Over the past week or so I've been dialoging with Harold 'Hess' Hester, owner of the Defense Mapping School alumni site. What drew me to Harold's site was an interest in locating an old Army buddy, CW3 Ralph Ruetze, who had served as an instructor at the school.
I learned from the website that, sadly, Ralph passed away in 2010. However, Harold was eager to incorporate my memories of Ralph into his site. Thanks Harold. Ralph was quite a character and deserves to be remembered.
The Defense Mapping School (DMS) had the mission of training service members of all services, Department of Defense civilians and foreign students in the topographic arts and sciences - survey, cartography, graphics, press operations, terrain analysis, instrument and equipment repair and much more. And they did an outstanding job. The entire DMS organization - from the school registrar to the division chiefs to the individual instructors - went to extraordinary lengths to make sure our soldiers were well trained and well cared for while they were in the school's care.
DMS was one of several agencies that included the Defense Mapping Agency, the Topographic Engineering Center, the Waterways Experiment Station and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory that provided unstinting support to the field topographic units. The sad truth is that these agencies often provided more support to Army topographic units than their own local Engineer commands did.
So my thanks to 'Hess' (and Jack Batt) for standing up a much needed home on the web for Defense Mapping School alumni.
Showing posts with label defense mapping school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defense mapping school. Show all posts
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Friday, April 22, 2011
Terrain Analysis
Last week I stumbled across this gem on YouTube -
It is a slightly dry film put out by the US Geological Survey in 1955 showing the modern (for the time) processes developed for natural resource analysis using aerial photography.
The guy narrating it sounds about as excited by his work as a dry goods salesman discussing the newest laundry soap. Zzzzzzzzz...
But once past the dry narration I was interested by the methods demonstrated for geological, hydrological, soils and forestry analysis. What struck me was that these were the precise methods we were taught at the Defense Mapping School as late as the early 1990s. These photo analysis processes formed the basis for what we called Terrain Analysis, and in fact my job title for much of my Army career was Terrain Analysis Technician (MOS 215D).
This film approaches each type of analysis as an independent process - an end in itself. We carried the analysis to the next level and merged the output from each of these four disciplines, mixed in some military-specific data like vehicle off-road capabilities, tossed in some road network analysis, some urban analysis and a pinch of weapon systems analysis and produced what we called a military terrain analysis. Our products were usually delivered in the form of map overlays known as a combined obstacle study. The process was very labor intensive and usually tightly focused on specific geographic areas like the Fulda Gap in Germany or the Koksan Bowl in Korea, natural movement corridors that had been used by armies for centuries.
Soldiers going into the Army's Terrain Analysis field received extensive training in field identification methods like geological and soils analysis, hydrological analysis and route engineering studies. They were taught to observe, test and measure in the field using a variety of hands-on methods. Next they moved to the classroom and were taught advanced aerial photo analysis techniques and applied their field knowledge to what they saw in the photos. It was hours and hours of peering at photos through stereoscopes, analyzing texture, tone and pattens to develop a detailed analysis of the terrain and it's impacts on military operations.
Computers have taken on the burden of much of this analysis, and today you can feed a digital image into a sophisticated image analysis package like ERDAS Imagine and have it analyze huge swaths of territory in a small fraction of the time it took using the old manual methods shown in the film. Still, it is fun to see how things were done in the good old days when men were men, hardhats were made out of aluminum and the science of aerial photo analysis found new applications in the civilian and military worlds.
It is a slightly dry film put out by the US Geological Survey in 1955 showing the modern (for the time) processes developed for natural resource analysis using aerial photography.
The guy narrating it sounds about as excited by his work as a dry goods salesman discussing the newest laundry soap. Zzzzzzzzz...
But once past the dry narration I was interested by the methods demonstrated for geological, hydrological, soils and forestry analysis. What struck me was that these were the precise methods we were taught at the Defense Mapping School as late as the early 1990s. These photo analysis processes formed the basis for what we called Terrain Analysis, and in fact my job title for much of my Army career was Terrain Analysis Technician (MOS 215D).
This film approaches each type of analysis as an independent process - an end in itself. We carried the analysis to the next level and merged the output from each of these four disciplines, mixed in some military-specific data like vehicle off-road capabilities, tossed in some road network analysis, some urban analysis and a pinch of weapon systems analysis and produced what we called a military terrain analysis. Our products were usually delivered in the form of map overlays known as a combined obstacle study. The process was very labor intensive and usually tightly focused on specific geographic areas like the Fulda Gap in Germany or the Koksan Bowl in Korea, natural movement corridors that had been used by armies for centuries.
Soldiers going into the Army's Terrain Analysis field received extensive training in field identification methods like geological and soils analysis, hydrological analysis and route engineering studies. They were taught to observe, test and measure in the field using a variety of hands-on methods. Next they moved to the classroom and were taught advanced aerial photo analysis techniques and applied their field knowledge to what they saw in the photos. It was hours and hours of peering at photos through stereoscopes, analyzing texture, tone and pattens to develop a detailed analysis of the terrain and it's impacts on military operations.
Computers have taken on the burden of much of this analysis, and today you can feed a digital image into a sophisticated image analysis package like ERDAS Imagine and have it analyze huge swaths of territory in a small fraction of the time it took using the old manual methods shown in the film. Still, it is fun to see how things were done in the good old days when men were men, hardhats were made out of aluminum and the science of aerial photo analysis found new applications in the civilian and military worlds.
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