Comment by sa46
10 years ago
Regarding teaching land navigation by compass:
I teach light infantry tactics to new lieutenants for the US Army. There's a couple reasons to use old-school methods over relying on your GPS:
* Using a compass and a map gives you a much better feel for terrain. One of the common problems with lieutenants is a disregard for advantages and disadvantages of specific terrain. I feel that this is by far the most important point. Understanding and visualizing terrain from a map is a hugely valuable skill that impacts most points of an operation, specifically route planning, where to place your machine guns, and where to attack the objective from.
* GPS can be jammed. This point was driven home hard by the novel Ghost Fleet. Ghost Fleet is a white paper turned into a novel (because no one would read a whitepaper) on what a future war with China would look like. I'm pretty sure Ghost Fleet is also the impetus for the Naval Academy re-adding celestial navigation to their classwork.
* GPS doesn't always work, or takes a while to get enough satellites to get a fix. You know what really sucks: taking fire and not knowing where you are.
* Batteries are heavy. Yes, tech is improving and you typically only need AA batteries. But soldier weight for light infantry is and continues to be a challenge.
In the early aughts I wrote a simulation for training infantry to call in artillery strikes. It relied on compasses and maps for exactly these reasons. Another point is that understanding what the automatic tools are doing for you makes you better at understanding the automatic tools (and why they're failing when they fail).