Back in My Day: Land Navigation

Back in my day, we didn't rely on fancy GPS to help us with our land navigation courses. Nope, we plotted our points with a pencil, compass, and protractor. If we got lost and got ate up by a bear, wolf or prowling chupacabra that was our own fault and we should have remembered that age-old saying,

"Life is hard, it is harder if you're stupid."

However, now these darn kids and all their newfangled technology are taking the piss out of the land navigation course. Do you know that there is a serious epidemic of hundreds of 2nd Lieutenants walking around that before would have perished, but now are alive and well because of GPS? Overcrowding by non-land navigating peons is quite possibly one of the worst things to hit the military.We need to get back to the days when Lieutenants and the friggin new guys that couldn't hack it got lost or eaten by some wild creature.

Much like shooting and qualifying with iron sights, these old-school methods of testing ensured we had the highest quality of persons. Want to use an optic in combat? Great, it'll help provided you already know how to shoot. You want to use GPS to get around a confusing and cluttered, bombed out city? Great, it'll help provided you already know the lay of the land and how to navigate it.

We may sound a bit grouchy and like we're taking a shit on technology, we're not. The crazy thing about technology is that it breaks. Usually, at the worst possible time (we feel like there's a law about this somewhere...), it will fail. You'll need to know how to get along without that super cool, neato torpedo GPS.Land navigation, like shooting with iron sights, separates the men from the boys!