Royal Army College

Lesson Overview

This first lesson frames the whole course. Before learning to read a map or use a compass, a soldier should understand why navigation and fieldcraft matter, what the two halves of the course are, and what the map is. It introduces the soldier's standing duty to know their position at all times, the map as a model of the ground, why these skills still matter in the age of the satellite receiver, and what they mean for the work the RKA actually does. It then teaches, as a usable drill, what to do on the day you realise you are no longer sure where you are.

By the end you will be able to explain why navigation and fieldcraft are basic skills of soldiering, describe the two halves of the course and how its lessons build on one another, say in plain terms what a map is, explain why the map and compass remain the reliable foundation that a device can never replace, and carry out the first steps of the lost-or-unsure-of-position drill correctly.

Key Terms

Navigation: the skill of knowing where you are and finding your way to where you must be.
Fieldcraft: the skill of operating in the field effectively and, when required, unseen, and of keeping yourself fit to continue.
The field: open country away from the made world of roads and signposts, where a soldier must rely on their own skills to move and work.
Map: a scaled drawing of a piece of ground as seen from directly above, using agreed signs to show what is there.
Scale: the fixed relationship between a distance on the map and the real distance on the ground.
Satellite receiver: a hand-held device that reads its position from satellites and shows it on a screen; a navigation aid, not a substitute for the map and compass.
Last certain point: the most recent place at which you were genuinely sure of your position, recalled as a grid reference and a time; the anchor from which a lost soldier relocates.
Handrail: a linear feature, such as a stream, wall, track, fence, or ridge, that runs your way and can be followed by eye instead of a strict compass bearing.
Resection: fixing your own position by taking bearings to two or three features you can both see and identify on the map; named here, taught in Lesson 04.

The field is the soldier's workplace

Almost everything a soldier does happens, sooner or later, in the field. The search for a missing person leads onto the open hill; the relief of a flooded valley means working in broken, dangerous country; an exercise runs across miles of ground; a patrol moves where there are no streets. The soldier leaves behind the made world of roads, signs, and certain shelter, and enters country that must be read, crossed, and worked in by skill rather than by following directions. The soldier who is at home in the field is effective there. The soldier who is not is a burden to those who must look after them, and in bad country a danger to themselves.

Ease in the field is not a gift some people are born with. It is a set of learnable skills, and this course teaches their foundation. A soldier who has learned to find their way, read the ground, move across it, and look after themselves in it can be sent into hard country and trusted to arrive, to function, and to come back.

Knowing where you are is the soldier's own duty

One habit comes first and underlies the rest: a soldier must know where they are, at all times and in every way they can. This is not done once at the start of a march and then forgotten. It is a continuous duty, carried by the soldier and by no one else, kept up step by step across a whole day in the field.

To know where you are, in the full sense, is to say more than a grid reference. It is to know your position on the map and on the ground at once; to know which way you are facing and which way your objective lies; to know the distance and direction back to your last certain point; to know what landmarks stand around you and where the dangerous ground lies. A soldier who carries all of that in the head is hard to lose and quick to recover when something goes wrong. A soldier who carries none of it, who simply follows the person in front and trusts that someone is navigating, is one missed turn away from being a casualty and a problem for everyone else.

The duty is discharged by constant small checks, not occasional great efforts. As you move, you keep the map set to the ground and your thumb at your position; you tick off each feature as you pass it, confirming that the ground unfolds as the map said it would; you keep a running sense of how far you have come and in what direction. None of this is difficult or dramatic. It is the discipline of paying attention, and it is the single habit that separates a navigator from a passenger. Lesson 05 teaches these checks in full. Fix this now, on the first day: staying found is your own responsibility, done all the time, so that you are never relocating from nothing.

The two skills and how the course fits together

The course builds two distinct but connected skills. The first is navigation: knowing where you are, and how to get to where you need to be. It rests on the map, the compass, and the ability to read the real ground against them, and it keeps a soldier, and those depending on them, from becoming lost, late, or worse. The second is fieldcraft: operating in the field, moving across country using the ground, concealing yourself and seeing without being seen, observing and judging what is around you, living in the open while staying fit to work, and, when it all goes wrong, drawing help to yourself. Navigation gets you there; fieldcraft is how you operate once you are there, and how you keep going.

The two meet constantly. A soldier navigating across country uses the ground as fieldcraft teaches; a soldier living in the field must still know where they are. This course teaches navigation first, in Lessons 02 to 05, because you must be able to find your way before the rest is much use, and then fieldcraft, in Lessons 06 to 09. Treat them as one craft with two halves.

The navigation lessons are not a heap of separate tricks but four steps answering four plain questions. Where am I? is answered by reading the map and the ground together, and it is the foundation: Lessons 02 and 03 teach the map, its scale, signs, and grid, and the shape of the ground in its contours, and Lesson 04 adds the compass and the bearing for when nothing on the ground will guide you. Which way, and how far, to where I must be? is the planning of a route, broken into manageable legs each with its bearing, distance, and expected features, which Lesson 05 builds. How do I know I am still on the route? is the act of checking as you go, comparing the ground you meet against the route you planned, recognising your landmarks in their expected places, watching your bearing and your distance; this too is Lesson 05, and it is where the lost-or-unsure drill below belongs. And how do I know I have arrived? is recognising the objective, often a small and easily missed place, by working onto a sure nearby feature first and only then making the short final approach. Each step rests on the one before, which is why the lessons run in this order, and why a soldier should not hurry past the early ones to reach the parts that sound more like soldiering.

The fieldcraft lessons fit together the same way. Concealment and the use of ground (Lesson 06) and observation, judging distance, and detecting movement (Lesson 07) are two sides of one coin, seeing without being seen; sound movement by day and night carries them onto the ground; living in the field (Lesson 08) keeps a soldier fit to do any of it hour after hour; and attracting help (Lesson 09) is the fieldcraft of the worst case, when a soldier or a casualty must be found. Read this way, the course is a single answer to the two questions the field always asks: where am I and how do I get where I must be, and how do I operate out here effectively, unseen when I must be, and still fit to do my job.

The map: the soldier's chief tool

At the centre of navigation sits the map. A map is a drawing of a piece of ground as seen from directly above, shrunk to a manageable size and marked with agreed signs for the things that are there: the hills and rivers, the roads and tracks, the woods and buildings. It is a model of the ground small enough to carry and study.

Two ideas make the map work, and the course returns to both. The first is scale, the fixed relationship between a distance on the map and the real distance on the ground, which lets a soldier measure a real journey on a piece of paper. The second is the system of signs and the grid, the agreed symbols that show what each mark means and the squared reference system that lets any point be named exactly. A soldier who can read a map can look at the paper and see, in the mind's eye, the real country it stands for, the steepness of a slope, the bend of a valley, the line of a track, before ever setting foot on it. That is the single most valuable skill in navigation, and Lessons 02 and 03 build it. The lost drill below leans on it hardest, because relocating means holding the map against the ground in front of you and asking, with care, whether the two agree.

Why these skills matter, even now

Why labour over a paper map and a compass when a satellite receiver shows a position at the touch of a screen? Because a receiver is an aid, and aids fail. The battery goes flat at the worst moment, and the cold of a winter hill flattens it faster than the maker's figures promise; the signal is lost under trees, in a steep valley, against a hillside, or among buildings, exactly the close country a search so often runs through; the device is dropped on rock, soaked in a river crossing, or simply broken. A soldier who can navigate only by the screen is, when it dies, not slowed but stopped, and simply lost. The map and the compass need no battery and no signal. They can be soaked and still read, dropped and still work, used in the dark and the wet and the cold without complaint.

The map and compass are therefore the foundation, and the receiver sits on top as a useful extra. A soldier who can navigate by map and compass can do three things the soldier who cannot will never do: check the device against the ground and the map, and so notice when it is wrong; correct the course when the device lies, as devices sometimes quietly do; and carry on without it the moment it dies, finishing the task on the foundation that was there all along. This is not a rejection of useful technology. Use a receiver where it helps; on a clear day with a fresh battery it is quick and exact. But build the foundation first, so the aid is an extra and never a crutch, and never let the screen do the thinking that should be in your head. The lost soldier is a casualty in waiting and a liability to everyone relying on them. The soldier who has truly learned to navigate is never wholly lost, because the means to find themselves is in their hands and their head, not in a battery.

When you are lost or unsure of your position

Sooner or later, however well a soldier navigates, doubt comes: the ground stops matching the map, an expected feature does not appear, or the cold realisation arrives that you are no longer sure where you are. This happens to good navigators as well as poor ones. What separates them is not that the good never feel doubt, but that they answer it with a drill instead of panic. The drill below is taught here in plain outline so a soldier knows it from the first day; Lesson 05 teaches it in full detail, with the map work and techniques, and resection is built on the ground in Lesson 04. Learn its shape now.

First, stop. The moment you are unsure, halt where you are. The worst thing a doubtful navigator can do is press on hoping the ground will sort itself out, because every further step in doubt carries you further from your last certain point and makes the eventual fix harder. Standing still costs almost nothing; wandering on can cost everything.

Second, stay calm and admit it early. Doubt is not failure, and the soldier who admits it at once, quietly and without fuss, is most of the way to recovering. The soldier who hides it, presses on, and hopes turns a small uncertainty into a real emergency. If you are with others, say so plainly; if you are leading, say it without embarrassment, because a section that stops and relocates together loses minutes, while a section led on in stubborn silence can lose hours or a person. Calm also lets you think, and thinking is what the next steps need.

Third, check the map against the visible ground. Set the map to the ground so its north matches the world around you, and look hard at what you can actually see: the lie of the slopes, the line of any stream or valley, the shape of the high ground, a wood, a wall, a track, a building. Then ask whether the map shows the same things in the same arrangement around the position you believed you were at. Often this alone resolves the doubt, because the ground confirms you were right, or shows plainly that you are one valley or one spur out from where you thought. Read the shape of the ground, not just the obvious landmarks, for the slopes and watercourses are the most reliable detail and the hardest to mistake.

Fourth, work out your last certain point and what you have done since. If the ground does not settle the question at once, go back over your movement in your head. Recall the last place you were genuinely sure of your position, as a grid reference and a time, for that point is the anchor for everything that follows. Then reconstruct what you have done since: the direction you set off in, roughly how far you have come, how long you have been moving, any turn you made or feature you passed. From the last certain point, your direction, and your distance and time, you can lay a sensible estimate of where you now are onto the map, and a sensible estimate is far easier to confirm than a blank one.

Fifth, relocate. With an estimate in hand, fix your position by whichever of three means the ground allows. The surest, where the country gives you the features for it, is to match what you see to the map: pick out two or three things you can both see on the ground and find on the map, and confirm they sit around you in the right directions and distances; when they do, you are found. Where the ground runs along an obvious handrail, a linear feature such as a stream, wall, track, fence, or the edge of a wood, follow it back to a line you know for certain, for a handrail leads somewhere, and following it to a known crossing or junction turns a vague position into a sure one. And where you can see distant features but cannot tell at a glance which of several you are near, fix your position by resection, taking bearings to two or three known features and plotting them so the lines cross at your position; resection is named here and taught in Lesson 04. Any of the three will do; use whichever the ground in front of you offers.

flowchart TD
    A["Unsure of your position"] --> B["STOP. Do not wander on"]
    B --> C["Stay calm; admit it early"]
    C --> D["Check the map against the ground you can see"]
    D --> E["Fix your last certain point and what you have done since"]
    E --> F{"Can you relocate?"}
    F -->|yes| G["Match features, follow a handrail to a known line, or resect (Lesson 04)"]
    F -->|no| H["Stay put; make yourself findable (Lesson 09)"]
    G --> I["Confirm, then carry on"]

Sixth, if you are still lost, stay put and make yourself findable. If none of this works, if the cloud is down, the light is gone, or the ground simply will not resolve, the rule is firm: do not wander on hoping to stumble onto something. A soldier who stays in one place is far easier to find than one who keeps moving, and a moving lost soldier widens the area others must search and tires themselves into a second casualty. Stop in a place that gives some shelter, look after yourself and anyone with you against the cold and wet (the fieldcraft of Lesson 08), and set about being found: by radio first where one works, and otherwise by the emergency and ground-to-air signals taught in Lesson 09. Being findable is itself a skill, and it is the disciplined end of the drill when relocating has failed.

The whole drill rests on the duty set out earlier, of knowing where you are all the time. A soldier who has been checking the map against the ground as they go is never relocating from nothing, because their last certain point is recent and their reconstruction is short. The soldier who has not been paying attention has the same drill to follow but a far harder time of it, because the last certain point is hours behind and everything since is a guess. That is why the constant checking matters: it makes the bad moment recoverable.

What this means for the RKA

For the Royal Kaharagian Army these are not distant or theoretical skills. The Army's most likely field task is search and rescue, and to search for a lost person is, before anything else, an act of navigation: a search area must be reached, divided, and worked systematically, and a searcher who cannot navigate cannot search. The irony is worth stating plainly: a searcher who has not mastered the lost drill above can become the very thing the search exists to recover. Humanitarian and disaster work means operating in hard, changed, and dangerous country, where reading the ground and looking after oneself keep a soldier useful rather than turning them into another casualty. Exercises and field training demand these skills constantly. For the RKA they are among the most directly and frequently useful of all, because they serve the very work the Army is most often called to do.

In Practice: The Searcher Who Could Find Themselves

A walker is reported missing on the high ground as the light begins to fail, and a section of the RKA is sent to help the civil rescue service search. The skills of this course decide whether each soldier is a help or a second problem. A soldier who can navigate takes their allotted stretch of hillside, knows where its boundaries lie on the map and on the ground, works it methodically in the failing light, and can always say exactly where they are when they report in, so ground is covered once and properly and nothing is searched twice or missed. A soldier who can read the ground anticipates where a tired, frightened walker might have gone, the sheltered gully, the false trail downhill, and where the dangerous ground lies that the searchers themselves must respect. A soldier with sound fieldcraft is still warm, fed, sure-footed, and effective hours later in the cold and dark, rather than becoming a casualty the others must now rescue. When, late in the search, the mist comes down and one soldier loses certainty of their position, the difference shows plainest: instead of pressing on and adding a second missing person to the night's work, they stop, fix their last certain point, relocate off a wall that runs back to a known track, and carry on, because they had been checking the ground against the map all along and knew the drill. None of it is dramatic, and all of it is the difference between a searcher who finds the lost and one who joins them. That is what this course is for.

Check Your Understanding

The lesson says knowing where you are is the soldier's own continuous duty. What does it mean to know your position "in every way you can", beyond a grid reference, and how is that duty discharged as you move? Why does it make the lost drill easier?
Why does the lesson insist that the map and compass remain the foundation even when a satellite receiver is available? Name two ways a receiver fails in the field, and explain the three things a soldier who can navigate by map and compass can do that a soldier who relies on the screen cannot.
Set out the lost-or-unsure-of-position drill in order, in your own words. Why is the first action to stop, and what are the three ways of relocating once you have an estimate of where you are? What is the correct, disciplined ending if relocating fails?

Reflection (write a short paragraph): This lesson says the lost soldier is "a casualty in waiting and a liability to everyone relying on them", while the soldier who has truly learned to navigate is never wholly lost. Think about a real field task the RKA might face, such as a search on the high ground, and describe how a soldier's navigation and fieldcraft, and their handling of the moment they become unsure of their position, would decide whether they were a help or a second problem. What does that tell you about how seriously to take the practical that follows this knowledge?

Summary

The field is the soldier's workplace, and being effective in it is a set of learnable skills, not an inborn gift; this course teaches their foundation.
Knowing where you are is the soldier's own continuous duty, kept up by constant small checks as you move, not done once and forgotten; it is the habit that separates a navigator from a passenger and the thing that makes a bad moment recoverable.
The course builds two connected skills: navigation (Lessons 02 to 05: where am I, which way and how far, am I still on the route, have I arrived) and fieldcraft (Lessons 06 to 09: concealment, observation, movement, field living, and attracting help). Each lesson builds on the one before.
A map is a scaled drawing of the ground seen from above, marked with agreed signs; the key skill is seeing the real ground in the map, and the lost drill leans on it hardest.
The map and compass are the reliable foundation; a satellite receiver is an aid that fails through flat batteries, lost signal, and breakage, and the trained soldier can check it, correct it, and carry on without it.
When unsure of your position, follow the drill: stop and do not wander; stay calm and admit it early; check the map against the visible ground; work out your last certain point and what you have done since; relocate by matching features, by following a handrail back to a known line, or by resection (taught in Lesson 04); and if still lost, stay put and make yourself findable (Lesson 09).
For the RKA these skills are directly and frequently useful, above all for search and rescue and humanitarian field work, the tasks the Army is most likely to perform; navigation and fieldcraft are mastered on the ground and certified in person.

Finding Your Way and Living in the Field