Counter - battery fire Counter - battery fire is a type of mission assigned to military artillery forces , which are given the task of locating and firing upon enemy artillery . Background . Indirect fire was introduced so that artillery could fire from behind cover to reduce its exposure to enemy artillery by making itself more difficult to find . Interestingly , while armies were doing this , little thought was given to the need for counter - counter measures . Perhaps the only means of finding concealed guns was observation from kite s or balloons . However , effective counterbattery fire needs far more than a single method of observation . Counterbattery ( CB ) fire emerged and developed extremely quickly during World War I . Since that war , CB has continued to evolve , mainly due to improvements in technology . The targets of CB fire are usually the enemy ' s guns , launchers and mortars , both the materiel and the men serving them . The formal NATO definition of the term " counterbattery " is " fire delivered for the purpose of destroying or neutralising the enemy ' s fire support system " , with the note that it may be proactive or reactive . This may be achieved by attacks on any part of the field artillery system . In some armies at some periods CB has been called ' counter - bombardment ' and occasionally ' counter - mortar ' has been handled somewhat separately . Functions . There are four functions in the system for CB fire : Target acquisition . Target acquisition is the source of information for CB intelligence . It may produce accurate locations for enemy fire units or merely inputs to a more complex process for locating and assessing hostile artillery . At the end of World War I , the following were recognised as the principal sources of artillery intelligence , this seems to be in descending order of usefulness : Apart from balloons and officers ' patrols , these sources continued to play their part in World War II , and their technology improved , although flash spotting became less useful as ranges increased and flashless ( or low flash ) propellant s became widespread . A successor to officers ' patrols had an isolated emergence in Italy when Canadian artillery observers were put ashore behind German lines and established themselves to observe gun positions . Sound ranging and flash spotting both required enemy guns to fire . Furthermore others , such as radio direction finding and information from prisoners , are insufficiently precise to ' fix ' a target for artillery attack . Information from others may not be received quickly and hence be out of date , the hostile battery having moved . These methods were joined by radar in World War II ; while this could detect a shell in flight the gun that fired it could not usually be seen and the shell ' s elliptical trajectory made it impossible to extrapolate backwards with the technology of that time . However , mortar bombs have a parabolic trajectory ( as do guns firing in ' high angle ' ) defined by a simple mathematical equation with two points on the parabolic curve . It was therefore possible to deduce a mortar ' s position by tracking its bomb and recording two points on its trajectory . Another method that emerged was crater examination , this could reveal the azimuth back to the hostile gun or mortar and study of fragments could reveal its type . However , while it was a useful source of information it was not sufficiently accurate to give a location for the firer . Most armies abandoned flash spotting in the 1950s . However , several new target acquisition technologies emerged . These included : CB Intelligence . CB Intelligence applies the intelligence cycle and principles to CB . It uses information about hostile artillery from all sources to maintain detailed records and apply specialist techniques that exploit the nature of artillery fire to produce : CB Intelligence is usually combined with CB fire control ( see below ) , although intelligence purists recognise this is not good practice and the two were separate in the British forces in France in World War 1 . In both World Wars CB intelligence and CB control were found to be most effective when they were at corps level . However , the final year of World War 2 showed that the counter mortar battle was really one for brigade level . Since that war CB has tended to move to lower levels and in some armies has grown into a wider " deep supporting fire " organisation . CB fire control . The CB fire control problem is that it does not always make tactical sense to attack hostile batteries the moment they are located . This is magnified by the challenges of targeting hostile batteries . There are many factors , and their significance depends on the circumstances . The first issue , for targeting , is that historically it ' s difficult to ' knock - out ' a battery , although smart munitions against SP guns may change this . That highlights the point that it is important to be clear what result is wanted from CB fire . As the quoted definition states ' Destroy ' is one possibility , another is " Neutralization " to render the battery temporarily ineffective or unusable , including by suppressing it or forcing it to move . However , " suppression " only lasts while CB fire is falling and if a hostile battery moves then it has to be found again . It ' s important to get the result that best fits the tactical situation , and sometimes it is best just to record the location of the hostile battery and leave it for later . Good CB officers are cunning and wily tacticians . An additional issue for the use of counter battery fire is the finite artillery resources available for use in a given situation . Firing on enemy artillery is one use of those resources , but more traditional uses such as shelling the enemy as they advance are often much more attractive simply because while artillery is an effective weapon , it cannot directly capture territory or destroy forces en mass . CB fire units . The final aspect of the CB equation is having available CB fire units and appropriate munitions . Typically these are " general supporting fire " units , but " direct supporting fire " units are also used if they are available and not fully occupied by their primary role . With conventional HE shells it may require the concentrated fire of 5 – 10 batteries to deal effectively with one hostile battery . Hence the attraction multi - rocket launchers such as MLRS able to deliver a heavy and concentrated attack from relatively few launchers . Counter - measures . Counter - measures to CB fire have emerged throughout history . These include : Of course there are many potential target " nodes " in the field artillery system , including those dedicated to finding hostile artillery . Attacking these may significantly blind the enemy ' s CB capability — counter - countermeasures .