page_title: Artillery
section_title: Precision-guided artillery
hierarchical_section_title: Artillery / History / Precision-guided artillery
caption_attribution_description: XM982 Excalibur
context_page_description: Artillery is a class of heavy military ranged weapons built to launch munitions far beyond the range and power of infantry firearms. Early artillery development focused on the ability to breach defensive walls and fortifications during sieges, and led to heavy, fairly immobile siege engines. As technology improved, lighter, more mobile field artillery cannons developed for battlefield use. This development continues today; modern self-propelled artillery vehicles are highly mobile weapons of great versatility generally providing the largest share of an army's total firepower.
  Originally, the word "artillery" referred to any group of soldiers primarily armed with some form of manufactured weapon or armor. Since the introduction of gunpowder and cannon, "artillery" has largely meant cannons, and in contemporary usage, usually refers to shell-firing guns, howitzers, mortars, and rocket artillery. In common speech, the word "artillery" is often used to refer to individual devices, along with their accessories and fittings, although these assemblages are more properly called "equipment".
context_section_description: Modern artillery is most obviously distinguished by its long range, firing an explosive shell or rocket and a mobile carriage for firing and transport. However, its most important characteristic is the use of indirect fire, whereby the firing equipment is aimed without seeing the target through its sights. Indirect fire emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and was greatly enhanced by the development of predicted fire methods in World War I. However, indirect fire was area fire; it was and is not suitable for destroying point targets; its primary purpose is area suppression. Nevertheless, by the late 1970s precision-guided munitions started to appear, notably the US 155 mm Copperhead and its Soviet 152 mm Krasnopol equivalent that had success in Indian service. These relied on laser designation to 'illuminate'  the target that the shell homed onto. However, in the early 21st Century, the Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled relatively cheap and accurate guidance for shells and missiles, notably the US 155 mm Excalibur and the 227 mm GMLRS rocket. The introduction of these led to a new issue, the need for very accurate three dimensional target coordinates—the mensuration process.
  Weapons covered by the term 'modern artillery' include "cannon" artillery (such as howitzer, mortar, and field gun) and rocket artillery. Certain smaller-caliber mortars are more properly designated small arms rather than artillery, albeit indirect-fire small arms. This term also came to include coastal artillery which traditionally defended coastal areas against seaborne attack and controlled the passage of ships. With the advent of powered flight at the start of the 20th century, artillery also included ground-based anti-aircraft batteries.
  The term "artillery" has traditionally not been used for projectiles with internal guidance systems, preferring the term "missilery", though some modern artillery units employ surface-to-surface missiles. Advances in terminal guidance systems for small munitions has allowed large-caliber guided projectiles to be developed, blurring this distinction.
caption: M982 Excalibur guided artillery shell
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