[FRMAG]

I have two sons on active duty both NCOs and both Staff Sergeants. Both boys learned map and compass as Boy scouts and Land Navigation and Orienteering from me (active duty Army NCO then.)

I have questioned both recently about the "pluggers" and from what they tell me dependence on those devices is viurtually universal as today's soldiers are very poor at Land Navigation.

Both of my sons still carry both a compass and an altimiter and routinely use them to back check what the "plugger" tells them.

There is also the issue of degraded battery performance in very cold environments.

[vbmoneyspender]

I appreciate the response. I have never served in the military and was looking at this as a technical problem. My take on this is that any time you have human beings trying to do even moderately complicated calculations, eventually they are going to make mistakes, particularly when they are operating under stress. So, instead of relying on humans to do the calculations, our military has developed these GPS devices to do the job. You certainly know better than I, but are these GPS devices as reliable as they seem to be? If so, then it seems that this was a situation that the programmers didn't account for and what is needed is some sort of warning that alerts people whenever an airstrike is being called in on the position of the GPS unit.