The infantry is a sensor, Gen. DePuy explains:
One of the comments that I’ve made has infuriated the Infantry School. Now, I don’t blame them for being infuriated, but I honestly concluded at the end of World War II, when I soberly considered what I had accomplished, that I had moved the forward observers of the artillery across France and Germany. In other words, my battalion was the means by which Field Artillery forward observers were moved to the next piece of high ground. Once you had a forward observer on a piece of ground, he could call up five to ten battalions of artillery and that meant you had moved combat power to the next observation point — more combat power than the light infantry could dispose of. Now, you needed the infantry to do that. You needed the infantry to protect them, but the combat power came from this other source, and I think that trend has accelerated ever since. I think the infantry has the dirtiest job of them all. But, if you want to be rigorously analytical about what you’re really trying to do, it’s trying to move combat power forward to destroy the enemy, and the combat power that you are moving forward has been, in the past, mostly artillery, and that is even more true today. The infantry has a lot of ears and a lot of eyeballs. Now, it can call forward even more artillery fire and different kinds of munitions — Cannon Launched Guided Projectiles (CLGPs), the Family of Scatterable Mines (FASCAMs), Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICMs), high explosive (HE), smoke, and illumination, and soon they will also have terminally guided anti-armor munitions. The infantry is a sensor. It’s a sensory organization that works into the fabric of the terrain and the enemy, and can call in all of this firepower — including artillery and TAC air that can really do the killing.