This paper reports on the first step towards developing a GIS-based methodology for analysing military operational plans from the Cold War. During the Cold War, the military of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact carried out a comprehensive military planning for the potential military confrontation between the two alliances.

Military planning documents is complicated historical source due to combination of both text, diagrams and cartographic representations used to convey the complex spatial relationship between the operational environment, the objective (intentions) of own forces and information about the capability and deployment of own and enemy forces. An important component of the plan complexes are the cartographic representations of the operational plan, typically drawn directly on topographic maps or on different types of overlays. In the NATO planning system, these cartographic representations are supplementary to text documents, while in the Soviet / Warsaw Pact system, the map is the central planning document with the text and diagram being second.

However, these maps are difficult to analyse due to a number of reasons. First, the number of maps as well as the amount of information on the maps makes it difficult to analyse the plan. In many cases, information is distributed on several maps at different scales covering vast geographic area include a spatio-temporal dynamics. Second, some difficulties are related to the specific cartographic technique used by Cold War militaries. Maps prepared in relation to NATO operational planning are often made on overlays, which needs to be viewed on top of a topographic map in order to provide a spatial reference. Such topographic maps for reference are typically not available at the reading room at the archive. Maps made by the Warsaw Pact armies are typically drawn directly on composite topographic map sheets, which cover the entire operational area. Depending on unite size and reference scale, such an operational area can be as much as whole of Western Europe. This means that the maps can be as lager as up to almost 18 square meters, which is almost impossible to view physically in detail. The physical size also means that digitization is difficult and that the output often comes as several parts, which is difficult to read without further processing. The complicated nature of the source material are probably also one of the reason behind the limited application of the cartographic content of the plans in Cold War research. Current research often ignores the spatial component of the plans in favour of the text, thus reducing the cartographic representation and spatial diagrams to illustrations.

Based on comprehensive archives from the Danish military for the NATO commands COMLANDZEALAND and COMLANDJUT as well as the Polish General Staff during the Cold War, we propose the first steps towards a GIS-based methodology for analysing the history of cartography of Cold War operational planning. The proposed method consists of two parts.
First, we aim to develop standard protocols for the georeferecing of plans from NATO as well as Warsaw Pact. For NATO plans, we propose to use the UTM-grid and coordinates as the main geographic reference and persistent geographic features from a reference maps as secondary in cases, where it is not possible to use the UTM grid or coordinates. For Warsaw Pact plans, we use the grid and coordinates related to the Soviet SK42 system and persistent geographic features as secondary.
Second, we aim to develop a GIS-ontology, which can accommodate the cartographic content of the plans within the standard geometry in vector-GIS. This is not a simple task, because the Cold War plans in most cases were drawn by hand applying different symbols and colours to show the content of the plan visually on a paper map. In some cases, such as with deployment areas, these are represented as area, which can easily been digitized as polygons in GIS. However, in other cases large arrows are drawn on the map to show axis of advance. These could be digitized as either a line or a polygon. In addition to these two, examples additional complexity can be added in relation to time and scale of the different plans, as well as the need for combining information from different maps within the operational plan complexes.

Despite these methodological difficulties, our results from our initial development has shown, that such GIS-data and visualizations can add significantly analytical power to the analysis of the Cold War operational plans. In addition, digital vector layers from the historical Cold War operational plans could also provide the source basis for a new historical geography of Cold War operational planning.