Military Geography

Military geography generally applies the concepts and techniques of geography to the study of military problems, situations, and activities. It examines, among other things, the causal effects of physical geography (e.g., terrain, climate) on military battles, campaigns, and wars. More recent developments in the discipline, however, have broadened the scope of military geography to include the study of military operations other than war (known by the acronym MOOTW), as well as the impacts of militarism on societies and the environment and also the use of environmental resources as components of military-related activities.

Military geography is intimately associated with the development of the discipline, an association that dates far back to early Greece. Thucy-dides's account of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), for example, is an early application of geographic perspectives to the study of military activities. From a non-Western perspective, Sun Tzu's The Art of War may also be considered an early example of military geography. The birth of “modern” military geography, though, is generally marked by Théophile Lavellée's Géographie Physique, Historique et Militaire (1836) and Albrecht von Roon's Milita-rische Landerbeschreiburg von Europa (1837). These two publications firmly established the connection between military campaigns, imperialism, and the formation of the nation-state in Europe. In the United States, W. C. Brown is credited with publishing the first text on military geography, although it was the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan that provided the main American contributions to the emergent field of military geography. A naval historian, Mahan wrote more than 20 books; the most important of his works were his 1890 The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 and its 1892 companion, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: The French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812. Mahan's writings, coupled with those of the British geographer Halford Mackinder, were also influential in the development of both political geography and geopolitics.

Throughout the 20th century, military geography has been significantly influenced not only by changing technologies (e.g., air photos, remote sensing, geographic information systems) but also by military conflicts. Indeed, it is often impossible to disentangle these two external influences on the development of military geography. During World War I, for example, geographers provided written descriptions of the physical landscapes involved in military campaigns. Other geographers participated in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which led to the Treaty of Versailles, and in the subsequent attempts to redraw the political boundaries of postwar Europe. Academically, military geographers produced numerous writings, emphasizing the applied and practical aspects of geography for the study of military-related problems. The works of D. W. Johnson—Topography and Strategy in the War (1917) and Battlefields of the World War, Western and Southern Fronts: A Study in Military Geography (1921)—epitomize much of the work of military geographers during this period.

After World War II, the wartime experiences of many geographers led to significant changes within and beyond academia. During the war, for example, many governmental agencies sought persons with the diversity of training and education that the study of geography provided. Hundreds of geographers were engaged in the war effort, being employed in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the War Department, the Intelligence Division, and the Army Map Service. Women also contributed to the application of geographic perspectives and techniques to military problems, notably in the fields of mapping and surveying. Within academia, geographers applied their research activities to studies that would have a direct bearing on military-related problems. R. A. Bagnold's Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (1941), for example, [Page 1897]was very important for military planning related to the North African campaign—namely, how mechanized vehicles would operate in Aeolian environments.

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