Field Artillery - Counter Battery

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.

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