American howitzers appear to be making a resurgence after nearly two decades of frequently being relegated to other duties. The 2019 Army ammunition budget allocates more than $376 million toward the purchase of high-explosive and Excalibur rounds, which have been fired more frequently in the fight against the Islamic State than in the previous 40 years. The move is striking, given how marginalized artillery was in America’s post-9/11 wars.

A decade ago, as a freshly minted Army artillery officer trained in the fundamentals of setting up and firing howitzers, I could compute ballistics by hand and correct the fall of artillery shells using just a pair of binoculars and a radio. Artillery fired often during the invasion of Iraq and the drive toward Baghdad in 2003. Yet when my first unit deployed to Iraq in 2008, we traded in our self-propelled howitzers for armored trucks and spent the next 12 months of that deployment essentially acting as infantry troops. In the years after the invasion, the United States Army viewed artillery as secondary to having as many soldiers as possible running patrols, staffing guard towers and escorting convoys of supplies.

The same went for Afghanistan, where for years after Sept. 11, many artillery batteries fired few, if any, high-explosive rounds. The rules of engagement were tight, and insurgents typically did not expose themselves in ways that made them easy targets.