‘The Gunners’ is a colloquialism for The Royal Regiment of Artillery. At over 300 years of age, She is an institutional adolescent, and as befits Her maturation, is suffering an identity crisis.
The discontinuity of the Royal Regiment is a story of weaving and adapting. How equipment is used is much more important than the equipment itself. As a technical arm, we should never say it, but as a tactical arm we know it is true. It can take generations to learn how to use the stuff we have been given (or made) and it is usually that learning that forms the central fable for an Arm.
For The Gunners, all over the world we picked up the call for indirect fire, but the implications of learning what that means took many years of hardship. However that is not the only story we tell ourselves; we have numerous stories, with many diverging threads, but without a focused mythos.
We don’t have a story arc of horses to tracks. Not only is it more complicated than that, but our four legged friends are still useful (and still our friends).
Neither do we have a romantic tale of increased dispersion and trust in the individual dismount - a move from totalitarian Hobbesian Close Order tactics to noble Rousseauian flourishing.1
Nor do we have a narrative of earthly escapism via the medium of sophisticated mounts - launching ourselves from a flowing cascade to toil in isolation above.
But we do have some coves from each of these storytellers, along with some creeks of a few other arms. And they, in turn, borrow something from us.
Flying aircraft for Land forces? I know an Arm that specialises specifically in that now…
Moving great quantities of ammunition? I know an Arm that specialises specifically in that…
Communicating over large distances and completely reliant on those communications to perform your job? I know an Arm that specialises specifically in that…
Identifying enemy forces and interpreting their actions and orders of battle? I know an Arm that specialises specifically in that…
Our fate is to resign ourselves to hiving off2 various kinds of firepower and the adjacent means of its employment. We must enfold the novelty, play with it, and then pass it forward to whatever new Arm we have blossomed, or matured.
There is no neat narrative to St Barbara’s journey. Her river winds and turns, finding every bit of ground that yields, and leaving plenty of Oxbow lakes in Her wake. Each a child of Her course, pregnant with its own possibilities, but each consigned to being but a well of the mother river: forever defined by its beginnings.
An unkind but pervasive frame. For a brace of healthy counters to this attitude, see the threads of Dr Alexander S Burns:
An endearing term from Military Theorist Richard Simpkin.