IN PRAISE OF MILITARY POOCHES: Rebecca Frankel
http://online.wsj.com/articles/military-dogs-sniff-out-ieds-save-lives-1414772453?mod=trending_now_2
Military Dogs Sniff Out IEDs, Save Lives U.S. soldiers’ best friends use their superior senses to detect roadside bombs in ways no sensor ever could
—Ms. Frankel is a senior editor at Foreign Policy and the author of “War Dogs: Tales of Canine Heroism, History and Love,” recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.
As the desert air cooled and night fell, Staff Sgt. John Mariana looked down into the reassuring eyes of one of the most valuable comrades of his eight-month deployment to Afghanistan: Bronco, his military working dog.
Sgt. Mariana and Bronco were leading a U.S. patrol in June 2011, searching for roadside bombs. Bronco kept his head low, sniffing for buried explosives. Suddenly, ahead in the dark, Sgt. Mariana saw a man just 10 feet away, pointing an AK-47 at them. Sgt. Mariana shouted, and Bronco bolted toward the attacker, biting down hard. Then a shot rang out, and Sgt. Mariana saw the impact as a bullet hit his dog.
Bronco survived, as Sgt. Mariana told me a year later—and joined a long line of canine heroes. For centuries, dogs have been saving soldiers’ lives on battlefields. The ancient Egyptians used dogs to carry messages, the Corinthians surrounded their seashore citadel with guard dogs, and the Romans used dogs to raise alarms for their garrisons.
Dogs began appearing on U.S. battlefields during the Revolutionary War, though often as pets and mascots. During the Civil War, according to an 1862 article in Harper’s Weekly, a dog named Union Jack ran toward a spray of shells, barking as if he were chasing down the Confederate artillery.
The U.S. military didn’t officially add dogs to its ranks until World War II. This foreshadowed an unfortunate pattern—recognizing the combat value of dogs once a conflict erupts, only to forget their utility as it winds down. Messenger and scout dogs are thought to have saved the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. troops during World War II and Vietnam, according to author Michael Lemish. Yet the U.S. has never truly maintained its canine combat readiness—a mistake we may be repeating today.
Between 2006 and 2012, the Marines were using about 1,000 dogs, but since then, they have drawn down their numbers by some 650, says Bill Childress, manager of the Marine Corps’ dog program. He adds that it could take “three to four years” to rebuild the canine corps.
ENLARGE The vastly superior sensory powers of dogs make them extraordinarily useful in combat. Most dogs can hear sounds from up to four times farther away than humans can. Dogs can also see much better than we can in low light and darkness, and most have a much wider field of vision.
Our four-legged friends have other advantages, too. According to the U.S. Air Force, the average military working dog—generally a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois, two of which recently brought down a would-be intruder at the White House—can deliver a bite that produces 400 pounds of pressure per square inch or more. (By way of comparison, a lion or shark bite packs roughly 600 pounds of pressure.)
But the most important canine military asset in recent U.S. wars has proved to be their amazing noses. The average human has around 5 million scent receptors; the average dog has roughly 220 million. So for the past decade, U.S. dogs in combat theaters have been almost exclusively devoted to sniffing out improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
From 1997 to 2000, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spent $43.4 million on a “Dog’s Nose Program” to develop similarly sensitive chemical sensors, agency officials say. But in 2010, Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, director of the special Pentagon office created to counter the threat of IEDs, told a news conference that, after spending $19 billion on high-tech innovations from hand-held sensors to enhanced optics, the best weapon against IEDs was still a handler and his dog.
In the spring of 2010, Staff Sgt. Justin Kitts and some 20 other members of the 101st Airborne Division were ambushed in southern Afghanistan by Taliban insurgents. Amid an onslaught of mortars and gunfire, Sgt. Kitts recalled, his dog, Dyngo, alerted the troops to not one but two IEDs. Without Dyngo, he said, they would have run from Taliban gunfire directly into one of those bombs—each of which was powerful enough to kill them all. Given the choice between a high-tech sensor and a dog, a number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan told me that they would certainly choose man’s best friend.
Dogs offer their fellow soldiers not just keen noses but also warm hearts. This may be why no robot or hand-held sensor will ever replace dogs in combat: A dog tugging at the leash to alert soldiers to the presence of explosives is doing so, at least in part, because of its devotion to the human at the other end.
Sgt. Mariana told me last year that his success as a handler depended on his bond with Bronco, who retired later in 2011 and died of cancer the next year. “He worked for me because he loved me, and I loved him,” Sgt. Mariana said. “And I really believe that he knew that.”
Comments are closed.
