Assistant Professor

Geography

Guru Nanak Khalsa College

Yamunanagar  Haryana, India 

Abstract

Geography as a multi-dimensional subject plays a crucial role in strategy making. These strategies could be in the form of development planning, like – Urban planning, Transport planning and Rural planning; as well as the strategies in the form of defense, like – War strategies and Combat planning. Domains like Economic Geography, Physical Geography or Bio-Geography are in public spaces and in general curriculum of the educational institutions. On the other hand, the defense strategical dimension usually gets out of focus from the public prospectus. This chapter is trying to introduce the Military geography as a strategical dimension of geography and try to give brief explanation of its nature and scope.     

Keywords – Strategy, Urban Planning, Transport Planning, Rural Planning, War Strategies, Combat Planning, Bio-Geography, Military Geography.

Introduction

Military forces are the part of national defense and nation building. Military practices are endless because of never-ending reasons which usually happened throughout the time. In early ages of expansion, militaries were used to expend the areas of states by the process of invasion. It was the part of incursion, like invasion of Indian states by the invaders from Central Asia and colonization of India by the Britishers. The scenario of expending statehood always militarized the landscape of Indian states. Especially, the western side of the India, as it was the gateway of India for the invaders form the central Asia. These invasions made possible by the help of geographical plannings and it militarized the socio-economic and political life of India throughout the time. This is a brief overview about military geography and what it focusses about. Military geography tries to connect the relation of military issues with the description of the world (Woodward, 2004). It is largely influenced by the human aspect of geography under its political dimension, it can be considered as one of the branches of Human Geography. The impact of geography on military operations was long known by the strategists but it was not developed as separate branch of geography in the early growth of geography as a domain. General of Swiss army, Henry Jomini started the military geography in Russia in early 1800s (Hamik & Ashot, 2020). It was T. M. Maguire who considered military geography as a separate branch of geography in his book “Outlines of Military Geography” published in 1899 by Cambridge University Press. T. M. Maguire specifically enlightened the role of topography and environment in military operations. In 1904 Halford John Mackinder published his book “The Geographical Pivot of History” and gave the geopolitical concept of Heartland. The concept of heartland basically focused about the strategical geographical area of having hold of power. It was the area surrounded by the geographical barriers and hard to invade and whoever invade it, controls the world power. It was basically the Eastern Europe. This further influenced the concept of geopolitics given by Political scientist Rudolf Kjellen in 1905 and Theory of Rimland given by Nichol Spykman in 1942. These theories and concepts somehow shaped the strategy of German military in WWII. Military geography was popularized as an academic discipline in 1970s after the failure of American-Vietnamize war in United States of America (Palka & Galgano, 2000).   Further that, the study of military operations with relation to geography become the inseparable part.

Nature of Military Geography

The political dimension in geographical space creates need of critical analysis of defense or war strategies and further the need of military forces. The political predominance not only emphasize the holding of power but create the urge of resource control. It is the geographical space over which the political power exercises according to the need (Sloan & Gray, 1999). So, the military geography basically is geopolitical in nature. The geographical environment and political desires go parallel to constitute the nature of military geography. Military geography Concentrates on the physical and cultural environments over political-military policies, plans, programs and combat operations of all types in global, regional and local contexts (Collins , 1998). So, the prime focus of the military geography revolves around physical and cultural environment.

Table 1, Physical and Cultural Geographical Environment

Physical Environment	Cultural Environment
Weather	Settlements
Climate	Population
Relief	Race and Ethnicity
Topography	Telecom
Drainage	Military installation
Ocean	Land use and landcover
Vegetation	Recourse allocation and distribution

Military geography tries to study the strategical planning and response in different type of physical and cultural environment. Its whole process can be separated into 3 basic parts –

Physical and Cultural Landscape in The Real-Life Scenario

Physical and cultural landscape plays an important role in the military operations. Every physical and cultural feature act differently in strategical situations (Rech, Bos, Jenkings, Williams, & Woodward, 2015). For example, Lush green natural vegetation helps solders to get hide effectively in comparison to the sparse vegetation. It can provide an effective attack strategy in gorilla warfare. In old times the construction of forts use to be done on uplifted areas, to provide bird eye view in case of outer surveillance and during warfare.   

Military Strategies According To The Real-Life Scenario

Military strategies prepare according to the real-life scenario. Real life scenario is the combination of physical and cultural landscape and give a 360° view for the strategy formation. Real life scenario provides the regional approach to the military strategies for either attack or defense according to the prior situation. Military geography helps to provide a convenient framework for area analysis as well as strategy making. COCOA is one of the frameworks, which uses by different forces to tackle the on-ground situation. COCOA stands for –

C – Critical Terrain

O – Obstacles

C – Cover and Concealment

O – Observation and Field of Fire

A – Avenues of Approaches (Collins , 1998)

It also abbreviated as OCOKA, where the first letter of COCOA replaced by letter K, i.e., Key Terrain.  

Attack and defense response system

Search, Rescue and Peacekeeping

Military geography generally gets stereotyped by public as a domain related to conflict studies but it has other side as well, which is Search and rescue during disasters. Defence forces play crucial role during disasters. Most of the forces use to trained for the search and rescue in disastrous situations. NDRF (National Disaster Rescue Force) is one of the important forces in India which trained especially for the search and rescue operations. Peacekeeping is also an important part of the military operations. It use to be done in the fragile situations. UN Peacekeeping forces plays an important role in handling the fragile situations in the world, especially in politically unstable African countries.

Geographical factors become fully significant during any type of conflict or war like situations. Usually, the strategies prepare on the bases of different frameworks and molded according to the response system in any situation on the bases of observation of field approaches.

­­­­­ So, military geography as a domain focuses on the landscape of conflicts and strategical impairment to deal with it.

Scope of Military geography

The scope of military geography is based on the applications and the temporal perspective. So, military geography constitutes of Two perspectives (Palka E. J., 2004) –

Applied – It basically focuses on the real-life situations which need military operations during current time.

Historical – It provides the historical perspective of brittle state of affairs and military operations in the past.

These perspectives get studies with the help of three approaches (Palka E. J., 2004) –
Systematic approach – In this approach the phenomenon studies over the world as a whole. This approach goes with the general to particular point of view in military geography.   

Topical approach – This approach helps to look after the phenomenon by its separation according to the purpose in military operations.

Regional approach – Regional approach emphasize the study of phenomenon with relation to the local influencers/ factors. It goes with the particular to general understanding in military geography.    

Dependance of Military geography on Physical and Human Geography

Military geography is not an independent domain as itself. It needs physical and human geography for its subject matter and topical analysis. Physical and human geography provide the systematic and regional perspective to the military geography. For example –

1. The physical geography provides the view of location, size and shape of the spacial entity, which further leads to formulate the regional strategy formulation. 

2. Military geography takes help of the human geography to look into the world as well as regional natural resource allocation.

3. Human geography also informs the spacio-demographic perspectives to the military geography in the form of human resource management and life load.

4. These domains also help to analyze the socio-cultural overview of the target population in the military geography.

5. Geopolitical regime is the inseparable part of military geography, which help to provide the political analysis for military operations.

So, the military geography is primarily depending upon the physical and human geography for the applied and historical perspective and analysis.

Conclusion

Military geography is an important domain of geography which revolves around physical and human outlooks. It is not a popular subject in public sphere but provide the 360° view to the strategic operations. It also helps to analyze the military operations in different type of environments. Military geography came into highlight as a separate subject after late 20^th century and developed properly afterward. It is mostly geo-political in nature and impacted by the several physical and human factors like location, size, vegetation, demography, ethnicity, resource allocation, political ideology etc. It not only provides the military overview during the situation of conflicts but also in situations other then war. It can be studied with the general as well as regional perspective and helps to enlighten the need of military strategic analysis.       

References

1. Collins , J. M. (1998). Military Grography for Professionals and Public. National Defense University Press, Washington DC.

2. Hamik, S., & Ashot, G. (2020). Military Geography in the Context of Geographic Determinism. (H. H. Hasmik, Ed.) Wisdom, 3(16), 136-141. Retrieved from https://www.wisdomperiodical.com/index.php/wisdom/article/view/384/386

3. Palka, E. J. (2004). Military Geography. In: Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century. (G. L. Gaile, & C. J. Willmott, Eds.) Oxford University Press.

4. Palka, E. J., & Galgano, F. A. (2000). The Scope of Military Geography: Across the Spectrum from Peacetime to War. U.S.A. : McGraw-HillPrimis Custom Publications .

5. Rech, M., Bos, D., Jenkings, K. N., Williams, A., & Woodward, R. (2015). Geography, Military Geography, and Critical Military Studies. Critical Military Studies, 1(1), 47-60.

6. Sloan, G., & Gray, C. S. (1999). Why Geopolitics?, In: Geography, Geopolitics and Strategy. (G. Sloany, & G. S. Colin, Eds.) New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

7. Woodward, R. (2004). Military Geographies. (N. Henry , & J. Sadler, Eds.) Blackwell Publishing.