It’s good to hear that you had some successes with what we taught you. The one thing I noticed is that The Army seems to be doing a good job as far as finding and gathering forensic evidence utilizing the WIT capability and have even done good job getting that capability down to the company level with the SWET teams. Those teams have been able to gather a lot of info at the company level that the COIST’s are analyzing and reporting. However the capability gap comes at an incident site when information is gathered but the opportunity to act on that information is not being acted on. No pursuit is taken. So although we are gathering good info the bad guys are getting away. When I was deployed we had been IED’d. A team came out and surveyed the IED site, we evacuated the wounded. The ANA unit I was with was so fixated on the nearest village. They never considered the other village across the river. I looked at the antenna from the IED and it had good line of site to the village across the river and was even pointing in that direction. We Asked the IED exploitation team what they thought and we both thought that the Insurgents detonated it from across the river (which was one of their TTP’s). We got a patrol together and crossed the river. Long story short we found their trigger site and followed their tracks and caught up with them. We actually found them not far from that trigger site and eliminated them. We brought the bodies down to the village and asked if any of the villagers could ID them, of course none could. The funny thing is that area of road had always been our units and the unit before ours "IED ally" and after that incident we never got IED’d again. We later got conformation that those guys had been from the village (which we suspected judging by some of the facial expressions from some of the men)and that the local insurgent group had attempted to recruit other villager’s to emplace more IED’s, but the villagers were reluctant to do so based on the outcome of their fellow tribesman. Not only was tracking the insurgents down successful but the psychological effect it had on the village as well as our ANA soldiers who were happy to have a victory over the insurgents. Later we sent in a CAT-A team to help the village, which opened the door to other opportunities for us. The skill of tracking was merely a vehicle to influence other things. After that point we incorporated it more often and every time we used the skill we either got the enemy or left with information that influenced other operations.

Tracker275, I am actually on the road heading in you direction. I was asked to help teach the last 2 classes at Ft. H. Too bad the tracking course will not be continued. Unfortunately, every soldier won’t be a sensor!