EXPLORATION OF THE UTILITY OF GEOLOGICAL ENGINEERING FOR MILITARY ENGINEERS

This talk examines a premise that military engineering and geological engineering are intellectually paired and overlap in practice to a significant extent. Geological engineering is an established, albeit young, academic discipline with supporting professional organizations and enjoys wide industry and civil demand. In contrast, military engineering is ancient, an empirically derived training or ‘OJT’ program with practice-based trade-associations that has narrow government-only utility. The premise is formed by observation of a decade of US Army military engineer officers completing a master of science degree in geological engineering as a complement to their practice-based training in military engineering at the ‘Captains Career Course’ of the US Army Engineer School.

The talk will cover first literature involving geological engineering, military engineering – which also happened to be the speaker's work background -- and the intersection in writing, works and memoirs of military and geological engineering. The latter was sometimes called military geology, geospatial information, geospatial-intelligence, engineering intelligence, military engineering, environmental engineering, explosives/energetics, civil, geotechnical and soils engineering, mining (both mineral and military) and sappers. Over time each of those terms grew beyond a military geological core and have become fields in their own right.

From there the talk will cover several articles that cross communities of practice in both military engineering and geological engineering. Case studies on water security, geospatial education development, and some notable 'goofs' in military practice that might have been better informed by geosciences are presented.