Dirt: Key Terrain

Bloody Ford, Charles Johnson Post, 1898, San Juan Hill, Cuba

13

Conformation of the ground is of the greatest assistance in battle.

Sun Tsu, The Art of War

Infantrymen travel to a particular place on the earth — fight to control a location, defend a place against attacks by others — because that piece of dirt has value, because that dirt has some meaning. Otherwise they would not go there; otherwise they would not be there.

The value of a location has much to do with the geometries and trigonometries of the weapons they carry. High ground is better than low ground, most of the time. High ground where the shape of the ground provides natural defenses against attack is even better. Best of all is ground from which a soldier can control the ability of his enemy to move elsewhere. Finding that place, that key terrain, is part of a soldier’s craft.

In some parts of the world it is easy. If it is a place where people have been a long time, a place with a history of conflict (say the Rhine River valley) then it is more than easy — most of the time there is already a structure on the key terrain built to defend or control the ground.

For a single infantryman, key terrain is simply where he can see and shoot and not be shot. If where he is on the earth meets those criteria, he is on key terrain, his key terrain. If he is moving, then his personal key terrain is somewhere around him, where he was, where he is going, or maybe a meter or two to his left or right. He is usually looking for his place as he walks along. His movement becomes a chain of equations: if the enemy is there, then my place is over there. If I move to that place, then I will be safe, I will be able to kill him.

However, soldiering is a collective activity. Being an infantryman is being part of a group of men. If soldiers watch only for their individual places on the earth they are no different from the individual birds in a covey of quail that has been flushed to flutter up into the air to be hunted down one by one after they scatter across the field.

The movements of a soldier are not part of a random walk. They move from one place to another place that is selected by them or for them from maps, from sending someone out in front of them to look at the ground in the direction they are going, from guesses about the value of a place on the ground made by someone else. 

But first of all, they have to know where they are.