More than six decades on from the end of World War Two, there are few people who have personal experience of warfare involving conventional battlefields. Apart from low-intensity, counter-insurgency conflicts, the post-WW2 period, one of continual conflict somewhere on the planet, has seen not a single campaign that has pitted large armies on a roughly equal footing, except occasionally in Korea and Vietnam. Pitched battles, such as Desert Storm in the first Gulf War, have been decided by overwhelming air power and surface-to-surface firepower in a matter of a few hours, irrespective of ground. So a book on the central role of terrain in military strategy and tactics is more of historical interest than looking ahead to battle plans that are dominated by conditions under foot. Stemming from a conference at the US Military Academy, West Point in 2003, it is no surprise to find Studies in Military Geography and Geology dominated by North American issues from the War of Independence and the Civil War. But there are vignettes about Hannibal's invasion of southern Europe, and the role of German geologists and geographers in planning the invasion of the Soviet Union and the aborted invasion of Britain.

That being said, anyone likely to come under fire aims to seek natural cover, and maintaining supply lines will depend on whether or not vehicles can become bogged and water supplies assured. The second is now less appropriate to armies of the last remaining superpower; millions of litres of bottled spring water, as well as TV dinners, fly into Iraq. Yet the first Gulf War was only able to sustain hundreds of thousands of troops by exploiting a major aquifer in northern Saudi Arabia from wells drilled to a depth of a kilometre, and using remote sensing to locate existing wells in the featureless desert that formed the main battle ground. Interestingly, the UN military force that is deployed along the Eritrean–Ethiopian border to observe adherence to the cease-fire terms at the end of the 1998–2000 war there uses bottled supplies. Not having drilled wells, they have done little to restore groundwater supplies in anticipation of the return of tens of thousands of refugees displaced by the war.

The abortive hunt for Osama bin Laden since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 highlights the tremendous advantage to small defensive forces of limestone terrain – highly irregular karst topography and a multitude of caves in which to hide. There is an interesting parallel account of how the intricate tropical karst of upland Jamaica – Cockpit Country – thwarted British forces’ attempts to suppress a guerrilla force of escaped slaves during the Maroon Wars of 1690–6. A combination of cordoning the karst terrain from which the guerrillas operated, deforestation, and guarding the few surface water supplies enabled the British to contain the rebellion. Maroon fighters, however, only sought terms after a measles epidemic weakened their forces. That karstic regions still worry counter-insurgency forces is emphasized by a detailed analysis of Afghan limestones. Its scope is from microscopic and geochemical studies of hand specimens, to determine which facies are most prone to solution cavities, to geospatial analysis of lithofacies maps and fracture systems as a means of predicting where most caves might be. The outcome was blanket bombing of limestone country close to the Afghan–Pakistani border, but no significant achievement of its objectives.

The central political purpose of conventional warfare is to wreak as much devastation as possible to force opponents to submit. But in these sensitive times, it seems that armies have some duties similar to those of mining companies: they are supposed to protect environment and heritage as best they can – at least on their training grounds. So there are two chapters dealing with environmental impact of marching and movement of armour. In the first, case studies focus on a bayonet assault course at West Point (has any reader actually seen news footage of US soldiers with fixed bayonets?). Equally earnest is the account of how vehicle tracks on surfaces coated by desert pavement last for tens if not hundreds of years, from studies of US arid-land training sites. To this day, the El Alamein battlefield lays out the to-ing and fro-ing of the Afrika Corps and the Eighth Army. And what of the impact on archaeology, for which US legislation has extremely stringent rules? Yes, there is a chapter on assessing such impacts, no doubt being applied to the world's densest area of archaeological sites from the Last Glacial Maximum to the first civilizations – on the Tigris–Euphrates plains.

Studies in Military Geography and Geology is not as lugubrious as it could be: no studies about means of detecting mass burials (oddly nothing about finding buried weapons of mass destruction either), the geochemical dispersion of dust from depleted uranium projectiles, or contamination of water resources by white phosphorus. Apart from military historians, I think a likely readership might well be the irregular forces which modern warfare seeks to suppress, for they are exploiters of terrain and cover par excellence.