While the Army has been trying to see farther at least since the Civil War, it is now working to leverage data and unmanned systems to push even deeper into the battlefield, a panel of experts said Dec. 3.

“We’ve been here before. What’s different is the scale and speed,” Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, director of Army Futures Command’s Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team, said during a panel discussion that was part of an Association of the U.S. Army Hot Topic on fires.

During the Civil War, the Army tried to use balloons to see farther, Crooks said. Since the turn of the 20th century, it has looked to aviation to achieve that goal. “We were trying to adapt new technology to try to see farther,” Crooks said. “We’ve had satellite imagery, U-2 flights, Predators. What we’re doing now is trying to leverage these in ways so we can access their data better.”

The panel discussion, titled “Maneuver to Destroy with Fires: Extending Range and Survivability,” highlighted the importance of massing and positioning fires on the battlefield.

“We’ve grown comfortable … saying any sensor, best shooter,” Crooks said. “Once we get access to the data, that’s going to take us from any sensor to all sensors. When we can take and ingest all the data … that allows us to see farther across the electromagnetic spectrum as we ever had before.”

But, Crooks warned, America’s adversaries also have the same capability. “What that means is that we’re always potentially in contact, in ways we may not recognize,” he said. “If we’re always potentially in contact, everything we do must be more deliberately thought out.”

Gen. James Rainey, commanding general of Army Futures Command, often says that the land component matters—and positioning matters, Crooks said. “What we do to position our fires into a position of relative advantage absolutely matters, and why you maneuver to these positions of relative advantage is so we can engage at the maximum possible way,” he said.

Whichever side does that successfully first “allows that commander to shape and gain the initiative and retain the initiative,” Crooks said.

Observing lessons from the fighting in Ukraine, there has been “huge attrition on the battlefield in Europe,” said James Miller, vice president of business development for BAE Systems, who was on the panel with Crooks and retired Lt. Gen. Richard Formica, vice president of CALIBRE Systems.

As industry works with the Army on what it needs, maneuverability and survivability are key, Miller said. In addition to preventing the enemy from “finding you” on the battlefield, survivability is something industry must consider and “how that transforms into requirements for industry to deliver to the Army,” he said.

“We have a real good relationship between industry and the field artillery community and the Army, … to study things together and exchange ideas pretty frequently,” Miller said. “We’ve got to continue that and make sure the investments are going to the right place.”

As the Army prepares for the future battlefield, “we know we have to emplace, we have to fight, we have to displace and we have to resupply much more quickly than we did before,” Crooks said.