Mortar Gunnery isn't magic, it's a process

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that people tend to treat mortars in one of two ways. Either they act like indirect fire is some kind of mystical artillery sorcery that only exists inside elite military circles, or they treat them like oversized lawn darts—where you just point the tube in a general direction, drop a round, and start making noise.

Honestly? Both viewpoints miss the point completely.

The mortar itself is actually pretty simple; there’s really not much mystery there. You have a tube, a bipod, a baseplate, a sight, and a round. In fact, the core design hasn’t changed much in over a hundred years because, frankly, it just works. Edgar Brandt figured that out back in 1913, and everybody since then has mostly just refined the concept. 

The hard part was never the gun. The hard part is the process surrounding the gun, and that’s the piece people don't truly appreciate until they start trying to place rounds consistently instead of just occasionally getting lucky.

I saw this play out pretty clearly earlier this year during a mortar competition. To be honest, I was surprised by how many mortar owners showed up, and there were some really interesting systems out on the line. But once the firing started, it became glaringly obvious who understood gunnery and who was basically just launching rounds and hoping statistics would solve the problem for them.

Now, before anybody gets defensive, let’s be clear: everybody starts somewhere. Nobody comes out of the gate as a polished gunner. Hell, I came in second at that competition, not first. But mortars have a nasty habit of letting bad habits work right up until the exact moment conditions change.

At short range, you can get away with a lot. A slightly bad lay, a rushed adjustment, a poor correction, or a gun that shifted a little after recoil—at 100 or 150 meters, you might still land close enough to convince yourself that everything is fine.

But then things change. The range stretches out, the wind picks up, the tube heats up, and the gun settles deeper into the soil. Suddenly, somebody rushes an adjustment or skips checking their bubbles because "it looked good enough."

When those impacts start wandering around the impact area, everybody immediately wants to blame the equipment. You’ll hear things like, “The ammo must be inconsistent,” “The sight must be off,” or “The tube is probably worn out.”

Most of the time, it’s none of those things. Most of the time, it’s process drift.

That is the real enemy in mortar gunnery. It’s not a dramatic, catastrophic failure; it’s just little mistakes stacking together quietly over time. It’s a failure to relay the gun after recoil, bad observer corrections, incorrect sight data, poor communication, guessing instead of observing, and adjusting off emotion instead of trends. That’s usually what breaks a gun line apart.

At its core, mortar gunnery is really just controlled problem-solving. That’s all it ever was. Every round tells you something, and the gun will talk to you constantly if you know what you’re looking at. Impacts, dispersion, recoil behavior, consistency, corrections, and timing—all of it is data. Good crews collect information; bad crews just chase impacts. And there is a massive difference between the two.To be completely honest, that gap is one of the main reasons I started pushing the Ordnance Development Division in the direction we did. There’s a pretty significant knowledge gap in the civilian mortar world right now. We have legally owned, registered mortar systems out there being operated by folks who have never had any exposure to actual crew drills, fire direction, observer procedures, gun laying, or adjustment methods. Most are learning from internet forums, random YouTube videos, or good old-fashioned trial and error.

And to be fair, sometimes trial and error works. But it also creates some incredibly bad habits.

The thing about mortars is they reward consistency and discipline more than almost anything else. That’s why military mortar sections do absolutely everything through strict procedures and standardized commands. It’s not because the military just enjoys hearing itself yell across a gun line; it’s because process reduces mistakes. It's the same checks, the same sequence, the same commands, and the same verification every single time. Consistency matters because mortars punish complacency hard.

That same mindset carries right over into our testing and development. When we test ignition cartridges or increment charges at ODD, we’re not just trying to see if the round leaves the tube. Lots of things will launch a round—that’s the easy part. What we care about is what happens over time. Does the system remain consistent? Does the dispersion open up? Does the recoil behavior change? What happens once the tube gets hot, environmental conditions shift, and the gun starts operating like a real gun line instead of a controlled, one-shot test?

That’s where the truth shows up. The gun line exposes a weak process very quickly.

It’s the exact same story with digital systems like I3-FIRES. I’m a huge believer in digital fire control systems—obviously—but I’ve also been highly consistent about this from day one: software should support trained crews, not replace them.

Computers are excellent at math, but they are terrible at judgment. If your observer gives the system bad target data, the computer will happily generate a perfectly wrong firing solution faster than any human being ever could. Garbage in, garbage out.

That’s why charts and darts still matter. Manual verification still matters. Crew discipline still matters. Technology can absolutely make you faster, more efficient, and reduce your workload, but it cannot make you disciplined.

At the end of the day, mortars are still crew-served weapons. And just like every other crew-served system on the planet, the most important component was never the tube—it’s the six inches between the operator’s ears.