Field Engineering and Pioneer Skills

ENG 201 · Field Engineering and Pioneer · Level 200 (Phase Two)

A Royal Army College course in the practical engineering of the field soldier.

Course length: 10 hours, studied online and asynchronously at the student's own pace, together with any in-person practical instruction and assessment the course requires.

Foreword

Armies have always carried, beside the soldier who fights, the soldier who builds. The pioneer and the field engineer make the ground work for the force: they help it move, slow an adversary, give it cover and shelter, find it water, bridge what blocks it, and, for an army like this one, hold back a flood and dig out the trapped. None of it is glamorous, and almost all of it is decisive, because a force that cannot shelter, cannot cross, and cannot drink is beaten before it begins, and a population in a disaster is saved or lost by exactly these plain skills.

For the Royal Kaharagian Army, a small, lightly armed, humanitarian home-defence force, field engineering wears a particular face. It is far less the bridging of a contested river under fire than the raising of a flood barrier, the shoring of a damaged building, the making safe of a hazard, the supply of clean water to people who have none. The same hands and the same principles serve both, and this course teaches them in the humanitarian and home-defence setting the Army will actually meet, while keeping the soldier's understanding of the wider field-engineering tradition from which they come.

Above every task in this course stands one word: safety. Field engineering works with heavy loads, sharp tools, deep holes, moving water, unstable structures, and sometimes the residue of explosives, and it injures the careless and the unlucky. The pioneer who works fast and unsafely is no use to anyone, because the casualty they become is one more person the force must now carry. Throughout, the course teaches the safe way as the only way.

Who this course is for

Trained soldiers of the Royal Kaharagian Army taking up, or supporting, the field-engineering and pioneer role, and any member whose tasks call for practical field works. It assumes Recruit Training (RMT 101) and the field discipline that comes with it, and it sits alongside the fieldcraft, logistics, and humanitarian courses, with which it shares much ground.

What you will be able to do

By the end you will be able to:

• describe the pioneer and field-engineer role and the functions field engineering serves for a small humanitarian force;
• select and use the common hand tools and materials safely, and work to a safety-first standard;
• tie the essential knots and lashings and rig simple mechanical aids;
• build basic field protection and cover, and site it correctly;
• construct expedient obstacles and barriers, and mark and record them;
• find, lift, store, and purify water for a force and for relief;
• carry out expedient construction, repair, and gap-crossing within safe limits;
• carry out flood, storm, and disaster works in support of the civil authority; and
• recognise and report explosive and field hazards, never handling what is not yours to handle.

How the course works

The course is self-paced and studied online, lesson by lesson, with a worked example and a reflection in each. But field engineering is a practical trade, learned finally in the hands and not on the page; the course gives the knowledge and the safe method, and the building, lifting, lashing, and digging are practised and signed off in person under qualified supervision, in the spirit of the College's practical components. Nothing in this course is to be attempted on real structures, real water hazards, or anything resembling an explosive on the strength of the reading alone.

Structure

A note on the RKA's reality

The Royal Kaharagian Army holds no territory and is far likelier to be raising a flood bank, shoring a damaged home, or supplying water in a disaster than to be fortifying a position in war. This course keeps that reality in view: the field-engineering tradition is taught for the understanding it gives, but the worked examples and the emphasis fall on the humanitarian and home-defence tasks the Army actually undertakes, and on the safety that all of them demand.

A note on sources

This is the College's own course, built on the British and Commonwealth field-engineering and pioneer tradition and the open professional and humanitarian-engineering literature (including the Sphere standards for water and shelter in relief), adapted to a small, lightly armed, humanitarian home-defence force and written fresh in Kaharagian terms rather than reproduced.

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