Page 16 - Ranger Demo

Figure 1 Afghanistan and Surrounding Areas – the first significant output of the Human Geography Team © UK MOD Crown Copyright, 2020 Based on map data © Collins Bartholomew Limited
The work done in Afghanistan, championed by DGC (then part of Intelligence Collection Group) Commanders, Brigadier David Potts and his successor Air Commodore Jon Rigby, provided an additional perspective for planners and strategists. From then on requests for Human Geography products were regularly included as part of typical taskings for geospatial support.
The team of 5 staff comprised of researchers and cartographers/GIS experts. As the team took shape, the members developed skills and knowledge across several disciplines, allowing them to adopt a new way of working. Each geospatial analyst became competent in finding sources and undertaking their research into a specific question, designing mapping products or report formats (as appropriate), and then producing the output, thus managing the task from start to finish. The way of operating became efficient, in that expert cartographers could also become subject matter experts and update or modify products themselves as more source information became available. A Sapper was posted to the team in 2009 bringing a valuable military perspective to an otherwise civilian team and, when he was subsequently posted to Afghanistan, providing expert ground truth feedback. The main outputs of the Human Geography team have stayed relatively consistent since its inception, generating mainly medium and small-scale maps showing the distribution of tribes or ethnic groups, language, religion, demographics, or any combination thereof as the requirement dictated. The team have also produced several Cultural Geography Study textual reports on particular regions or specific groups. In recent years, the team have undertaken analysis and created graphics illustrating issues such as migration patterns, diaspora locations and disease distribution. One of the main challenges the team had to address in the early days was how to educate the tasking organisations and end-users in the art of the possible. Often unrealistic expectations of either what was already available or deliverable within the timescale required had to be managed. There was often an expectation that this sort of information was on the shelf ready for dissemination – a situation not unique to Human Geography.
The first major tasking outside Afghanistan was in response to the conflicts across North Africa and the Middle East in February 2011, the Arab Spring. Protests driven by economic, social, and demographic factors, heavily influenced by the increasing use of Social Media, spread rapidly across
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