[daferg]

Wait a minute.....This is the same guy that had a post about the Infantry and now he is talking Radar? Thats right folks. After 19.5 years in the Army I have picked up a job or two. I was a Counter Battery Radar Operator in the Regular Army during the late 90's and very early 2000's. I became an Infantry Soldier shortly after 9/11 and have been it since.

I will discuss the non-classified information regarding the radars I worked on. All of this information can be found on the net somewhere and the technology is so old that little is classified.

I operated the AN/TPQ-36 and AN/TPQ-37 radars. The 36 is the smaller of the two and is primarily for mortars and tube artillery. The 37 was the big brother and was primarily used for tube artillery and rockets. The range of the two was anywhere between less than a kilometer to 50km. Radar beams do not just stop at 50km. At 50km the detection was accurate enough to fire-for-effect.

Radars see everything but only report what they are told to report. Will a counter battery radar see an aircraft? Yup. But it will not report it as a target because it does not have a ballistic arc of an artillery shell. The same goes for anti aircraft radars. They will see artillery shells but will not report them as aircraft because they do not meet the criteria.

If you are fighting in an area that you control the skies and is low intensity, you can get away with running the radars all of the time. If you are fighting the Soviet Army in the late 80's and ran the radar all of the time you would be a very big target. Anti-Radiation missiles(HARMs) do as they are advertised: They kill radars.

Normally the Q-36 would support each brigade and the Q-37 would be used for a division front. The Q-36 can advance with the brigade and the Q-37 would overwatch while it moved. This type of thinking is from the old days of the Russian horde pouring through the Fulda Gap. Not much Fulda Gap action is taking place anymore except on my favorite game of all time: SPMBT.

The radars can track and produce a grid(location) of the firing weapon within a few seconds. Very, very fast. It is accurate and I have seen grids that were dead center mass of a firing battery. So why don't we kill everything that is fired if this radar is so darn good? Good question. The target is sent up through the channels and everybody from cooks to pilots look at the grid and try to decide if it is really a target. By the time some over paid officer shoots on the grids, the gunners are several kilometers down the road. Shoot and scoot is the name of survival in counter battery.

Ideally, a part of your artillery assets are reserved for counter battery. Realistically, there is never enough artillery to satisfy all the request. If your attack is going well and you will punch a hole in their lines and run over their artillery, do you fire in support of the advance? Or do you lift your fire and switch to counter battery? Do you continue to fire smoke to cover movement or do you fire counter battery? Do you fire that FASCAM mission or swithch? Ideally, there would be several MLRS's just sitting and waiting for a mission. If they are on a firing point, they can let loose hell and destroy a grid square.

During the "Great War Games" of the late 90's, we fought against an enemy with set doctrine and very defined sectors. We could guess where the bad guy artillery was and plan for it. Today, the battle field is wide open and we fight against an enemy that changes doctrine often. Read about the counter battery fight during the first Gulf War in 1991. "Steel Rain" refered to the MLRS strikes against artillery targets. Which country has the best counter battery radars? I think the better question is: Who has the best plan in place to execute those fires. A really good radar but it takes four hours to fire on targets is no good. A poor radar backed up by several rocket batteries will win the fight every time.

Sooooooo.. How do I think SPMBT models the counter battery(CB) fight? I think it is good. The only units that can fire CB are units with no active fire missions planned. This goes along with what I said above. The size and number of tubes firing decide the effects. Buy an off map MLRS battery and keep it just for CB fires and see what happens. Now, the percentage of times that enemy rounds are detected in the game is above me. I do not know what the magic formula is.

The only draw back in the game is the on map artillery is not detected. You have to use your MK 1 eyeball to look for smoke where there should be no smoke. Those little clouds in the enemy rear area are tell-tale signs of bad guys.

I am done boring you. Hope you got something out of it.