MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
    FOR PROFESSIONALS AND THE PUBLIC

20. FINAL REFLECTIONS

Many of today's problems were yesterday's solutions.

Norman R. Augustine
Augustine's Laws

THE AIM OF EVERY AREA ANALYST IS TO EVALUATE THE INFLUENCES OF PHYSICAL, CULTURAL, AND POLITICAL geography on every aspect of military policies, plans, programs, and operations at particular points in time and space. That task is exceedingly difficult, because cogent factors are pervasive, as a few Key Points extracted from preceding chapters indicate:

• Land, sea, air, and space forces each must prepare area analyses to fulfill specialized needs of combatant and support commands at every echelon.
• Armed forces that are organized, equipped, and trained to function in any given environment perform less well elsewhere until they complete essential adjustments.
• Time, distance, and modes of transportation determine how rapidly armed forces can respond to distant contingencies.
• Logistical problems multiply and intensify in direct proportion to the distance between support bases and deployed forces.
• Surface materials strongly influence the lethality of nuclear as well as conventional explosives and the ability of motor vehicles to travel cross-country.
• The characteristics of salt water influence every naval activity from ship design to employment practices on or beneath the surface of oceans and contiguous seas.
• Low cloud ceilings, poor visibility, high winds, powerful air currents, and variable barometric pressures impose critical constraints upon all land-based and naval air operations.
• Topographic features that narrow the number of suitable drop zones and amphibious landing sites generally favor defenders who can concentrate forces at probable points of decision.
• Population patterns, languages, religious preferences, cultures, customs, and social structures in areas of responsibility (AORs) directly affect prospects for success or failure of many military operations.
• Military commanders engaged in urban combat commonly must divert precious resources and manpower to control refugees and sustain the civilian populace.
• Territorial boundaries that statesmen draw with scant regard for geographical realities often become political-military trouble spots.

Global and regional AORs require periodic reviews to ensure that they still serve stated purposes. Savvy analysts accordingly remain acutely aware that it seldom is wise to stamp any assessment "APPROVED" and stash it on the shelf, because settings, situations, tactics, techniques, and technologies are subject to frequent, often unanticipated, change.

Operation Neptune and Operation Plan El Paso, which demonstrate analytical techniques in chapters 18 and 19, are illuminating in such respects. Geographic circumstances in Normandy, for example, are much the same today as in 1944, but the implications are dissimilar. Long-range attack aircraft with diversified weapon systems, guided missiles, and helicopters able to hurdle beach obstacles might have enabled Anglo-American Armed Forces to open a Second Front in Europe south of the Loire, where the German Wehrmacht was weak, rather than hit massive Atlantic Wall defenses head-on. Operation Plan El Paso developed differently in 1967-68 than it would have in 1965, when Highway 23 was the only road fit for truck traffic anywhere along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Route 914 cutoff had not yet been conceived, choke points at Tchepone and Ban Dong were nonexistent, and Muong Phine was the only potentially important blocking position south of Mu Gia Pass. Similar conclusions accompany almost every other historical cameo used for illustrative purposes in this document.

Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned from the previous pages is the folly of slighting geographic factors during the preparation of any military plan, the conduct of any military operation, or the expenditure of scarce resources and funds on any military program. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose military career culminated at the five-star level, perhaps put it best when he addressed the Corps of Cadets at West Point on April 22, 1959: "The Principles of War are not, in the final analysis, limited to any one type of warfare, or even limited exclusively to war itself . . . but principles as such can rarely be studied in a vacuum; military operations are drastically affected by many considerations, one of the most important of which is the geography of the region."

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