Isn't life insurance fraud by suicide selling your life for a chance at money, usually much less than $2 million?
1,425 karma · joined December 2, 2015
Paratrooper to programmer.
http://github.com/jschaf
hn@schafer.dev
I teach light infantry tactics to new lieutenants for the US Army. There's a couple reasons to use old-school methods over relying on your GPS:
* Using a compass and a map gives you a much better feel for terrain. One of the common problems with lieutenants is a disregard for advantages and disadvantages of specific terrain. I feel that this is by far the most important point. Understanding and visualizing terrain from a map is a hugely valuable skill that impacts most points of an operation, specifically route planning, where to place your machine guns, and where to attack the objective from.
* GPS can be jammed. This point was driven home hard by the novel Ghost Fleet. Ghost Fleet is a white paper turned into a novel (because no one would read a whitepaper) on what a future war with China would look like. I'm pretty sure Ghost Fleet is also the impetus for the Naval Academy re-adding celestial navigation to their classwork.
* GPS doesn't always work, or takes a while to get enough satellites to get a fix. You know what really sucks: taking fire and not knowing where you are.
* Batteries are heavy. Yes, tech is improving and you typically only need AA batteries. But soldier weight for light infantry is and continues to be a challenge.