Engineer Intelligence Study No. 191, Terrain Analysis, Alaska Slope Region, Alaska, 1959

The summary on Page 5 is paraphrased as follows. This digital document is a generalized description of the Arctic Slope region -- an area covering approximately 70,000 square miles. Access to the region and the feasibility of various access routes are discussed. Location and extent of natural fuel supplies are given. Factors controlling outdoor work feasibility are summarized graphically on Page 19. A terrain analysis of each of the three major physiographic provinces of the region. Those provinces are the Arctic Coastal Plain, Arctic Foothills, and Brooks Range provinces. Geographic factors which affected cross-country movement, construction, and water supply within those provinces are evaluated. This document contains detailed Landforms and Physiographic Provinces..., Bedrock Geography..., and Surficial Deposits... maps. The distribution list names a number of Corps of Engineers intelligence organizations and the engineering officers of army formations which might be interested in operations in Alaska. The digital document contains a bibliography. High-resolution scans of the large maps (150 to 350 MB) are attached (below) as related files

A genealogy of military geographies: Complicities, entanglements, and legacies

This paper argues that historical geography is particularly well positioned to make insightful contributions to military geographies and critical military studies more broadly because of its commitment to critically exploring the genealogies and consequences of military violence, which are too often seen as a given or historically non-contingent. This is demonstrated by a review of existing literature which variously acknowledges the emergence of disciplinary geography in concert with the modern military, traces the contributions of geographers to and their entanglements with the military, and, which accounts for the complicities, consequences and legacies of military activities and violence through an historical lens. The paper reveals how historical geography exposes the knowledges, technologies and lives that produce and are shaped by military activities as being spatially and temporally specific. Further, its suggests future directions for historical geography that would extend and expand the discipline's attempts to more fully acknowledge the place of military geographies in our histories, politics, spatialities, cultures and everyday lives

Military Geography in Afghanistan: A Compartive Geospatial Analysis of the Soviet War and Operation Enduring Freedom

According to Colonel and Professor of Military Geography, Eugene Palka’s, Modern Military Geography “Military Geography is the application of geographic information, tools, and techniques to military problems.” Historically, military geography has been applied primarily to decisive battles or wars, limiting the scope of its effectiveness. Recently, geographers have extended geographic analysis and principles to unconventional military scenarios. Many geography scholars advocate analysis of geography to support peacetime and support operations. This paper will push this proposition even farther to suggest retroactive geographic analysis of conflict zones. Geography and military geography can be divided into the subfields of Physical and Human Geography. Physical Geography examines the physical make up of an area including its climate, topography, land forms, soil content, location, and borders. Human Geography focuses on groupings of different cultural characteristics within an area. Geography is a constant in the world, it may change over time, but its impact is always present. What is called into question is whether or not that impact is as consistent as the geography it derives from; especially its impact on conflict. Afghanistan provides an opportunity to test this question. Afghanistan has been in almost a constant state of conflict since the Soviet Invasion of 1979. The conflict in Afghanistan, while continuous, has varied in participation, combatants, casualties, intensities, and destructiveness. The Soviet Invasion and Occupation was followed by the Afghan Civil War, which was in turn, followed by the Coalition invasion of Afghanistan as a part of Operation Enduring Freedom. While the three conflicts vary considerably, the Soviet Invasion and Operation Enduring Freedom share common themes that make them the most comparable. This paper will use the geography of Afghanistan to identify the commonalities of these two conflicts, but the complex geography of Afghanistan makes this task difficult.Bachelor of Art

A GEOGRAFIA MILITAR NA AMAZÔNIA BRASILEIRA

MILITARY GEOGRAPHY IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZONLA GEOGRAFÍA MILITAR EN AMAZONIA BRASILEÑANascida na geografia do comércio, a geografia militar tem sua origem, assim como o conhecimento geográfico, com a presença humana na superfície, através de sua forma mais concreta, pelos mapas desenhados em cavernas pelo homem. Nesse sentido, existe uma geografia militar dentro da análise geográfica. Tendo em vista essa problemática, ter-se-á como análise a sua localização temporal e a sua existência e importância para a Amazônia. Portanto, existe uma geografia militar e ela se diferencia da geopolítica, não é, pois, sinônima desta. A propósito, diante de uma geografia militar, pretendeu-se examinar as formas de existência por meio das questões amazônicas. A metodologia será baseada em estudos teóricos, que serviram para fundamentar e justificar a sua existência, ou seja, feito por meio de uma pesquisa bibliográfica. Palavras-chave: Geografia Militar; Geoestratégia; Amazônia.ABSTRACTBeen born with the geography of the trade the military geography has its origin as well as the geographical knowledge with the human presence in the surface through its more concrete form by the maps drawn in caves by the man, in this sense that form exists a military geography inside the analyzes geographical, having in mind this problematic will have as it analyze its temporal location and in the second its existence and importance for Amazon, therefore, our objective will be direcionared by demonstrates that there is a military geography and that she differentiates from the geopolitics, therefore, not being synonymous of the same to analyze the existence forms through the amazon matters in front of a military geography the methodology will be based on theoretical that served of base for to justify its existence, therefore, done through an analysis of a bibliographical research.Keywords: Military Geography; Geostrategy; Amazon.RESUMENNacida en la geografía del comercio, la geografía militar tiene su origen, así como el conocimiento geográfico con la presencia humana en la superficie a través de su forma más concreta por los mapas dibujados en cuevas por el hombre. En ese sentido, existe una geografía militar dentro del análisis geográfico, teniendo en vista esta problemática se tendrá como análisis su ubicación temporal y un segundo análisis en su existencia e importancia para la Amazonia. Por lo tanto, los objetivos orientados demuestran que existe una geografía militar y que ella se diferencia de la geopolítica, siendo así, no siendo sinónimo de la misma analizar las formas de existencia por medio de las cuestiones amazónicas ante una geografía militar. La metodología se basará en teóricos que sirvieron para fundamentar y justificar su existencia, por consiguiente, hecha por medio de un análisis de una investigación bibliográfica. Palabras clave: Geografía Militar; Geoestrategia; Amazônia

Politikai földrajzi határ a katonaföldrajzban

The issue of state borders is a complex problem of modern geography. The complexity lies in the fact that political, historical, economic, social and military geography applies different approaches of the state border as a geographical factor. Military geography usually discusses the question of borders from the point of view of the art of military science. But this approach leads to a one-sided, simplistic evaluation. The result of the geographical aspect of the modern state and the development of today’s military science is the continuous change of the military geography’s view about the state borders. The current approach of art of military science, in accordance with today’s requirements, must be replaced by an integrated approach of geographical security in relation with state borders as well. The author of the study discusses some of the theoretical questions of borders in light of the above mentioned points of view

A new methodology to manage Italian geodetic datums of the cadastral systems and of the historic maps

Cadastral maps represent the result of the highest scale survey of any region. They are not topographic maps. Their goal is to show the property system of the mapped area, so any topographic element that is important for this aspect is shown while others often omitted. Historical cadastral sheets provide valuable information about not only the natural and built environment but also about some aspects of the society of the time of the survey. Because of their high scale, their creation is extremely expensive. Even the updating of the cadastre claims considerable funds from the state budgets. That is why the coordinate system, the geodetic basis of a cadastral work is rarely changed. Re-ambulation is often made on the basis of the older version, following their geodetic and topographic 'skeleton'. The main period of the cadastral works in Europe was the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. Countries that gained their independency after this period have quite complicated cadastral systems, more or less preserving the political distribution of their lands of the time of cadastral mapping. Besides Germany, Italy provides the best example to this. Concerning Italy, the complete unification of the country was in 1870. To this time, a large part of the Apennine Peninsula was covered by cadastral surveys, mainly carried out by Piedmont, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Papal State as reported by Frazzica et al. (Geophysical Research Abstracts 11:4791, 2009). After the WWI, territorial gains from the former Habsburg Empire resulted three new cadastral systems to be incorporated (one of them 'lost' after WWII). Together with them, nowadays, Italy has 31 major ("grandi origini") and more than 800 smaller, local ("piccole origini") cadastral systems; all of them have its own projection origin (Fig. 1; Baiocchi et al. 2011). At some smaller parts of the country, the modern national map grid system was later introduced and applied as reported by Moncada (1948), Bonifacino (1953), and Giucucci (Rivista del Catasto e dei Servizi Tecnici Erariali 8(2):109-113, 1953). Fortunately, the story of the related geodetic datums was simplified prior to nowadays. Of course, the abovementioned systems had several trigonomentric networks as geodetic bases. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, the Italian Institute of Military Geography (Istituto Geografico Militare; I.G.M) developed four geodetic networks, all on the Bessel 1841 ellipsoid; the Genova 1902 (Fig. 2), the old Monte Mario (Fig. 3), the Castanea delle Furie 1910, and the Guardia Vecchia (Fig. 4) datums, for northern, central, and southern Italy and Sardinia, respectively (Mori 1922). However, these systems were independent ones; afterward, one of them, the Genova 1902 datum, was extended to cover other parts of the country. Outside of northern Italy, the original area of this datum, the coordinates of the basepoint, and the cadastral system origins were transformed from the locally valid network to Genova 1902 datum. The present paper aims to estimate the accuracy of this extension of that system and to describe the parameters of the other systems for GIS applications, thus offering a tool for future, higher accuracy methods to fit the cadastral maps of southern Italy and Sardinia to modern grids. This can be useful also to convert some older technical maps that were referred to the same geodetic datums. © 2013 Società Italiana di Fotogrammetria e Topografia (SIFET)

Moving through Medieval Macedonia: Late Modern Cartography, Archive Material and Hydrographic Data Used for the Regressive Modelling of Transportation Networks

The aim of this article is to illustrate how the rich data which was gathered during the scholarly work on Macedonia, Southern Part (Tabula Imperii Byzantini, 11) as well as on Macedonia, Northern Part (Tabula Imperii Byzantini, 16) from 2002 until 2010 can be combined with applications deriving from Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) in order to create a case study on the transportation network and on the hydrography of Lake Vegoritis in the historical region of Macedonia. For this reason a holistic approach combining humanities and natural sciences is applied, which comprises not only written medieval sources, which have already been evaluated in the bibliography, but also late modern datasets. Their undisputable value lies in the fact that they convey the state of the respective landscapes before industrialisation commenced in South-East Europe. In the near future the author will expand his research in order to cover eight lakes in the southern Balkan peninsula – namely Lake Ohrid, the Great Prespa Lake, the Small Prespa Lake, Lake Petron, Lake Vegoritis, Lake Dojran, Lake Kerkini and the vanished Lake Achianos, which lay on the Thessalonica Front (Macedonian Front) between 1915 and 1918 and on which hydrographic data was gathered before, during and shortly after the Great War. By combining Byzantine and Ottoman sources, travel literature, maps, archaeological evidence and hydrographic data the author ventures to compare different water basins, to discern their impact on the transportation networks through time and thus to reconstruct the landscapes of past times.This scholarly research was funded by the Adolf Holzhausen Legat of the Austrian Academy of Sciences