NO SAVANT EVER TAUGHT MILITARY GE()GRAF'HY T(1) PERSIAN MONARCHS CYRUS, CAMBYSES, DARIUS, AND Xerxes, who assembled the world's first sprawling empire that by 480 B. C. stretched from the Indus River to the Aegean Sea. Teenage Alexander learned a lot at Aristotle's knee before he conquered even larger territories 150 years later, but military geography was not one of his tutor's strong points. Ghenghis Khan, whose Golden Horde rode roughshod across Eurasia in the 13th century A. D., established the record for seizing real estate by force of arms without resort to any book about military geography in his saddlebags.

Modern warfare, however, is so complex that commanders at every level must consistently manipulate geographic influences advantageously to gain a decisive edge. Most soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines unfortunately learn painful lessons mainly from the school of hard knocks, because few schools and colleges conduct courses in military geography, none confers a degree, instructional materials seldom emphasize fundamentals, and most service manuals have tunnel vision. The four-volume bibliography compiled at West Point, which is 4 inches thick and totals several thousand citations on 1,059 pages,

addresses an admirable scope but is minimally useful to most uniformed practitioners of military art, their civilian supervisors, concerned citizens, and members of the news media, because many of them lack easy access to the sources cited while others are too busy to bother.

My contacts in the Pentagon and Congress were bemused when I began to write this book, because they had never heard of a discipline called "military geography." That reaction came as no surprise; after all, members of the Association of American Geographers at their 92 "d annual meeting in April 1 996 debated heatedly before they finally decided to establish

a military geography specialty group. This consolidated guide, designed to fill undesirable gaps, has a threefold purpose:

• To provide a textbook for academic use

• To provide a handbook for use by political-military professionals

• To enhance public appreciation for the impact of geography on military affairs. Parts One and Two, both of which are primers, view physical and cultural geography from military perspectives. Part Three probes the influence of political-military geography on service roles and missions, geographic causes of conflict, and complex factors that affect military areas of responsibility. Part Four describes analytical techniques that relate geography to sensible courses of military action, then puts principles into practice with two dissimilar case studies--one emphasizes geographic influences on combat operations, while the other stresses logistics. Each chapter terminates with key points, which final reflections reinforce and relate to time-tested Principles of War. The text at no time tells readers what to think. It simply tells them how, in jargon-free terms that disregard technical details (neither British Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig nor corporals who led his squads through Flanders fields in 1917 cared a whit whether Passchendaele Ridge was a product of tectonic upheaval or glacial depositions). Concise historical examples and the probable influence of technological trends help illuminate past, present, and future relationships between geography and military affairs. Notes at the end of each chapter encourage students of the subject to pursue topics of particular interest in greater breadth and depth. Maps and figures are plentiful throughout, but readers nevertheless should keep a world atlas handy.

Military Geography for Professionals and the Public, which considers every form of warfare and every military service at strategic, operational, and tactical levels, is intended for audiences abroad as well as in the United States, and therefore is generally couched in generic terms. Consequently, its contents should be almost as sound at the end of the 21 st century as at the beginning, regardless of political, military, economic, social, scientific, technological, and other changes in this volatile world that inevitably will occur during the next ten decades.