The most terrifying thing about artillery is with modern communication systems… you never actually know if you have been spotted and an artillery barrage is being dialed in to fire on your position.

Most of war most of the time is paradoxically boring, which means that the unpredictable onset of an artillery barrage infuses every moment of downtime with the latent question “am I being targeted?” like the thought of “are there sharks near me?” can totally fill up your mind when swimming in the ocean even if the chance of there being a shark is remote.

What a system like the Archer does is amplify that uncertainty because in the past you could develop through reconnaisance a picture of the enemies artillery capacity in an area and at least have an idea of how much pain the enemy could drop on you all at once out of nowhere. Further after a traditional artillery battery fires on you at least that intel can be fed back up the chain of command to develop a picture of where the enemies artillery and spotters are deployed and where the other weak spots must then be. This is doubly true if you have counter-battery radar like Ukraine does.

In the past counter-artillery work was often done by friendly artillery but obviously drones, particularly lancet type loitering drones have changed that. A less appreciated revolution are US supplied counter-battery artillery radars employed by Ukraine to quickly locate russian artillery (that Ukraine is developing domestic equivalents for). These counter-battery radars allow rapid location of enemy artillery after sensing incoming barrages and give Ukrainian drones and artillery the ability to quickly punish russian artillery that is out of position and vulnerable.

Not only is Ukraine better at hunting artillery and quickly capitalizing on the vulnerability that comes from the trajectory of artillery shells giving away the location of the cannon, Ukraine has already fielded a superior counter to their own counter… in highly mobile artillery systems such as the Archer and RCH 155 where even if a loitering munition receives the coordinates of an artillery battery within seconds of it occurring, it still might not be relevant unless a drone gets lucky and happens to be very close to the area.

You really have to step back and think about how to counter a system like the Archer or RCH 155 to appreciate how powerful artillery systems like this are. Extremely expensive guided long range missiles or air dominance are the only easy answers since even if you get the precise coordinates of an Archer or RCH 155 that just fired on you from 50km away, you have to be able to capitalize on that in a matter of minutes or else the highway speed capable self propelled artillery systems will be long gone. Locating the firing position is almost meaningless if there aren’t nearby assets since the location was likely chosen by the enemy to be unimportant to their static positions given the highly mobile nature of the self propelled artillery.

Systems like thus also allow what the US military calls “gun raids” which is where highly mobile artillery is used offensively and temporarily deployed far forward to decisively strike the enemy. An Archer artillery system may spend most of its time far back from the frontline, but that doesn’t mean that under certain operational conditions created by a synchronized advance of friendly forces an Archer can’t be brought forward for a brief window to fire deep into the enemies’ backline.