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Corps tackles erosion of navigation skills

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — Many Marines cannot plot their own positions on a map grid by hand.

Global Positioning System receivers are no longer mere conveniences of modern life. They are now essential equipment, the very backbone of contemporary warfare.

Marines are now so dependent on the devices — some say addicted — that many are at risk of disaster if they lose power or signals in critical combat situations. GPS addiction has captured the attention of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, which ordered a study in 2007 to find out why Marines are struggling with conventional land navigation, one of the basic, fundamental skills taught at entry-level training for everyone.

Nearly two years later, the study is unfinished and on hold, as the officer in charge moves to a new assignment. The skill is being reinforced at career schools, but the Corps doesn’t have a solution for the operating forces.

Commanders ultimately decide which skills to drill during predeployment training and which ones to ignore. The strain of seven-month-on, seven-month-off deployment cycles means commanders have to prioritize, officials say, so sometimes basic skills are taken for granted. Land nav is especially vulnerable because of the easy access to technology as a solution.

That makes sense — until the batteries run out.

Sitting ducks

On a winter day in 2005, Sgt. Damian Senerchia’s infantry squad suddenly found itself lost among a series of buildings and alleyways in Hit, Iraq. The Marines’ GPS receiver went blank during the squad’s foot patrol.

They had a map, but no extra batteries, and no compass.

“We were using the GPS as our compass,” said Senerchia, then a private first class. “It put us in a bad position, especially in that urban environment. ... We didn’t know where we were.”

In fact, they were just a stone’s throw from their base, but they didn’t learn that until a Quick Reaction Force they called in found the squad in less than 10 minutes.

Today, Senerchia teaches land nav and shares that embarrassing story with his students at the Battle Skills Training School at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

“When that technology goes, what do you have?” Senerchia asked. “Without these skills, you’re sitting ducks. You have to keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it. It’s very perishable.”

Capt. Mike Regner, an infantry officer at the Warfighting Lab in Quantico, Va., knows just how perishable those skills are.

“Land nav is one of those things we’ve consistently had a problem with,” he said in a telephone interview.

In 2005, while running a series of evaluations looking into advanced infantry skills, officials at the lab noticed that Marines struggled with map reading. The same problem arose during a subsequent test in another experiment in 2006, Regner said.

“We were asking them to do tactical land navigation,” he said. “Patrol from this point to that point. Or, tell me what grid coordinate that target is at. We were trying to get them to do tactical land nav and they weren’t able to do that.”

Marines ran into similar obstacles in 2007, during the lab’s experiments with Combat Hunter, a training program launched last year that teaches Marines how to observe and communicate when seeking out the enemy.

“With Combat Hunter, you’re basically required to have a certain level of situational awareness,” Regner said. “You would say, ‘OK Marines, I want you to go and observe this piece of terrain,’ or, ‘Go and observe this building.’ We’d give them a map and satellite images.

“Basically it came down to, ‘I think I can find that place,’ ” Regner said. “They have to know where they are. They don’t always know how to do that.”

Focusing on land nav

Recruits receive 12½ hours of land navigation instruction at boot camp and another four hours at Marine Combat Training and the Schools of Infantry. For officers, The Basic School requires more than 50 hours of land navigation training and is one of the first classes new arrivals must complete, said Capt. Chad Troyer, a TBS instructor.

“The reason we teach and stress it so much is, GPS is great and everybody has it now, but they can’t rely on it,” he said.

The Corps has more than 11,000 hand-held Defense Advanced GPS Receivers, according to Marine Corps Systems Command officials. Each infantry battalion has 49 DAGRs and the Corps has a host of systems, including Blue Force Tracker and the Lightweight 155mm Howitzer, with built-in GPS.

Meanwhile, Marine units are rapidly trading in their obsolete Precision Lightweight GPS Receivers, known as PLGRs, or “pluggers,” for DAGRs, or “daggers,” which are more secure.

The Corps also issues compasses to deploying units, of course, but those often go unused.

Lance Cpl. Marvin Sanders, an infantryman with 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, said his unit used GPS receivers to plot grids on a map, a common practice, while in Afghanistan last year.

“We were using maps on every patrol that we had to do,” he said. “You had to go on the maps.”

The terrain where his unit operated is peppered with waterways and canals, which don’t show up on GPS receivers, he said.

Early last December, shortly after 1/6 returned from that deployment, the Marines took a land navigation course at Lejeune.

Sgt. Maj. Charlie Stanford, the battalion’s sergeant major, said Marines have to be proficient at land nav because GPS does not assist them with map reading, orientation, terrain overlays or terrain study. And, in some remote areas, GPS does not work, he said.

Land navigation should be sustained annually “at a minimum,” said Bruce Raich, Marine Corps Common Skills supervisor with Marine Corps Training & Education Command in Quantico. But he reiterated that commanders ultimately decide what to include in their training. And, for now, the Corps is leaving it up to them to determine how much time their units should focus on land nav training.

Practice makes perfect

It’s a mid-April morning, and Senerchia polls his students: How long has it been since they last practiced land navigation, he asks. There are about 50 of them, mostly members of 2nd Marine Logistics Group’s Combat Logistics Regiment 27.

The answers come back in a range: two months, six months, not since MCT.

“How often are we doing land nav? Rarely,” Senerchia concludes.

After going through step-by-step instructions, the students are given coordinates and told to identify a location on the map.

“I want to be dead-on,” Senerchia tells them. “I don’t want any room for error.”

How do you pinpoint your location on a map, Senerchia asks. “OnStar,” quips one student, referring to the communication and navigation system available in civilian automobiles.

No, Senerchia counsels. Relying on GPS to save you is a recipe for disaster.

“It’s going to bite you in the ass.”

After the two-hour classroom portion of the course, students split into six-man teams and make for the swamps. Armed with rifles, one map, one compass and one protractor, each team has four hours to find four boxes.

Members of the self-titled “A-Team” tramp swiftly to their first objective — a red-painted ammo can attached to a tree. But then their pace slows as they seek out roots, downed limbs and the rare bit of solid ground to step on as they cross a swampy area.

Sinking into thick, black mud sometimes up to their thighs, they laugh and curse, occasionally stopping to check the map and compass to ensure they are still heading in the right direction.

They found their first box within 45 minutes, giving them a 15-minute jump on their second one.

They find the second box within an hour. But it takes the full four hours to complete the task, and the other teams take just as long — but everyone does complete it in the four-hour window.

Now the challenge is preserving their new-found skills.

Cpl. Nolan Kopecky completed a similar course less than six months before, but it had been two years since he had done land nav before that, he said.

“If you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it for sure,” he said.

No quick fix

Regner, of the Warfighting Lab, summed up the requirement: “We have to figure out a better way to do land navigation,” he said.

In 2007, the lab initiated Trail Blazer, an underlying field craft study to examine land navigation and other core skills. But the officer in charge is moving, and his replacement hasn’t arrived. For now, Trail Blazer is stuck in the mud.

What happens next is unclear.

“Is the Marine Corps going to do anything about it? I don’t know,” he said. “Everything that we do right now serves a purpose. It’s up to the commander to say what his priority’s going to be.

“Who’s going to choose land nav over first aid or marksmanship?” Regner asked. “There is no short-term solution. That kind of drastic change is nowhere in the pipeline.”

Still, there are steps. The recently revamped Corporals Course, now standardized across the Corps, includes more time for land navigation instruction and field movement exercises.

But many question whether a course here or there will ever be enough. Retired Col. Brad Washabaugh, a former commander of the School of Infantry-East at Lejeune, said land navigation should “be taught every step along the way.”

“There are other benefits to land navigation than getting from point A to point B,” he said. “You learn confidence. I think we’re kind of in that transition phase of having a manual method and having a technological solution. We’re still trying to do both, and that’s a question the Marine Corps has to ask itself — do we have time to do both?

“I would challenge the Marine Corps to use technology in a way to make it easier to teach land navigation.”