Bret Devereaux

This may not be the case anymore! Azerbaijan/Armenia war made heavy use of drone-spotted artillery (also suited rough terrain). Indirect, drone-spotted artillery could make the self-propelled howitzer the fundamental unit of war in the 2020s

Indirect fires are already the fundamental unit of war (since '15), issue is that infantry still has to be flushed out of cover in order for the artillery to kill it. The French dropped tactical nukes worth of explosive per division at La Malmaison and still had hard fighting.

True, but the balance swung quite a bit between fires and maneuver, which was arguably the dominant element of WW2 in most theaters

Yes and no. WWII was still, IMO, a fires war. Unit collapse only ensued after a frontline had been decisively broken, and that was mostly a fires and positional fighting situation. The Eastern Front was very much a trench war, for example.

Fires are certainly a big part, but strategic encirclements like Dunkirk in 40, Barbarossa cauldrons in 41, or the Stalingrad encirclement in 42/43 seem very maneuver-oriented. German maneuver warfare and Soviet deep battle also matter, Western doctrine seems more fires-focused.

John Nagl, pressed to come up with a name for US doctrine post WW2, pre-Airland Battle terms if "Overwhelming Firepower Doctrine" in Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, as I recall. Seemed apt.

To be fair, that's pretty much everyone's doctrine if they have the tubes and the shells for it. I ran the numbers using a fantastic WWII ammo dataset, and the Soviets were consuming infantry to arty munitions at a 1:12 ton ratio in 1944, the Germans at 1:18, and the US at 1:42.

Well it's a question also of what resources you have. For the USA, losses in men were politically expensive. Shells were cheap, men were expensive. For the USSR, already under near-total economic mobilization, the reverse might be true. You fit your doctrine to what you have.