An Outlier – Navigation

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Navigation is one of the critical skills required for all commanders, get your troops lost – hard to come back from that. Hard to stand up and teach diggers Navigation when they know you cannot navigate.

Navigation is also one of the harder skills to teach.

One of the best activities I did in the Army was in the Platoon Competition in 1984. A Navigation Skills test was formulated by one of the Unit officers. The exercise took all of the Corporals, Sergeants, and Lieutenants from each of the 17 platoons in the unit; in a closed down truck to different locations and then required each commander to provide a 6 figure Grid reference within 3 or 4 minutes.

It was a great activity. It clearly called out the strong navigators from the weaker ones. The commanders who could relate map to ground, and do resections under pressure.

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Map to Ground 

The skill of navigation is firstly understanding the map.

All of our Survey topographers will tell you every contour line, and every dent, no matter how minor means something. Strangely, this lesson was reinforced on Subject One for Sergeant in Enoggera, when I took our section of All Corps Corporals out for some Nav training prior to going bush. We were in the back of Enoggera and crossed a small creek – minor. And sure enough on the map, there was a minor dent to show this creek - not a blue creekline, just a slight change in contouring.

I had been a pretty good navigator for a number of years, and this was eye opening.

Of course Tully flips that on its head, as only Tully can do. Why?

Because in Tully the map detail is limited by the canopy. The denser the canopy, the harder to get ground detail. So creeks that are wide enough and deep enough to cause concern for a patrol are not shown at all. You can’t identify major features because visibility is limited – sometimes 5m, sometimes 50m, but certainly no overall picture of the terrain around you.

In Tully its Bearing and Paces. The map is barely relevant.

Follow this bearing for a set distance. How well can your Scout maintain a direction through thick vegetation? How close are you to your bearing reference? How accurate are your two pacers counting each step as they traverse through creeks, around vegetation, across fallen trees and around waitawhile?

End of story.

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Back bearings

You can’t gain expertise in Navigation in training areas you know. It is irrelevant. Which are the challenges most Mechanized or Armoured units had, where the options for training were limited to a small number of training areas, and therefore Navigation was never an issue – because the commanders knew the training area intimately.

The second skill that is critical is being able to confirm your location from a 1, 2 or 3 point resection. That is – identify a feature, take a bearing with your compass, plot that bearing backwards from the feature on your map, then repeat with one or two more features to get a triangle on your map where you are likely to be. In a perfect world, 3 features you can identify, and a small triangle on your map. Known as a resection.

That means when you were patrolling, being ground aware and appreciating when the terrain would be challenging for navigation. There were many occasions when 3 features was 1 or 2 features too many. A couple of times on exercise in both NQ and PNG, our companies entered valleys where there was barely one prominent feature. As you surveyed the ground, the terrain was indistinct.

I encountered this in PNG in 1984, on Swift Eagle in 1985, and again with Alpha in 1988. In each scenario, we were entering a valley along a ridgeline and the entire landscape was indistinct. Luckily, there was one feature that slightly stood out from the entire mountain range. But it only stood out if you assessed the ground from the highest point entering the valley. It was less prominent from the valley.

As we patrolled along the valley for hours, then changed it, the trick was to keep that one feature as a reference. In these instances, I used only one known feature, and took a back bearing to cross our patrol axis and that gave me as close to an accurate location as possible.

Of course, if other commanders hadn’t done the same appreciation, ground assessment, and identified the same feature; then discussions on where are we always were challenging.

And of course, it’s the Army – so rank wins in these scenarios.

I slept well.

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Mount Stuart

The best Navex I conducted was on Mount Stuart. I was Support Section commander, so we had some of the senior diggers in Alpha. As a section we did a route march up Mount Stuart in 1988, from the back of Brigade Hill up the main spurline with 7 false crests until the summit. I am not sure if that is legal with current WHS regulations, but hey it was signed off by Ron Hill, my Company Commander that year, and we executed.

At the top we had lunch.

From there we walked down the road from Stuart to the highway. The beauty of this road from a nav perspective, the road was winding and every 300m the key features you could see were different.

This provided ample opportunities, like we had done in the closed truck exercise for diggers to identify features and use a 1 or 2 point resection. Every stop gave us a new challenge, new reference point, and new resection. Obviously, the diggers should have known where they were on the road as we had only walked 300m, but the exercise was to prove the ground, and your location using map to ground and backbearings.

It was worth the walk.