Tactical Tips: Land Nav Continued: On the Ground

How’s it going everyone? I’m back again to talk about some more land nav. Today I want to get into the use of attack points, route selection, and terrain association. These skills are the backbone of effectively navigating on the ground. I do not want to go into making this an entirely formal class, so I will not be teaching how to read contour lines. Try to look at this more as a refresher or some information to add to your baseline. So, let’s get into it.

Terrain Association

First off, I want to cover terrain association. Knowing this well, will give you a better advantage at other skills. To me, terrain association is the most important skill to use. I suggest if you have a map available and you are in an area with known points, study what those look like and compare it to your map. Doing this enough times and in enough areas will help you be able to take in your environment and make your decisions quicker. Especially, going into an unknown area where you will be expected to figure things out without the time to learn it before.

Once you are in your area of operation, figure out your known points on the map. Once you have your known points, try to get into a position that you can visually see at least two. The reason for this is, you can orient your direction off of these. If you are able to visually see more of these points you will be able to pinpoint your own location on a map a lot faster. You can also use these points for talking other agencies onto positions such as call for fires, casevacs, and quick reaction forces.

With an effective use of terrain association you are going to have more comfortability in your area. Whenever I am navigating, I try to in a way keep an overlay of the map as a mental image at all time that should be able to help you maintain your bearings. The only way to do this is really reading and studying your map, and knowing these points that I talked about. It has allowed me to be able to make a lot of decisions a lot faster.

This skill translates to other areas as well. You can translate this over to urban, defensive, and offensive operations. What I do is take this mental overlay and add MSL and sector lines to myself or my squad. Being able to do this will give you an advantage when adjusting your direction of fire, and more importantly reduce the chance of fratricide. I also do the same thing when in a defensive posture with knowing our obstacle plan, sectors, and TRP’s.

Attack Points

This next skill is building on terrain association. When you need to get to a point do not go point to point. There is only a few situations where this is the most effective use of your time. Instead when you need to get to a point on the map, look for an obvious or known point that is easy to get to. What I mean by obvious, is a road with a 90 degree turn, intersections of roads, or anything that you can get to quickly. You want these points to be fairly close to the point you are trying to get to.

Now what you want to do once you have that spot. Is make a quick movement to that spot. Upon reading this point you will then use your compass to take you to your destination. An effective use of attack points will make your overall experience much easier. You will only need to focus on a shorter distance to navigate off of, instead of trying to use a compass for multiple km’s.

Route Selection

Now putting these two skills together brings us to our third topic. Your route when navigating is extremely important. Ensuring you don’t end up in a dangerous situation, time, and energy conservation what you need to weigh against each other when selecting a route. It is important to find a balance between these though.

You don’t want to go only off energy conservation because then you will just end up walking on a road, in most situations this is not where you want to be. You can do the same when only focusing on time or you try to go point to point without attack points.Doing this will deplete your energy faster and possible put you in more of a dangerous situation. And only focusing on being safe will take longer and also deplete energy based on how much weight you’re carrying.

To find this balance, like mentioned earlier you need to study your map. This will allow you to know areas to avoid such as draws, ridges, cliffs, sharp inclined hills, etc. All of those are either depleting your energy or possibly putting you in a dangerous situation. This does not mean that you should avoid everything hard all together. Picking some tough routes will at times also minimize the possibility of enemy forces effectively tracking you.

In conclusion your knowledge of the terrain that you will be operating or moving around in is extremely important. Try to study your map as soon as you can, and develop a plan for your route/movement using these skills.