Re: Americans: that clueless cretin you elected just killed the CVE program :-(

On 4/22/2025 10:54 AM, Dan Cross wrote:

 I learned land navigation using metric units in the US Marines,
using the NATO grid system (not lat/long). 

It's called Universal Transverse Mercator and NATO had nothing
to do with it.
Just a few blurbs:
The Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) system was developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers starting in the early 1940s.
Provided by AI overview.
The Universal Transverse Mercator projection and grid system was adopted by the U.S. Army in 1947 for designating rectangular coordinates on large scale military maps. UTM is currently used by the United States and NATO armed forces.
MapTools.
Note the dates, long before NATO even existed.
Developed by the US Army Map Service in the late 1940s — probably 1947 — and shortly thereafter adopted by US Army
as well as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, the Universal Transverse Coordinate (UTM) projection and grid system remained a classified secret for many years.
The Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) geographic coordinate system
By
Michael A. Neiger
Marquette, Michigan
© Copyright 2010 - 2022
It was originally developed not by NATO but by the US Army.
By the way, just for the sake of curiosity the reason I am rather
well versed in this is because my first job after high school and
leading up to my first enlistment  in the U.S. Army was with  the
above mentioned Army Map Service where I was both a Cartographic
Technician and a Geodetic Aide.  When I went into the Army I was
hell on the Land Navigation Course.  :-)
bill