47 Regiment transferring from its current home in Thorney Island. 47 Regiment RA will move from Thorney Island to Larkhill in the summer, between June and July. 43 Battery is indeed already based in Roberts Barracks, Larkhill, and the rest is to gradually follow.

10 Bty, 47 Regiment also is about to deploy to Afghanistan for Herrick 20, and it seems that they will bring with them one Watchkeeper task line, for the first ever operational use of the new tactical UAS. In the meanwhile, the UAS personnel have seen their tours sized at four months, which means that personnel from the two regiments is rotated in and out of theatre regardless of the battery that is deployed in that specific moment. Personnel rotate under directions coming from the central management, and it is thus pretty normal to end up de-linked from the parent battery for periods of time.

It is very reassuring to see that the UAV force made up by 47 and 32 Regiments will express a powerful capability, spread over six “flying” batteries of unmanned air systems, plus two HQ batteries and a shared support battery.

Three UAS batteries will be aligned with the reaction force armoured infantry brigades, and are likely to retain the full spectrum structure. They will get Warthog vehicles modified to act as carriers for the Desert Hawk III detachments, and they will also have Viking vehicles carrying the ground tactical node of the Watchkeeper system.

Two more support the Adaptable Force, and hopefully will maintain the full-sprectrum structure as well. 21 (Gibraltar 1779-83) Battery, in the Very High Readiness air assault role appears likely to shift to a mini-UAV only role, more realistic to deploy in earnest, possibly from the air and with as little logistical footprint as possible, although I can’t confirm this at present. The battery so continues to be directly aligned with 16 Air Assault brigade, for which it once provided air defence with the Starstreak LML missile system. The air assault, very high readiness air defence role has now moved out to 12 (Minden) Battery in 12 Regiment, instead. 

The Integrated UAS Batteries as shaped by the Afghanistan experience. Note to the equipment detail: Desert Hawk III and T-Hawk are both being brought into core budget. It is almost certain that Black Hornet will also be retained. Black Hornet is the only army UAS that is employed by infantry instead of RA specialists.

 

Another interesting element is the STA force, 5 Regiment RA. The regiment is to have its batteries changed to align them to the Reaction Force. One battery looks set to be “lighter” than the others, as 53 Bty is to be configured to provide STA support to 16 Air Assault Brigade in the very high readiness air assault role. It is probable that the battery will bear greater similitude with the Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron of 30 Commando IX than to the other three STA batteries of 5 RA, which will be heavier and include a full range of capabilities to support the three armoured infantry brigades.

These batteries will employ MAMBA, as well as the lightweight counter mortar radar, and the plan appears to include the retention of some of the CORTEZ base-ISTAR equipment, including the large surveillance aerostats. I read time ago that Royal Artillery and RAF Regiment were collaborating on base-ISTAR equipment, including the aerostats, and it makes a lot of sense: it would be very interesting to get fresher and more detailed information about this.

Unfortunately, there won’t be five “ready-to-go” STA batteries with the same, complete range of capabilities, which puts another problem on the planning schedule for a possible future enduring operation, and unfortunately the Adaptable Force misses out completely on having a STA formation aligned with its brigades. Support for training and for future deployments will thus present some serious challenges, in a repeat of the problem already evidenced in ICS support.

There used to be two reserve batteries in the STA role, but it appears that there will be none under Army 2020, as the existing batteries are converting to GMLRS.

The Honourable Artillery Company remains, however, on three squadrons providing additional covert special observation patrols for the reinforcement of 4/73 Sphinx battery.

It is also finally confirmed that the intended structure of the Adaptable Force Artillery Regiments, 3^rd RHA and 4^th RA, includes only two Light Gun batteries, and a doubled complement of Fire Support Teams, in two (three, even, in 4^th Regiment) TAC batteries instead of the canonic one. It seems clear that the idea is that regulars are better employed in the demanding FST role, while reserves from the paired regiment can provide additional guns. 3^rd RHA is paired with 105 RA, while 4^th RA is paired with 103 RA. It seems to remain the plan that, for reasons of geographical convenience, 3^rd RHA will also support 101 RA, the Reserve GMLRS regiment, despite the different roles and equipment of the two units. 

Each of the two Reserve light gun regiments has four gun batteries. 

The Royal Artillery reserve regiments under Army 2020

 

The changes to the Air Assault artillery regiment, 7^th Royal Horse Artillery, have taken place as planned, and the remaining gun batteries have taken up the equipment and role of the gone Aviation TAC Gp Battery, bringing it into smaller but full-capability packages that can rotate in support of the airborne task force at high readiness.

The structure of the Reaction Force artillery regiments is also confirmed, with three AS-90 batteries supported by a GMLRS (and Exactor) precision fire battery.

The future will tell if the Fire Shadow loitering ammunition will find a long-term place in the Army beyond the 39 Regiment’s Troop which has taken it for evaluation and trials. 

The Infantry of Army 2020

This is the first post of what could become a series for which i invite any reader interested in collaborating to step forwards and contact me. I will welcome suggestions, information and thoughts at the same way. This article is intended both as a take on the always actual, still-evolving Army 2020 situation and as a kick-start for what will hopefully become a wider reasoning over the future of the british Infantry in the modern scenarios.

Some Written Answers in Parliament in the last month and in June are painting a possibly quite depressing picture for the future of british Infantry battalions, which are possibly set for a marked downsizing as part of Army 2020 restructuring.

On 13 July 2012, in fact, minister Nick Harvey, answering to a question about the future of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, dispelled the myth, created by The Telegraph, that the surviving Scottish battalions would have their establishment downsized to around 400 or 450 in exchange for their survival. This, both fortunately and unsurprisingly, is not the case, as creating such small battalions, so much smaller and different from the others within the army would have been a severely damaging move.

Harvey makes clear that the establishment of each battalion will in future depend solely from the role to which it is assigned and added that, under Army 2020:

Any battalions that are in the Armoured Infantry role will have a full unit establishment of 729 personnel;

Any battalions that are in the Mechanised (Heavy Protected Mobile) Infantry role will have a full unit establishment of 709 personnel;

Any battalions that are in the Light Protected Mobile Infantry role will have a full unit establishment of 581 personnel;

Any battalions that are in the Light Infantry role will have a full unit establishment of 561 personnel;

[Official Report, Column 415W]

The Light Protected Mobile Infantry role is a novelty of Army 2020, represented by 6 infantry battalions which will be mounted on Foxhound vehicles, while the other three roles all already exist, even if the 3 Mechanized Infantry Battalions (currently 4^th Rifles, 1^st Royal Anglian and 1^st Lancs) will have their vehicle changed as part of Army 2020 from FV430 MK3 Bulldog (now) to FRES UV (not earlier than 2022, possibly around 2025) with the Mastiff vehicle, brought into Core Defence budget after Afghanistan as interim solution.

The Armored Infantry battalions will go down to 6, but will continue to work on Warrior vehicles, although modified under the Warrior Capability Sustainment Programme, with first deliveries of the upgraded IFVs in 2018, IOC in 2020 with an Armoured Company fully operative and deliveries completed by 2022.

Nick Harvey fails to provide a Full Unit Establishment for Air Assault battalions, which as part of Army 2020 might go down to just 2 (from four until now: 2 and 3 PARA plus 1^st Royal Irish and 5 SCOTS). Currently, the full establishment for such battalions should be 582 all ranks, all trades.

According to the data I’ve managed to collate, the new establishment present some differences with the current ones, and most of these differences are not good ones.

According to Charles Heyman’s “The British Army Guide 2012 – 2013”, and ArmedForces.co.uk, the full unit establishment of a current armoured infantry battalion is 741, so that, if data is correct, Army 2020 implies a reduction of 12 men. At the moment, there’s no telling how this might be achieved, as there is not an evident source for the reduction in manpower (as would have been the case if, for example, the Warrior upgrade had walked down the road of Overhead Remote Weapon Stations and reduced the turret crew of Warrior from 2 to 1). One possibility is a reduction in the strength of the REME Light Aid Detachment, but this is only a wild guess.

With the same source of data about the current battalions, it seems the 3 Mechanized Infantry Battalions are getting a very significant uplift in manpower, instead, from 667 to 709, hopefully with the increase made up as much as possible by fighting troops. Might have to do with the fact that a Mastiff 2 or 3 can take up to 12 men aboard, even though normally it is described as a “2 + 8” vehicle which, in the case, would provide no evident justification for the manpower increase, since Bulldog is a 2 + 8 vehicle itself.

As said before, the Light Protected role is new, so there is no comparison to be made. One consideration to be made is how the Light Protected battalion will work, and how much of its strength will effectively be mounted in Foxhound vehicles and protected. How will it all be arranged? Foxhound is a 2 + 4 vehicle, and we could reasonably assume that the driver at least won’t count as a Dismount, while the commander perhaps will.

This would open the door to a fireteam of 5 instead of 4 men, but even if the Section stays 8-strong, there will be a need for 2 Foxhounds for each Section. That would mean as many as 28 Foxhound vehicles per each Rifle Company.

And numbers at that point do not work, because many more Foxhound vehicles would be needed over and above the 300 on order (even before the toll that Afghanistan will eventually take)[at least 35 for a training fleet] and the provision of drivers would become a problem.

Also, the Foxhound vehicles on order this far are all in the basic patrol variant, while a Battalion would arguably need weapon carriers (so the WMIK variant of Foxhound, or perhaps Jackals), an ambulance, ideally on the same chassis and with the same battlefield mobility (perhaps the Husky ambulance variant can be used in the short term, assuming that Husky is brought into Core post Afghanistan), a command post and so along.

Of course, this problem would not exist if substantial follow-on orders for more Foxhounds (in more variants) were to arrive, but for quite obvious reasons I find it hard to be that optimist.

Another reason not to be optimist is the comparison of the establishment of the Light Protected and Light Role infantry battalions: just 20 men of difference suggest that there won’t be that many vehicles, possibly, as the need for drivers and maintenance would suggest a much higher figure otherwise.

It will be very interesting to see how these Light Protected Mobility Battalions are actually organized: it might come down to having the capability of moving one Rifle Company in Foxhounds, for the look of it, and I frankly hope in something better than that.

But the real worrying part is the Light Role battalion itself, because a Full Establishment of 561 seems very low. According to the same sources named earlier, currently a Light Role infantry battalion full establishment is 630.

That would mean a cull of 69 men from each battalion, likely to imply a significant impact on the fighting force of the battalion, which will be balanced, on paper, by the famous “pairing” with reserve battalions. The Army 2020 document, presenting a force of 14 Light Role regular battalions, seemed to go in the direction of a possible “one to one” pairing, since the TA has exactly 14 Infantry Battalions.     

The Army 2020 document also showed the Foxhound battalions paired up with TA battalions, though: will the Reserve expansion offer room and scope for a further 6 TA infantry battalions? I doubt it for many reasons, mainly for the fact that, was that the case, there would have been an easy solution for government in the delivery of the cuts: the names and badges would be saved by moving into the TA.

Since this has not been done, taking the usual flak connected to the loss of “historic” names, room for optimism is very small.

As you can easily see, there are some very hard questions left in search for an answer. The Telegraph was wrong when it reported that the Scottish battalions would go down to 450 men establishments, but the reduction in manpower might have been enforced army-wide, with the oddity represented by the Mechanized Infantry expansion. 

This, of course, while we wait for better and more accurate data. I have no real reason not to trust the sources quoted earlier, but I’m taking them with some prudence.

However, there is another, indirect element in support of the downsizing fear: a look at the current Establishment.

The Establishment is different from the Full Unit Establishment. FUE is the total strength of the battalion, all-trades, all-ranks.

The Establishment instead is a figure that only comprises those soldiers from the unit’s specific Arm or Corps, excluding any supporting components from other Corps. The Establishment of an infantry battalion, in other words, is the count of the sole Infantry personnel, excluding REME, clerks, cooks and all other figures.

Current Establishment for a Light Role battalion hovers at around 530 men.

For an Armoured Battalion, it goes from 599 to 608, roughly.

For a mechanized battalion it is around 570, and for an Air Assault battalion it is 554.

Assuming, once more, that the figures from “The British Army Guide” are correct, there’s a 132 men difference between Establishment and Full Establishment for Armored Battalions, of which up to 90 are made up by the Light Aid Detachment (REME personnel).

The difference reduces to 97 for a Mechanized battalion (including a smaller REME component).

Some 100 man are the difference in Light Role battalions (a bit high, admittedly, since Light Role should not have that much in terms of supporting elements), reducing to just 28 for an Air Assault battalion.

If  the figures are correct, the Army 2020 Light Role battalion might have an Infantry establishment of just 460 men from the Infantry. This is, obviously, highly undesirable, and goes against operational experience which very much calls for bigger battalions (an expansion to over 700 has been assessed as necessary already long ago).

The US Infantry battalion in an Infantry BCT has a strength of 685 men.    

A Royal Marines Commando battalion full establishment is 692 men all ranks, too, even if the Royal Marines are semi-mechanized, with normally a Wheeled and one tracked (on Viking) “stand-off combat” companies plus 2 Close Combat Companies.

Looking at the strength and ORBAT of the infantry battalions, mainly the Light and Light Protected Mobility ones, will be very important to understand how much compromise the Army has had to accept, and how much damage the infantry’s capability has eventually taken.

I’ll keep my eyes open, as always, to try and catch any other useful information regarding this subject.

At the same time, there are questions we could try and reason about, for coming up with a realistic, desirable design for the infantry battalion.

Questions to be faced include:

-          The Maneuver Support Company is valid in its current form? In Afghanistan it is very often broken down into Fire Support Groups, made up of sections of HMG, MG Sustained Fire, Javelin Anti-Tank, Mortar, Sniper. These sections are organized on the lines of a Platoon and assigned directly to the Rifle Company, giving it the firepower it needs to .

Normally the FSG will use the 60 mm Light Mortar, and the 81 mm mortars will be kept at Battalion level. In some cases, the Maneuver Support Company remains, albeit in a different form, including the RECCE element, a Fire Support Group and a Fire Support Team (the latter being the 6-man team for the direction of Joint Fires, be it mortar, artillery, rocket or an air attack). A Fire Support Team is assigned at Company level on deployment.

Are these “ad hoc” structures indicative of long-term trends?

What and how should be made permanent in the force structure?

-          Mortars and guided ammo. 81 mm forever, or shift towards 120 mm? Is a mortar-cannon the best Fire Support Weapon, combining direct and indirect effect?

-          Fire Support Team: vital direction for the whole range of support fires in a complex, joint environment. Definitely need more, how to integrate them in the force?

-          The Load Carrier. At Platoon level? How many? Manned or unmanned?

-          UAVs for the Infantry, how many, where, for what roles?

And, no doubt, many others.

With a major focus in thinking being the reduction in the weight carried by the soldier out on a mission. Current weight levels are way too high, and a substantial reduction is absolutely necessary.

Other issues include bandwidth and communications, especially in urban areas and C2 on the move, and this brings us straight to another problem closely connected to these: provision of power for all the optics and systems. Which means considering ergonomics of wiring, load carriage, and other issues. 

The graphic shows the organization of the Royal Anglian battlegroup in its deployment in Afghanistan. The restructured Maneuver Support Company, and the Fire Support Groups in which it broke down are well evident. Also, the Fire Support Team at Company level.

A very complex and ample subject, so let’s start thinking.