Since no other answer mentions Electronic warfare
, I’ll add some.
spots the target and directs the fire.
Without observers, artillery is blind and rather useless as it can’t hit anything.
Trying to spot and take out these scouts is as hard as it gets, as they are well trained in and equipped for camouflage, heavily armed, and pack various other goodies like radars, sound probes and whatnot. Like, they can hear you crawling 100m away, see you in the night and shred you to pieces with machine guns. On first hint they have been spotted, be it incoming aircraft or artillery fire - and their radar will warn them of any - they will disappear.
An example of scout radar. It’s just a suitcase.
So safest and fastest way to get rid of them is silencing their radios. All you need is a radio of your own, then just make some noise, and artillery is deaf.
You ‘only’ need to figure out their frequency.
Yes it’s as simple as that. And that’s why frequencies are top secrets.
So unless you have a spy on the other side to tell you their frequency changing protocols, jamming is a game of cat and mouse: nothing but a noise, change frequency, a few more commands, noise again, change frequency, and so on.
Of course, radio operators are trained in that kind of electronic warfare, but the above assumes all that you have is a radio of your own. There’s plenty of specialized jamming devices, have a look at some artillery jammers:
You fire them up, they open up parachute and antenna, and block all radios for 60 minutes, in pretty much every frequency range. And you’ve bought yourself an hour to root out observers, dig in, retreat or whatever.
Unless they pulled wires, that is. Wires are not that easy to jam. In that case, electronic warfare is of rather limited use.
Either way, I hope I’ve provided some insight in an important weak point of artillery - communications.
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