Reviewed by: The Organizational History of Field Artillery, 1775–2003 David T. Zabecki The Organizational History of Field Artillery, 1775–2003. By Janice E. McKenney. Washington: Center of Military History, 2007. ISBN 978-0-16-077155-6. Tables. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xi, 394. The two principal elements of ground combat power are fire and maneuver, and field artillery is the primary source of the former. Yet, artillery has always received relatively short shrift from historians and popular military writers because of its highly technical nature. Compared to the seemingly more dynamic and glamorous maneuver branches—infantry, cavalry, armor, and more recently aviation—artillery is all too often ignored as being some indecipherable combination of black magic and arithmetic. Janice McKenney’s study of the evolution on the U.S. Army’s Field Artillery branch is long overdue. Until now, most of the key information on how and why American artillery was organized, manned, and equipped the way it was over the course of its history could only be pulled piecemeal from some two dozen key sources, starting with William E. Birkhimer’s standard work, Historical Sketch of the Organization, Administration, Materiel, and Tactics of the Artillery, United States Army, first published in 1884. McKenney’s book does retrace some of the same ground covered in Boyd L. Dastrup’s King of Battle: A Branch History of the U.S. Army’s Field Artillery, published by the Center for Military History in 1993. But while Dastrup’s work focuses almost exclusively on the field artillery since colonial times and includes a good amount of operational history, McKenney concentrates more narrowly and in greater depth on the “structure, strength, disposition, materiel, and technical and tactical doctrine of artillery in the U.S. Army.” McKenney’s study also includes both field and coast artillery until the separation of the two branches in the early twentieth century, and then on field artillery separately until 2003. Not being an operational history, this book is not exactly a page-turner, nor is it intended to be. It is an invaluable reference that other historians and serious military students will use in the future when seeking information to help explain how the field artillery fit into the larger U.S. Army and how it connected to and operated in support of the other branches at any given point in time. [End Page 1283] Well researched and clearly written, McKenney’s book does a superb job of explaining how evolving complex technology and doctrine interacted with each other and with the economic and political constraints of any given period to produce the resulting organizational structure. Throughout the volume she makes only one or two errors when discussing highly technical points. In the description on page 152 of the advances in fire direction procedures between the two World Wars, for example, she gives a definition for the gunnery element called Site that is really the definition for Vertical Interval, which itself is used in the computation of Site. That, however, is a point of detail that would be all but lost to anyone but an experienced fire direction officer. This book is a must for anyone with a serious interest in the evolution of American military organization and doctrine. David T. Zabecki Army of the United States, Retired Freiburg, Germany Copyright © 2008 Society for Military History