Counter Battery
Fire aimed at disabling or destroying enemy guns is known as counter-battery fire.
Removing the threat posed by enemy artillery is an important objective on the battlefield. Most of the time enemy batteries are too far away for the infantry to engage, so it falls to artillery to do this job.
The battery uses a variety of techniques to calculate the position of the enemy battery, then can lay fire upon it. If possible, a FO can access a position to call fire on enemy guns directly; either on the ground or in the air, or a battery can be located using counter-battery radar, which can be used to observe the fall of enemy shells and thus calculate their trajectory. A correctly calculated trajectory will reveal the location from which the shell was fired, which information can then be passed on to a friendly battery command post as a fire mission.
Read more about this topic: Field Artillery
Famous quotes containing the word counter:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)