Counter-battery fire
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Counter-battery fire is a type of mission assigned to military artillery forces, which are tasked with locating and firing upon enemy artillery. Typically, enemy artillery would be detected when they fire, and a counter-battery fire mission must proceed as quickly as possible before the enemy artillery battery finishes their salvo and relocates.
Originally, counter-battery fire relied on ground or air-based artillery observers noticing the source of the artillery fire (due to muzzle flashes, smoke, spotting the artillery pieces, etc.) and calculating firing solutions to strike back at them. Artillery spotting, along with reconnaissance, was one of the major roles for aircraft in warfare (see World War I). Modern counter-battery fire relies on counter-battery radar, which calculate the source of incoming artillery shells very accurately and quickly—so quickly, in fact, that return fire can sometimes begin before the first enemy shell or rocket has landed.
The development of fast and accurate counter-battery fire has led to the concept of shoot-and-scoot and concentration on the development of highly mobile artillery pieces (typically self-propelled guns like the US M109 Paladin, the South African G6 Howitzer or Soviet 2S1 Gvozdika, or rocket artillery like the Soviet Katyusha or the multi-national M270 MLRS). The idea is to fire and then move before any counter-battery fire can land on the original position.
The task of destroying enemy artillery batteries can also fall to attack aircraft, but unless they are already on patrol overhead, they are usually not quick enough to save friendly forces from damage. More often, ground-based counter-battery fire would suppress the enemy battery/batteries and force them to move, while aircraft would follow up later with a strike to destroy the rest of the enemy artillery.
