Isn't the Navy going back to teaching sextants and astral navigation, just in case in a conflict the enemy interferes with GPS?
On land, I always carry a paper map while hiking and have a bit of a, shall we say, opinion of people who neither take a map nor could competently use it if they needed to. Especially on multi-day mountain walks with a night in a hut along the way.
I don't know about the standard navy officer school but the naval academy only stopped teaching it for like a ten year period and then brought it back.
Funny enough though serious rec sailors are the most likely to know it well I think. They are much more likely to be in a situation where it's necessary and they have fewer shipboard obligations compared to a naval officer so more time/boredom to use futzing with it. It does take practice.
I'm now a SAR navigator on a lifeboat and we now have a renewed focus on manual navigation as skills atrophied due to reliance on GPS plotting. While GPS in our AOR is rock solid, our plotters are not and frequently unavailable.
