In modern age survivabilty of artillery pieces have become difficult due to advancement in surveilllance and target acquisation devices.As a result artillery pieces have to be deployed at more distance and in small groups.This irregular deployment pattern would result in lack of dense artillery fire at target,thus reducing its effects.In your view what procedure can one adopt at gun position to engage targets with same desity and effect

First it depends on the nature of operations and the capabilities of the enemy.  Deploying further back limits the work that your guns can do, in effect they have partially neutralised themselves which saves the enemy from doing it.  The correct solution is to win the CB battle.

 

Spreading out makes CB more difficult for the enemy but has no effect on your own fire, basically electronics etc has solved such things as survey and computing an individual trajectory for every gun to put the fall of shot into the target space. 

 

Improvements in shell lethality and for larger calibres their rate of fire also reduces the need for the concentrated fire of many fire units unless the target is a very large area. 

Actually, with the improvements in communications and fire control the ability to place fire on the target, and to perform 'time on target' from multiple sources of varying size, has never been greater.

To restate the several previous posts:

A second assumption in the original post is that "target accquisition devices" can operate without interferance.  Unfortunatly these things put out a electromagnetic or radar signal that can be rapidly DF by a signals intel unit.  Activating these things for just a few seconds invites imeadiate counterfires.  In the arty commands I trained in counter battery/mortar radars were a fairly high priority target.  

Its true that at present it is difficult to engage targets with conventional shoots...many of which seem obsolete (as they take more time) due to advancement in surveilllance and target acquisation devices... One of the solutions can be the shoot and and scoot technique being followed with self propelled artillery. Further in my view the problem of density of fire by deploying artillery pieces at more dist can only be solved by the engagment of a single target with one of the battery's section ...and once enemy CB comes some other section may be asked to engage the same target. In this way the aim of CB will be totally defeated.   

Conventional shoots don't take any time at all, and they're getting faster as the data is reticulated ever more seamlessly.  Adjustment is very rarely needed because predicted fire is accurate due to up to date meteor and positioning and orienting systems.

 

Shoot and scoot is old news, I was doing it in 1964, and today you can do it with towed guns just as easily as with SPs.  However, the price is that constant movement is very tiring.  The reality is you employ artillery deployment tactics and practices that are appropriate to the threat.  If the threat is high then use gun manouvre areas operating the battery in sections if not single guns, not shoot and scoot.

 

However, the first priority may be to win the CB battle, and their are plenty of nodes in the CB system that can be acquired and attacked, some more critical than others.  Of course a quick review suggests there's never (not even in WW1) been two sides with equally capable CB systems, one is always weaker in some way.  There's a lesson here.

Battle Command

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Actually things have moved on.  COBRA is far more effective in terms of its target handling capabilities than anything anyone had in the 1990s.

 

APS is streets ahead of old fashioned sound ranging.

 

Airborne radars are good for following units on the move (which tends to make 'shoot and scoot' a bit pointless if your counter indirect fire sensors are networked (as they are in Basra in what the US currently calls the 'counter indirect fire test box')).

 

perhaps also, ahem, UAVs?   At bit thin on the ground in the US land forces in the 1990s IIRC. 

And with that came giving each gun coordinates of its own aimpoint, according to the sheaf pattern and size of the target.  Before this, with manual methods or gen 1 computers, firing data was calculated battery centre to target centre and the layout of the mpis over the target reflected the layout of the battery position.  Of course there were standard procedures to concentrating all guns ont a single aimpoint and spreading them out in a linear (or illuminating pattern).

 

Concentrating the fire of several batteries onto a single target started to become common in 1915 when European armies got serious about indirect fire.  So 'Firepower Mobility', where fire is moved not the guns, is now approaching its one hundredth anniversary.  It won WW1 and without it WW2 would have been a lot more difficult.