Getting The Nation’s Politics Pointed To True North

The analogy of the Army’s old M2A2 aiming circle

Tom Davis
My Side of the Aisle
6 min readAug 7, 2024

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A soldier setting up the M2A2 Aiming Circle
A soldier orienting the M2A2 aiming circle, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

We now live in a country where only one percent of the U.S. population serve in the nation’s military, and only six percent ever did — the group we call veterans. Accordingly, I’m always a bit reluctant to attempt making a political point with a military analogy as few can relate to it. But let me try on this one.

For a young Army artillery officer in the 1970’s, like me, the fundamental skill to be mastered was called “laying the battery.” To some, the phrase had something of a risqué ring, but it was actually a very specific task that had to be correctly performed for a battery — and artillery unit of about 100 soldiers and six to eight howitzers — to perform its basic mission of lobbing 100-pound explosive shells about twenty miles and accurately hitting an unseen target.

Doing so required two very basic skills: first knowing rather precisely where you were located, and second aiming the cannon in the right direction. The first task, in my day, required proficiency at map reading — today something largely accomplished with GPS, but the second required measuring angles from true north with a surveying instrument known as the M2A2 “aiming circle.”

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Tom Davis
My Side of the Aisle

Tom Davis is a 1972 West Point graduate with a Master’s degree from Harvard University. He is author of the Cold War novels “Conclave” and “Empty Quiver”.