Saved Rounds 12/1

Articles, resources, and responses for your weekend coffee

Editor’s Note: Saved Rounds is a weekly post for the CxFile Staff to share articles, resources, and responses we’ve found to the wider audience.

Are you tired of plotting grids for live fire ranges on 1:50,000 maps that are not detailed enough to use reliably? Finally, a handy tool that will completely change the way you plan and conduct training.

Caltopo is an online map resource billed as an "adventure planning" tool. It's used mostly by hikers, backpackers, offroaders, and other outdoorsmen, but this outstanding resource offers enormous benefits to make training tougher, more realistic, and exponentially more precise. 

The mapping software enables you to use geographic maps, satellite maps, and topographic maps as your base imagery. You can also layer topographic maps on top of satellite maps to display contour lines. You can set the contour interval as well as the map scale, enabling you to use military scales such as 1:100,000, 1:50,000, and 1:25,000, or go even more detailed such as 1:12,000. Settings allow you to use latitude/longitude or Military Grid Reference System (MGRS). An especially helpful setting allows you to put down northings and eastings at 1000m intervals or even 100m intervals, essential for identifying 8-digit grids of points on the deck during execution, although the cursor points to 10 digit grids when you're plugged in.

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Let your battle buddy know you are thinking about their lethality and send them this post.

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Once you have your base map established by imagery, scale, and contour interval, you can put down icons that serve a host of extremely helpful functions, such as:

-Markers to symbolize checkpoints, way points, friendly/enemy positions, attack/assault positions, final coordination lines, firing positions, objectives, etc;

-Measuring tools to measure distances;

-Radius circles tham emanate from a specific point, which can indicate friendly/enemy max effective weapons ranges, effective casualty radiuses (ECR) of weapons systems, and minimum safe distances (MSD) of indirect fire weapons systems;

-Bearing lines, which can be used as azimuths/back azimuths. Especially handy when plotting gun target lines (GTL) and then measuring another azimuth 15 degrees off the GTL to find the Minimum Safe Line (MSL) of direct fire weapons, and can be used to connect MSD's to show a buffer for a mortar system;

-Especially noteworthy is the Viewshed feature, which displays what can be seen at a specific height from a specific point on the map. This excellent feature shades surrounding terrain in a certain color to show what can be seen from that point. For example, a point on the map set to 1m (approximate height of a machine gun bunker), 2m (average height of a person), 3m (approximate height of a person in a vehicle turret), etc. Gives a remarkable idea of what and how far can be seen from high ground such as a peak, hilltop, or ridgeline. Excellent for identifying covered avenues of approach. Note: This feature only accounts for terrain, not vegetation so it is more helpful in some places than others. It is extremely useful for Twentynine Palms;

-Another great feature is the ability to save as a PDF file to distribute to electronically or save your plans for later. Can also print to scale, making maps usable to Marines on the ground. Simply laminate so you can use with protractors and map pens the old fashioned way during execution;

-And many other features/settings. Naturally you can set them to display in any color you want, perhaps blue for friendly or red for enemy, and different colors to distinguish MSL's from GTL's , MSD's for different weapons systems, and so on.

This is just a short list of some of the best features, but is by no means an exhaustive list of all. Caltopo offers a free version that includes all of the above features. A subscription buys access to more features, although the free version is not only sufficient but extremely capable.

I have personally used and seen Caltopo Maps used by others to effectively plan static live fire ranges, squad fire/movement attacks, platoon and company live fire/maneuver attacks, unit defenses, land navigation courses, navigation for movements, products for confirmation briefs, and even found it useful for building tactical decision games. At the start of this article is an initial scheme of maneuver diagram I made using Caltopo for a company attack at Morgan's Well in Twentynine Palms. This document depicts the big picture of integrating/deconflicting fires and maneuver at 1:25,000 scale. But don't stop at 1:25K! The smaller the unit, the tighter the scale should be and you can plan in much more detail with custom scale settings.

Caltopo is an outstanding tool that is highly recommended to every company grade infantry leader.

Get started today at:

https://caltopo.com

Major Mike Hanson is currently a student at Command and Staff College. He can be reached at falconhorn45@gmail.com.

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Retrans - Responses from the Community

From James Salerno in response to Outdated Doctrine: The Construction of Mortar Firing Pits

From a former BN mortar PL in the Airborne Infantry:

Fully Agree.

Luckily I had great NCOs who shaped me and good leaders who allowed us to be effective.

We had towed 120s and this is where we focused our deliberate defense efforts.

In fact we did a defense LFX where we established a fire base in a triangle formation that culminated with a FPF and displacement.

But the 81s (and 60s) were always prioritized for hip shoots and set in a wood line with minimum necessary masking and overhead clearance.

Somewhere along the way, GWOT convinced the force we need 360 degree fires from mortars, and that’s just not sound in LSCO.

Great article CPT

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From the Staff: We are highly interested in publishing lessons learned on SUAS employment at the Squad and Platoon Level. Please consider sharing with us if you have tried, failed and/or succeeded! CUAS AARs are welcome too.

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