Over the years, I've learned things from different domains -- gongfu (martial arts), Go (the game not the language), various computer languages, and most recently, gardening.

It's been my experience that for every expiring skill, there is hidden, a more essential, permanent (or rather, "timeless") skill.

The technical skill for drawing and recording the battlefield topography is no longer relevant.

But you can bet that spatial reasoning and situational awareness / situational reasoning and topography is still relevant for the military professional, whether someone is drawing the maps by hand, or using modern navigational devices.

Having to construct maps (mapping the actual terrain with an abstract representation) helps construct a model in the mind, and doing so lays the foundation for developing spatial reasoning. An artist's eye is trained to see things as they are seen, not as they are interpreted, thus disciplining one's perceptual skills, which enhances situational awareness.

One of the things I have learned from gongfu, is that once you have refined the essential skill, it can be applied broadly in many other domains, outside the one you initially learned. Those seemingly disparate domains I listed (martial arts, Go, computer languages, gardening), all share essential skills that allow me to transfer things that I learned in one domain into another (with modifications).