The core combat mission in Afghanistan is suppressing warlord assassination teams and the rarer Taliban fighters. Controlling lethal contact is the critical problem.
Tracking is the only way to kill assassination teams. Either you are tracking the enemy every day or you are losing. Dog-based Combat Tracking Teams beat humans, every situation.
FLW is the U.S. Army Military Police training center. Want to train sentry dogs? Missouri's fine.
Want to avoid losing Afghanistan? Changes are needed:
-- Move the dog tracking operation out to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Add dogs to Huachuca's Combat Tracking Courses
-- Expand the dog tracking course from today's one-week breezer to 180 days in the desert
-- Change personnel selection criteria to a policy of Hire Two, Keep One. Tracking is a Bear Grylls episode plus guns and explosives
-- Develop tactical specs to augment a protected pursuit with integration and force escalation
Now, our Military Police own the working dog programs. Fort Leonard Wood is not doing this job.
Dog-based tracking ops got better than 50:50 success in Vietnam where integration was available. Afghanistan is cleaner. MBTF:::
U.S. Army got to the very simplest solution for doing dogs. The powers that be let the Military Police do it. Let them do all of it. The effect of this decision is that the Army has guard dogs, called Sentry Dogs, and nothing for combat.
In 2007 Army had 527 dog teams. Not one qualified for combat tracking.
U.S.Army needs a program to train 100 CTT dog teams a year.
Combat Tracking Teams -- the traditional dog teams -- aren't there anymore. There is nothing. Doctrine is overwhelmingly materialistic and static:
Combat power is created by combining the elements of maneuver, firepower, protection and leadership. --FM 100-5
Dog teams simply don't fit in with that mind set. They had been trained and usedall the way back to the Civil War and through WW II and Vietnam to go after assassination teams and other covert small-force threats.
HERE is the Amazon page for Tracking Dog: Theory & Methods, from Glenn Johnson. This book is the standard guide and reference for tracking teams. Modification to Army (and Marine) pursuit procedures would take Johnson into account. Obviously, you don't want to close out pursuit against an AK-toting Afghan, the same way as going after a state prison walk-away.
We are quite likely the only major country that does not have a dog-based pursuit capability.
HERE is an Australian experience with tracking dog teams.
Then along comes Afghanistan, then Iraq. Of course, not much changed.
Combat Tracking Teams never got put together. That's not because people don't know how to do it. Special Forces and national police from at least 100 countries have combat tracking dog teams.
Getting anything new involving dogs got to be like climbing Mt. Everest. Sniffing out explosives is one Fort Leonard Wood dog success:
The Engineer School and CEHC have championed the establishment of a mine
detection dog program and specialized search dog program. This effort led to the establishment of the 67th Engineer Detachment (Mine Dog), part of the 577th Engineer Battalion, 1st Engineer Brigade, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri—and the creation of the "K9" additional skill identifier (ASI) for engineer soldiers trained as mine detection dog handlers.
The specialized search dog program uses nonaggressive explosive detection
dogs, which operate off-leash to search buildings, routes, vehicles, or other venues for explosive devices, weapons, or contraband. The Engineer School has already deployed mine dog and search dog teams into both Iraq and Afghanistan with resounding success.
During one specific house search of a suspected vehicle bomb maker, a specialized search dog alerted on the explosive scent off an automobile starter located in the suspect’s garage. At the conclusion of
the investigation, it was revealed that the suspect had bomb residue on his hands. He had transferred the residue to the starter while removing it from his car, after completing another project — making a bomb.
http://www.wood.army.mil/...
Well done.
Getting dogs to sniff explosives in Iraq took the Army three years.
Our prison systems have people who know all about tracking humans. Its not quite rocket science, though the working conditions can be reminiscent of the Mojave Desert and China Lake.
Dogs are not a great match to the standard motives that go with DoD military procurement. This is the opposite to high tech. There is no Big-$$$$$ to doing dogs. No multimillionaire contractors. Few to no double-dipper slots for retirees.
There is no glory, no careerist glitz, no band playing. You learn to do this so you can kill the enemy's assassins.
Simple as that.
There is no other reliable way to kill assassins. You have to track them down.
You also get to pick up on large troop movements. But that is so much gravy. You get to track down stragglers, when battles break up a major enemy force. Again, gravy. Killing assassins before or after an attack is the pay-off.
Catch scent on a Taliban field team ??? The Vietnam experience was that 50% to 75% of these hits would produce a kill in an integrated response area. And that was before the Predator drones, before today's command systems.
Combat tracking is uniquely useful, compared to not having the capability. (Human-only tracking has very low probability of success, compared to using dogs.)
There's also the strange-sounding excuse that hard-core Islamicists don't like dogs. Don't want to offend these delicate flowers. Actually dogs are a rarity in all the desert countries. Since when does the U.S. Army let an enemy tell us what tools to use ??? If they don't like dogs, I think that makes a strong argument for using nonaggressive dogs all over.
Dogs get along with children naturally -- that connection works both ways. Good symbol for Americans protecting the little Afghans.
Changing the Army org chart -- that's the hardest part. We're our own worst enemy when we start doing something wrong.