Badlands Fieldcraft: Proper Planning for Field Excursions: part 2

This originally appeared on Badlands Fieldcraft. NCS

In part one I discussed commander’s intent, backwards planning, and the XYT. I encourage you to read that article if you haven’t had a chance to already. For those of you with experience in military planning and wondering why I’m not getting into the more doctrinal aspects of planning, I’ll get there. I want to first discuss tools I’ve learned that are used on a more day to day basis and that augment more doctrinal techniques, you might say they’re unconventional. I’ve been taught the “top down” view of planning many times, what I’d like to do is present it from the bottom up instead.

The next three ideas I’d like to discuss are the map study, OCOKA-W and the rule of threes.

Once we have been either given a task to complete or developed one ourselves, we should begin familiarizing ourselves with the terrain or area we will be operating in. The more information sources you can tap into the better.

As of this writing Google earth is still available and is a great resource for studying terrain. There are a few features I find very useful and I think you will too. First is the 3D terrain setting, you want to ensure this is on when you are doing a terrain study. This will give you a fairly good idea of the general terrain in an area, and with the capability to go to ground level it can give you a pretty realistic sense of what you’ll see terrain wise in an area. One thing to note is foliage and structures are not taken into account all the time.

3D terrain with natural lighting conditions showing shadows.

Next is the viewshed calculator. Once you’ve set a specific waypoint you can right click on it and calculate the field of view for that waypoint. It will ask you from what elevation as well, and you can play with this to get a good idea of what kind of line of sight you’ll have at different elevations. This is useful for a lot of purposes but I’ll leave you to your imagination.

Green areas are within Line of sight of blue marker

The next tool that is useful is that you can adjust the visible light to a certain time of day. While this doesn’t account for man made illumination or moonlight, it can give an idea of what areas are illuminated at different times of day. Once again, I’ll leave this up to you to figure out how best to use it.

While Earth is a good tool, it’s not the only tool available. I would advise you to screenshot and save/print any pertinent information from there for future use though.

The next tool available is the free PDF maps from the USGS website. These are multilayered maps with a traditional topographical map as well as a satellite view that can be overlaid. While not in 3D like Earth, it is still a very good resource. I once again advise saving and printing any pertinent map sheets that you may want in the future.

The next tool available is any Open Source Intelligence that is available about your area of interest. This could be photos, videos and articles online to published magazines or other documents. Also don’t discount first hand accounts from people familiar with the area and then of course there is always the option to scout it yourself…

So besides familiarizing ourselves with an area, what are we looking for when we are doing a map study? For those of us with a degree from USMC and similar schools, we use an acronym OCOKA-W. It stands for Observation and fields of fire, Cover and concealment, Obstacles, Key terrain, Avenues of Approach and Weather. We want to look at these different aspects from both our point of view as well as the point of view of any other parties involved, whether they are friend or foe. For example, for Observation, what sort of observation will the terrain allow for? How far can you see on average based on the terrain and vegetation? How will this effect you and your adversary?