thedrifter
03-20-09, 08:29 AM
Old intel tool getting new life
Military personnel learn tracking on Fort Huachuca
By Bill Hess
Herald/Review
Published: Friday, March 20, 2009 2:17 AM MST
FORT HUACHUCA — It’s not high-tech, but tracking footprints to counter insurgents is making a major comeback in the U.S. military.
Soldiers, Marines and others, including members of foreign militaries, are being trained on Fort Huachuca in what was once a dying art. Instructor David Scott-Donelan helps military personnel make tracking an intelligence-gathering tool.
“Tracking is strategic as well as tactical,” Scott-Donelan said Thursday as a platoon of Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., prepared for an exercise.
First Lt. Troy Mitchell, the 2nd Platoon leader of Company C, 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, led the small group of Marines. He said Fort Huachuca can easily be used to replicate parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, where having many ways to counter terrorists is needed.
The skills being learned will be critical to ground operations during deployments. Tracking provides Marines different skill sets to find people who may have planted improvised explosive devices or taken other actions detrimental to U.S. and coalition forces, the officer said.
Near the end of the three-week Tactical Tracking Operations School course, Mitchell said he and his men are learning that footprints can tell a lot about a person. They can give information about height, weight, age grouping and what the person is carrying. Mitchell said those are just four of 20 signs a tracker is expected to read.
“If you want to play you have to practice,” he said.
The platoon will take away more than “something helping Marines follow footprints” from their training on the fort, he said.
A footprint is a core part of tracking, but additional information obtained by following ground tracks provides a “bigger intelligence picture,” Mitchell said.
The course also teaches students how to cover their tracks so they can’t be followed.
On Thursday, an exercise merged the students going through the Joint Intelligence Weapons Course and the tracking course.
Students at the weapons course on post are trained to do forensic-like work, to gather information and items from an IED scene.
Once the weapons team gathers evidence, which includes looking for indications of which direction insurgents came to an area to plant an explosive device, trackers are called in to move out in the direction the unknown enemy headed.
Scott-Donelan, a world-renowned tracking expert, is the founder, CEO and training director of the Tactical Tracking Operations School, which is a contractor on the fort. The contractor employs 10 instructors on the post, as well as having a single trainer at two Marine installations.
The former Rhodesian Army officer spent most of his military career tracking “communist-trained terrorists in (then) Rhodesia,” he said.
Rhodesia is now known as Zimbabwe. When the Marxist-leaning government took over in that nation, he and many other members of the once Rhodesian Army left the country and some, like him, joined the South African Special Forces. He later was seconded to the military in Namibia.
During much of his 27-year military career in three nations, Scott-Donelan was involved in tracking and pursuing terrorists, many of whom were eliminated during the bush wars in Africa.
Now 68, he still is sought for his knowledge and ability to teach tracking. His teachings are not limited to the military. His work includes law enforcement agencies under a different program. He also is a federal expert witness, testifying at trials where tracking is part of the evidence presented.
Fort Huachuca has a tracking heritage, Scott-Donelan said. Native Americans used tracking to help the cavalry in the late 1800s. Groups against the U.S. Army also tracked soldiers to keep watch over them, which in some cases led to ambushes.
The U.S. Army used trackers up to 1947, when Staff Sgt. Sinew Riley, a Native American, retired on Fort Huachuca. After that, and after nearly 300 years of using trackers in what is now the United States, tracking ended, Scott-Donelan said.
During the Vietnam War, the use of trackers was revived by the U.S. military. Scott-Donelan said those chosen for the work were trained by either British or Australians in the jungles of Malaysia.
Since 2006, which is the year the course really got off the ground on the post, nearly 2,000 individuals have been trained in tracking, ranging in rank from privates to a general.
“And none have failed,” Scott-Donelan said.
Tracking is an important part of the military intelligence game, Scott-Donelan said.
Between those on the ground following footprints and modern communication equipment, there is a marriage of old and new that will help eliminate problems facing forces in global hot spots, he said.
According to U.S. Army Field Manual 17-98, “Tracking is one of the best sources of immediate use (of) intelligence information about the enemy that can be put to use immediately.”
Israel has the best-trained trackers, Scott-Donelan said. The units that do the tracking constantly patrol areas where terrorists can infiltrate that country, and the units are made up of Druze and Bedouin Israeli citizens, he said.
A tracker must be physically fit, Scott-Donelan said. For example, the course final exam takes place in the Huachuca Mountains.
Today, the Marines’ training will move up a notch.
Instructor Peter Kerr, who travels from Hawaii to teach, will help in the training. The tracking exercise will start as Kerr and other instructors flee into the mountains, challenging the Marines to track them and catch them.
The training will start in Garden Canyon and go up to the higher altitudes, with Kerr and the others going up and down the hills in what is expected to be a minimum distance of 20 kilometers and what is expected to last two days.
For Kerr, the final exercise is the most exciting.
“We’ll be the quarry,” he said.
For information about the Tactical Tracking Operations School and David Scott-Donelan, visit www.tacticaltracking.com.
Herald/Review senior reporter Bill Hess can be reached at 515-4615 or by e-mail at bill.hess@svherald.com.
Ellie
Military personnel learn tracking on Fort Huachuca
By Bill Hess
Herald/Review
Published: Friday, March 20, 2009 2:17 AM MST
FORT HUACHUCA — It’s not high-tech, but tracking footprints to counter insurgents is making a major comeback in the U.S. military.
Soldiers, Marines and others, including members of foreign militaries, are being trained on Fort Huachuca in what was once a dying art. Instructor David Scott-Donelan helps military personnel make tracking an intelligence-gathering tool.
“Tracking is strategic as well as tactical,” Scott-Donelan said Thursday as a platoon of Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., prepared for an exercise.
First Lt. Troy Mitchell, the 2nd Platoon leader of Company C, 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, led the small group of Marines. He said Fort Huachuca can easily be used to replicate parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, where having many ways to counter terrorists is needed.
The skills being learned will be critical to ground operations during deployments. Tracking provides Marines different skill sets to find people who may have planted improvised explosive devices or taken other actions detrimental to U.S. and coalition forces, the officer said.
Near the end of the three-week Tactical Tracking Operations School course, Mitchell said he and his men are learning that footprints can tell a lot about a person. They can give information about height, weight, age grouping and what the person is carrying. Mitchell said those are just four of 20 signs a tracker is expected to read.
“If you want to play you have to practice,” he said.
The platoon will take away more than “something helping Marines follow footprints” from their training on the fort, he said.
A footprint is a core part of tracking, but additional information obtained by following ground tracks provides a “bigger intelligence picture,” Mitchell said.
The course also teaches students how to cover their tracks so they can’t be followed.
On Thursday, an exercise merged the students going through the Joint Intelligence Weapons Course and the tracking course.
Students at the weapons course on post are trained to do forensic-like work, to gather information and items from an IED scene.
Once the weapons team gathers evidence, which includes looking for indications of which direction insurgents came to an area to plant an explosive device, trackers are called in to move out in the direction the unknown enemy headed.
Scott-Donelan, a world-renowned tracking expert, is the founder, CEO and training director of the Tactical Tracking Operations School, which is a contractor on the fort. The contractor employs 10 instructors on the post, as well as having a single trainer at two Marine installations.
The former Rhodesian Army officer spent most of his military career tracking “communist-trained terrorists in (then) Rhodesia,” he said.
Rhodesia is now known as Zimbabwe. When the Marxist-leaning government took over in that nation, he and many other members of the once Rhodesian Army left the country and some, like him, joined the South African Special Forces. He later was seconded to the military in Namibia.
During much of his 27-year military career in three nations, Scott-Donelan was involved in tracking and pursuing terrorists, many of whom were eliminated during the bush wars in Africa.
Now 68, he still is sought for his knowledge and ability to teach tracking. His teachings are not limited to the military. His work includes law enforcement agencies under a different program. He also is a federal expert witness, testifying at trials where tracking is part of the evidence presented.
Fort Huachuca has a tracking heritage, Scott-Donelan said. Native Americans used tracking to help the cavalry in the late 1800s. Groups against the U.S. Army also tracked soldiers to keep watch over them, which in some cases led to ambushes.
The U.S. Army used trackers up to 1947, when Staff Sgt. Sinew Riley, a Native American, retired on Fort Huachuca. After that, and after nearly 300 years of using trackers in what is now the United States, tracking ended, Scott-Donelan said.
During the Vietnam War, the use of trackers was revived by the U.S. military. Scott-Donelan said those chosen for the work were trained by either British or Australians in the jungles of Malaysia.
Since 2006, which is the year the course really got off the ground on the post, nearly 2,000 individuals have been trained in tracking, ranging in rank from privates to a general.
“And none have failed,” Scott-Donelan said.
Tracking is an important part of the military intelligence game, Scott-Donelan said.
Between those on the ground following footprints and modern communication equipment, there is a marriage of old and new that will help eliminate problems facing forces in global hot spots, he said.
According to U.S. Army Field Manual 17-98, “Tracking is one of the best sources of immediate use (of) intelligence information about the enemy that can be put to use immediately.”
Israel has the best-trained trackers, Scott-Donelan said. The units that do the tracking constantly patrol areas where terrorists can infiltrate that country, and the units are made up of Druze and Bedouin Israeli citizens, he said.
A tracker must be physically fit, Scott-Donelan said. For example, the course final exam takes place in the Huachuca Mountains.
Today, the Marines’ training will move up a notch.
Instructor Peter Kerr, who travels from Hawaii to teach, will help in the training. The tracking exercise will start as Kerr and other instructors flee into the mountains, challenging the Marines to track them and catch them.
The training will start in Garden Canyon and go up to the higher altitudes, with Kerr and the others going up and down the hills in what is expected to be a minimum distance of 20 kilometers and what is expected to last two days.
For Kerr, the final exercise is the most exciting.
“We’ll be the quarry,” he said.
For information about the Tactical Tracking Operations School and David Scott-Donelan, visit www.tacticaltracking.com.
Herald/Review senior reporter Bill Hess can be reached at 515-4615 or by e-mail at bill.hess@svherald.com.
Ellie