Engineering, Military
Engineering, Military.The U.S. Army's basic manual on what engineer troops should do in wartime defines five general tasks: mobility, countermobility, survivability, topography, and general engineering. The primary imperative is the offensive: movement. The obverse—impeding the movement of the enemy—is the engineer's second task. If the battlefield situation requires it, engineers must also provide expedient field fortifications, which will protect troops and equipment from enemy fire. Assisting the army in locating positions and understanding terrain is the engineers' fourth task. And finally, military engineers perform a variety of other duties, which change over time but are related to construction or destruction.
These five tasks, or “missions,” are relatively straightforward and have defined in a general sense the responsibilities of military engineers for centuries. But the relative importance of each task has changed during the more...
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