Australia’s national aspirations, reverberate in the history of the Royal Regiment of Australian Artillery. This work, by Lieutenant Colonel Nick Floyd and Major General Paul Stevens AO (Retd), supported by the Royal Australian Artillery Historical Company, forensically creates a shared understating of artillery’s role in maturing and enabling Australia’s national policies, particularly in the 150 years between 1871 and 2021.

These aspirations include how leaders of Australia’s artillery fused, and continue to fuse, the changing application of technology, tactics, command, control, performance, and people to support the most widely-employed and persistently-lethal arm of the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Today, the role of the Royal Regiment of Australian Artillery is to maximise the combat power of the ADF through the provision of offensive support coordination and indirect firepower, surveillance and target acquisition and ground-based air defence.

Enabling an understanding of this role, Action! Action! Action! A Short History of the Employment of Australian Artillery, 1871 – 2021, delivers a seventeen-chapter masterpiece analysing, defining, and describing the role and employment of Australian Artillery from European settlement in 1788 to the present day.

The 2024 National Defence Strategy makes four references to fires, including: land based long-range fires and deployable strike capability; Precision Strike Missiles to extend the range and variety of targets for land based long-range fires; increasing stockpiles of land based long-range fires munitions; and, Government priorities for hypersonics, directed energy, trusted autonomy, quantum technology, information warfare and long-range fires.

This twenty-first century strategic preference for deployable long-range fires, resilient logistics, and integrated science, is echoed throughout Action! Action! Action! Indeed, Floyd and Stevens deftly explain that artillery has always delivered effects more than guns.

From inception, the Royal Regiment of Australian Artillery employed an adaptive mindset, excelling at orchestrating a vast array of capabilities and their effects. At various epochs, these capabilities, included Australian artillery leading change, doctrine, and employment of fires, logistics, and science for anti-aircraft, anti-tank, anti-ship, counter battery, close and deep support, missiles, ammunition logistics, meteorology, radar, searchlights, survey, uncrewed air systems, professionalised headquarters, and liaison staffs.

Everywhere Whither Right and Glory Lead