FORT BLISS, Texas –In its continuous effort to enhance the life-saving and force protection skills of the nation’s law enforcement agencies, Joint Task Force North introduced 22 members of the nation’s elite civilian agencies, along with 20 Soldiers from 1st Armored Division’s 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, to a new three-week training initiative.
The new JTF North civilian law enforcement pilot program, code named “Border Hunter,” was conducted last month at the task force’s headquarters and on Fort Bliss ranges and training areas.
The new JTF North program is based on the U.S. Marine Corps’ highly successful “Combat Hunter” training currently being used to train Marines pending deployment to Afghanistan. The Marine Corps’ program, which evolved from the lessons learned in the two on-going conflicts, trains Marines to sense danger when encountering situations and pitfalls that have proven fatal in combat.
As a U.S. Northern Command subordinate task force, JTF North conducted Border Hunter in response to a U.S. Border Patrol request for assistance. At the request of USNORTHCOM, and on behalf of JTF-North, the training was supported by U.S. Joint Forces Command, based in Norfolk, Va.
The overall course objective is to train the students to sense for dangers and react appropriately --- while safeguarding innocent people, their law enforcement partners and themselves.
“Border Hunter training was designed to enable skill development in cognitive decision making through tracking, enhanced observation and human behavior pattern recognition,” said U.S. Marine Corps Col. John Mayer, JTF North deputy commander and Border Hunter program coordinator. “The training will help protect and better prepare our nation’s law enforcement personnel for future encounters with criminals or terrorists. It will also benefit our military forces that participate in the training.”
Highly skilled military and civilian instructors -- with extensive personal experience in the U.S. Border Patrol, other law enforcement agencies and the military – provided the students with over 200 hours of classroom instruction.
The students received instruction in a variety of “tracking” subjects, including the dynamics of a footprint, action indicators and track identification and interpretation. Tracking is a unique skill that enhances situational awareness and bolsters the effectiveness of law enforcement in a variety of circumstances.
“These subjects are all designed to teach a student to become ‘track aware’ and subsequently conduct a successful follow-up or tracking operation,” said Cornelius B. Nash, operations director for the Scott-Donelan Tracking School. “Additionally, students were taught the fundamentals of urban tracking. This block of instruction culminated with each team successfully following one set of prints through the urban sprawl and foot print ‘contamination’ of the housing and built up areas.”
Instructors stressed that tracking is employed in a direct operational capacity, intelligence collection, force protection, sensitive site exploitation or investigations; tracking skills enhance, if not direct, nearly all operations.
“The tracking course showed students that it is not enough to say ‘someone passed through here’ or ‘someone walked that way.’ Border Hunter students were taught to analyze what they see and develop a true understanding of what transpired,” said Nash.
Border Hunter also provided the students with enhanced observation technique training on the use of law enforcement and military issued optics, including weapon-mounted scopes, night vision devices and thermal image devices.
“It’s been my experience that most military personnel are loaded down with binoculars, night vision and thermal devices, but they have never been taught the best way to use the equipment,” said Mayer. “Border Hunter taught the students the optimal way to use their optics to find a threat at the maximum standoff distance, day or night.”
The third skill set taught of the Border Hunter triad was Human Behavior Pattern Recognition or Combat Profiling. Mayer stated that HBPR is a scientific discipline that offers the possibility of predicting human actions based on the comparison of behavioral anomalies against established patterns or norms. Greg Williams, a former Detroit policeman and HBPR discipline pioneer, developed the course of instruction taught in Border Hunter.
During the course, Williams taught the students that all people, events and objects give off certain signals when they are measured against context, relevance and a societal baseline. These “signals” are read against the baseline, and variations to the norm are “anomalies.” Three or more anomalies above the baseline require action that is initiated during rapid decision-making based on three primary options: Establishing a baseline, detecting anomalies and then acting on these anomalies is the essence of HBPR. The skills learned can be applied to any culture and on any person, event or object.
Combat tracking, enhanced observation and Human Behavior Pattern Recognition are the three key components of the Border Hunter program. When used together the combination of the three skill sets enables the user to have greater situational awareness and stay a step ahead of the enemy or criminal organization.
The students also received hands-on training on their newly acquired skills during a series of day and night field training exercises conducted at a recently constructed replica of a Middle Eastern village. The village featured role players portraying armed criminals and innocent civilians. The training scenario included the use of simulated explosions, fires, smoke and firing of weapons. Relentless winds, blowing up to 60 miles per hour, created sand storms that further added to the students’ challenging and realistic experience.
A group of human behavioral and cognitive scientists from Joint Forces Command were invited by JTF North to monitor the entire program in order to determine future civilian law enforcement and military training benefits, particularly for irregular warfare and counter insurgency environments.
“The Border Hunter study provided our research team a truly unique opportunity to observe, record and analyze every aspect of the training to measure if, how and why it works,” said Joint Forces Command Research Coordinator, Dr. David Fautua. “Every student raved about the Border Hunter training --- how effective it was in building new skill sets to systematically recognize human patterns and signals, spot anomalies, anticipate threats and make decisions."
Students’ feedback included: “How can we get more of this training,” and “When will this be institutionalized at the military and law enforcement academies?”
“From our preliminary observations, the course was quite effective in building both individual skill sets and team competencies in sense making,” said Fautua.
“What we were also finding is that it is not simply the tracking/profiling skill sets (to sense danger) that are key but also the development of enabling attributes that develop in parallel as a result of the cognitive decision making competence, like confidence, accountability and intuitive reasoning (high order problem solving),” explained Fautua.
JTF North’s Border Hunter pilot program served as an introduction to the Marine Corps’ highly effective training.
“It is our goal that our law enforcement partners and other military services incorporate Border Hunter skill sets into their training programs,” said Mayer. “The program has been proven by the Marines in combat to save lives by increasing their situational awareness before contact is made with an enemy. These same skills can save lives of our civilian law enforcement partners and help stop criminals and terrorists from operating in the United States.”