Sadly, generating Predator kills has replaced mindful analysis. Predators score zero protecting civilians. Also zeros for back-tracking and for cold trails.
Afghanistan should be a tracking war. Despite what you hear, we have fought these wars before. Successfully. Using expert dog teams for the core tactical missions. Not Search-and-Destroy.
When Predator goes into targeting mode, the pilot-gamer sees an area a 100 yards wide. From 2 miles up, that's like looking down through a soda straw. Electronic magic gets done. Rockets are fired.
Whatever gets killed... dontcha know... was the enemy. That's our propaganda line.
We fought tough tracking wars against Apaches and the Sioux. Protected our civilians.
Afghanistan should be similar to what our dog Combat Tracking Teams did in Vietnam. 50%+ contact-to-success where part of integrated response systems. At most, 10% of Vietnam was protected with dog teams.
Afghanistan is also important to block the $80-billion a year poppy-to-heroin drug plague.
Search-and-Destroy in Vietnam caused the most of 2,600,000 total extra deaths. Action Plan BTF :::
Yessiree, this CTT info has been posted before. Got washed away last time with the Kennedy diary tsunami. You'll see it again when we savage Afghan civilians and/or sit on our butts and let the warlord-mercs/Taliban-mercs do the same.
America fought Vietnam with 1000:1 force advantage. Applied quite stupidly.
And... hey... guys... guess who won that slaughter ??? Brain work matters.
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Controlling lethal contact is the critical problem. The insurgents in Afghanistan are paid hands -- a few dollars a month -- not ideological fanatics. Many of them are teenagers, press-ganged/kidnapped into service. We need to find and track armed insurgents, but we're not up against high quality opposition.
We need to understand that this is a tracking war.
Tracking is the only way to kill these assassination teams. You can do it with dogs. Or you can try to do it with Predator drones and local bribery, like today.
Dogs + Predator + bribes =EQ= better to take three than two.
Either you are tracking the enemy units every day or you are losing.
Dog-based Combat Tracking Teams beat assassination teams, every situation where the CTT has support forces. Where the CTT can hold to the trail, the on-foot target is going to get caught. The pick up rates in Vietnam were many times higher than what the Army claims for Afghanistan.
Fort Leonard Wood is the U.S. Army Military Police training center. Want to train sentry dogs? Missouri's fine. What they do for tracking is a one-week pass-through course that approximates AKC Tracking trials. There is no integrated response system in the U.S. Army to incorporate dog Combat Tracking Teams. Since there are no CTTs... 0 for 527 dog teams, as of 2007... there is no use for integration procedures.
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 tracking job. None of their people were in Vietnam. They don't know squat about international CTT operations, despite over a 100 countries adopting these tactics, along with the Federal prisons and apparently all of the state systems.
Protecting civilians during a guerrilla war is a bitch of a problem.
It is so much easier to go with technology. Fergit about the civilians.
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 stark:
The Army has guard dogs, called Sentry Dogs, and nothing for combat.
In 2007 Army had 527 dog teams. All sorts of jobs, but all related to Military Police and investigations. Not one team was 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.
The dog teams have been trained and used all the way back to the Civil War and through WW II and Vietnam to go after assassination teams and other covert small-force threats. A bank robbery in St. Albans, Vermont, brought a call for a dog team to help track a Confederate raiding party. Dog tracking was essential to control these threats. The Army also went through different dogs -- even Cuban-bred bloodhounds and breeds you never heard of, but turned out to be walking miracles.
HERE is a good intro written for civilians by Glen Johnson. This book is the standard guide and reference for civilian tracking teams. Modification to Army (and Marine) pursuit procedures could take Johnson into account. Obviously, you don't want to close out pursuit against an AK-toting Afghan merc, the same way as going after a state prison walk-away.
Getting anything new involving dogs got to be like climbing Mt. Everest. Sniffing out explosives is one Fort Leonard Wood dog team 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/...
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 is much slower and has a lower probability of success, compared to using dogs.
There's also the strange-sounding excuse we hear out of the Pentagon that
Hard-core Islamicists don't like dogs.
Don't want to offend these delicate flowers. Fact is, 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 the Binladen types hate dogs, gotta think that makes an argument in favor of using the usual nonaggressive tracking dogs all over. We're not fighting pit bulls, here.
Dogs get along with children naturally -- once kids get used to them. That connection works both ways.
Good symbol for Americans protecting the little Afghans.
The easy part is implementation. Dogs learn territory automatically, so you lay out a "dog quilt" pattern over southern Afghanistan. Each dog Combat Tracking Team gets assigned to an irregular "square" of this "quilt." As the dog learns his "square," which can be a 10 x 10 = 100 miles, he gets better and better. Dogs learn everything. Every person, every animal, every object in their territories. They learn patterns -- including trails and caves. They learn everything.
Changing the Army org chart -- that's the hard part. Honestly. Walt Kelly and Pogo had it right: we're our own worst enemy when we start doing something wrong.