Geospatial Intelligence school drops printing course from curriculum

Stop the presses! Stop the presses!
Those were the words that used to echo though a press room when a big news flash had just hit the wire. Now, those words mean the end of an era as technology and the needs of the warrior change. The printed map product as we know it is not needed.
At the end of November, the presses at The School of Geospatial Intelligence went silent, as the last printing class graduated.
TSG has been around a long time. The "school house" started in the early 1900s and came to Fort Belvoir, then Camp Humphries, in May 1918.
The Schools of Printing, Ranging and Surveying were the beginning and later expanded into full topographic learning venues. Cartographic and topographic sciences developed into the Geospatial Engineering of today.
It wasn't an overnight transformation. Thousands of students passed though Belvoir's campus. The demise of the School of Ranging was not recorded and the Survey school left Belvoir in late 2008 for Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., leaving the presses as the last of the original mission.
At its peak, the printing course, which was part of the Department of Graphic Arts, Defense Mapping School, ran a day and a night shift, with 24 U.S. Army and 12 U.S. Marine Corps students learning topographic map-printing during the day, and a dozen each of U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force students learning basic bookwork printing at night.
Originally, 60 students were in house just for press instruction. Another 60 were in the other side of "the house," learning pre-press subjects such as process photography, layout and platemaking.
As global positioning system technology developed and began to replace paper maps, Army topographic units changed what they needed to complete their mission. Now, the only presses running in the armed forces are with Psychological Operations units at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Graduates from the last several 12-student classes were sent to Bragg.
Over the years in the Army, the printing profession has been transformed from being four different military occupational specialties to being an additional skill identifier. Technology first took the Air Force students away from DMS around 1995. The Navy and Marines ceased requiring DMS print services about six years ago.
In the past, the Printing Technology Department had as many as 52 personnel. There were as many as eight Marines, four Navy personnel, four Air Force, 24 Army and 12 DoD civilians. Time and technology had whittled the group to four. The final print team was comprised of one military and three civilian personnel.
Peggy Burks, after a 20-year Air Force career, including a tour as an instructor at DMS, worked at the school since 1994. Dana Reeves was a production printer at the Ruth Building for DMA and NIMA for many years. He came to the school in 1996 after the Ruth Building printing element was moved to St. Louis. Virgil Tarry is a retired U.S. Army NCO who also taught at the school before retiring from the military. He has long been the repair expert at the school. He kept the presses running and used his expertise to instruct students in both operation and repair. Staff Sgt. Jose Rios, a 16-year Army veteran and a Press Course alumni, was the NCOIC.
(Batt is a retired Army NCO and DoD civilian, having spent more than 30 years working for the agency at Belvoir. He retired in June.)