Ok, I'm using towed 105mm and the enemy has 152 SP, with a response time of 11 mintues. If I can't take out his counter battery capability, then does that mean I shoot, move, shoot, move, shoot, move, etc?

Ok, I'm using towed 105mm and the enemy has 152 SP, with a response time of 11 mintues. If I can't take out his counter battery capability, then does that mean I shoot, move, shoot, move, shoot, move, etc?

Especially if they are towed, which are obviously more vulnerable.

That's just simple tactics, not any specific military procedures.

The scoot school made use of hasty ocupations, multiple alternate positions, emergency displacements, and raid techniques.  The battery comanders & battalion ops staff gave a lot of thought to question of ingress & egress to firing positons, road priorities, ect... All that worked ok when the towd howitzers were realatively light like the M101 or the M114, and the heavies were self propelled.  When the USMC replaced everything with the eight ton M198 the hasty move became a bit problematic.  

The hunker down school emphasised deep holes by every crew section, dispersion, just in time ammo supply, & anything else to reduce vulnerability.  This was not a advocation of staying one spot until beaten into oblivion.  Rather a recognition that heavy howitzers dont scoot.  Neither did we stop rehearsing emergency displacements and the rest of it.  We recognized that our short term safety lay in dispersion & having deep holes to dive into when counter battery came.  Over the long hual we still moved about a lot.

In Desert Storm we learned that its all relative.  The Iraqi counter battery was so slow that the batterys I know of were easily able to limber their 7200 kilo cannon and drive away before the Iraqi FOs completed their four point brackets with double check rounds.

The combat readiness test standards from 1987 allowed a maximum of three minutes in a Emergency Displacement for the howitzers to be rolling & at least 200 meters from their original firing positions.  Two minutes for the SP cannon.  This was not difficult with the M101 105mm howitzer.  With the M198 a full crew might be able to do that in four if well drilled.

Alternate positions could be anywhere from 500 to 5000 meters away, depending on circumstances.   What we called raid techniques consisted of rushing into a positon with just the cannon, firing a preset mission, and rushing off again.  Usually this was practiced with just one or two cannon, which were often moved by heliocopter.   But in a 1985 exercise I helped plan a multibattalion raid, and in the run up to Desert Storm several battery & battalion size 'raids' were executed.

Hopefully the M777 will help with this on several levels. Lighter weight allowing faster displacement, the automated fire control system allowing the piece to get back in the battle faster after displacing, and having the fire direction software track and adjust the firing data of each gun individually instead of calculating data for the center of battery will allow much greater dispersion.

Depending on how severe the counterbattery threat was, I still wouldn't expect moving after every fire mission though. Even with M109A6 you generally don't do that, and moving an A6 is just stop, turn the turret, fire a mission, drive off... for a short mission it is under a minute. OMG, I love that weapon.

 

When it comes to both dispersion and displacement you have to balance the relative threat posed by counterbattery vs. enemy light ground forces. Moving a lot exposes you to the risk of ambush, while staying in one place means the enemy has time to march toward the sound of the guns. Less dispersion obviously means that any counterbattery will be more effective but your guns can maintain a common defensive perimeter and if attacked by ground forces can fight together. More dispersion means that counterbattery does less damage, but if your guns are a long way apart they can't fight together if attacked.

Thanks for the responses. I wondered how you managed the terrain, the resupply, and the constant movement with a counter-battery threat. Speaking of counter-battery, is the threat really that "real". From the comment on the Iraqi counterfire, it would seem that most third world forces have a limited counter-battery capability and that the US forces with the new technology negate that threat.

Depending on how severe the counterbattery threat was, I still wouldn't expect moving after every fire mission though. Even with M109A6 you generally don't do that,

Whoa, what Paladin (M109A6) battery was that???

We moved after every fire mission.  But, as you said, with a mobile system that is properly "digitized", it's easy.  The doctrine is to move around in a box (a "Position Area" or PA) between missions, and then move to different PA's throughout the day...  Being part of an Armored Cavalry Regiment, we didn't have the time to set up PA's, we just had to constantly roll.  The was no way counterbattery could be a danger to us (our threat was an enemy tank getting loose behind the line troops).  The moment you got a fire mission, you had to stop and shoot - but during that time the tankers were moving and assaulting, so then you had to play "catch up" once the fire mission was done.

 

Perhaps I missed it, but one point that I didn't see being made is the advantage that a digitzed artillery piece has, i.e., a howitzer with GPS and some sort of accurate azimuth control, linking in to fire control software/computer.  For any non-expert reading this, laying a howitzer "old school" with an aiming circle, etc, takes some time - not alot, for a well trained battery, but it also isn't instantaneous.  (Someone a little older than me can chime in on how fast that process can be.)  The howitzers need to be "aimed" to shoot rounds at targets kilometers distant.  With digital fire control, this process is basically instantaneous, and makes march order /displacement  and emplacement a faster process.  The 777 is digitized.

 

The other thing that I'd note is that there are lightweight, mobile systems for light forces like the Rascal or the Caesar (a howitzer in a light unit doesn't *have* to be towed), although it does cramp airmobile/heliborne operations, but plenty of armies out there don't have an airfield full of choppers to use moving arty batteries around.

Depends on the expected counterbattery threat. If you are facing US-level counterbattery, its going to be every fire mission.

On the road doesn't hurt as much as it used to. I don't know how fast an M777 unit can stop and be ready to fire, since they are towed, but for Paladins the response time is only about half a minute slower than if they were stationary when the call for fire comes in. It is an amazing thing to watch a battery of howitzers driving down a valley spread out over more than a klick all stop, turn almost in unison, fire a mission then drive off. My experience was on M109A5 and then A6s (and even then, in FDC rather than on the guns) so I have no idea how fast a towed howitzer can be physically readied to fire (not counting safety and other firing data issues which on a M777 is going to be mostly handled by the computer). Based on the M109A6 I'd assume that the fire control computer would be ready to go by that time.

Just hope who you're firing at doesn't have CAS near by.

That was the fun thing about the Cav, we had to be ready to roll CONSTANTLY.  A writer who was in a Cav regiment put it this way "tanks aren't just firepower and armored protection, they are *mobility*"  My favorite orders to get were "start moving in X direction (and it was understood that this was to happen within the next 30 seconds).  You will get destination grids and mission while on the move".  Beats the hell out of the endless (and endlessly boring) OpOrder cycles.  GPS and digital fire control make that much easier to execute.