Present situation and development trend of military geological work abroad

Military geology comes into being along with military activities, and develops along with the development of military activities and geological sciences. In this paper, the authors systematically studied the history and present situation of the military geology abroad and, on such a basis, firstly divided the development of military geology abroad into 3 stages, namely, the early induction stage, the fast developing stage and the stable developing stage. The authors describe the research progress of military geology abroad in the following 6 aspects: military engineering geology, military hydrogeology, military mineral geology, military marine geology, military geophysics, and military remote sensing geology. The authors also summarized three characteristics of the military geological work abroad, namely, army and civilians jointly carry out the military geological work; government makes overall deployment of the geological work and defense construction; military and civilian units jointly conduct technical research and apply the technical achievements in both defense and civilian fields. Also, the authors pointed out 3 future development trends of the military geology, namely, big data and cloud computing will be important supporting techniques for military geological work; the working field of military geology will be expanded to the space; and the service scope of modern military geology will be enlarged from country-wide services (domestic) to the world-wide and full time domain services. It is hope that the results obtained by the authors can be helpful and of reference value to the development of China's military geological work.