Photo By Sgt. Mike MacLeod | Pfc. Micheal C. Shears of A Company, 307th Brigade Support Battalion, 1st Brigade...... read more read more
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Arguably, the enemy's greatest asset on today's asymmetric battlefield of big Armies and small terror cells is his anonymity. Take away that, and there's nothing left that a slug, shell or JDAM can't hit. Lacking anonymity, bad actors can't hide among good people, and the good guys win.
The nature of insurgencies has not changed, but what has changed is the ability to root them out. Using muscular computers and enormous databases, information analysts are better than ever at weaving together a flow of biometric data—mostly fingerprints—collected from the field to identify individual insurgents.
Many of the fingerprints are extracted from bomb-making materials by experts after buildings are cleared by Soldiers, but there aren't enough experts to do the collecting. The Army thinks the answer may be a well-trained private.
"Privates do most of the looking," said Byron Cousin, a 42-year-old, mobile-training-team assistant leader sent to teach battlefield forensics at the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La. As a retired veteran and former first sergeant with the very unit he was teaching—the 82d Airborne Division—Cousin established instant rapport with the Paratroopers of the 1st Brigade Combat Team during its initial classroom training of a four-day forensics course here in late April 2009.
"Because privates do most of the looking," said Cousin [pronounced coo ZAN], "terrorists need to be smarter than the private."
Troopers chuckled.
"A private yells, 'Sergeant, I found an arms cache' as he's rubbing his leg. The sergeant says 'Good job. Army Achievement Medal. Don't tell nobody you fell in on it.'"
He struck a common funny bone. The Paratroopers laughed, and were engaged and ready to learn.
"This class is about using biometrics — literally 'measuring life' — to find the bad guys," said Cousin. "When Soldiers gather fingerprints, they are protecting their country for years into the future."
The Biometric Intelligence Project is an Army effort to collect, exploit and analyze biometric material collected on the battlefield in order to produce timely and actionable intelligence.
The heart of the initiative is a giant database with over 3.1 million biometric records from which a "watch list" is generated that can be acted upon. So far, the system has produced 690 detentions in theater, 18 convictions in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, and has, to date, stopped 59 would-be terrorists from entering the United States. The system can also be used on the battlefield to flag a detainee as a maker of improvised explosive devices, the number-one killer of American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's hard to imagine fingerprints surviving an IED blast, but importantly, the bombs have to be made somewhere, with something, by someone with fingers, said Cousin.
The Paratroopers learned that fingerprinting as tool for identification has been around since 1891, and that it is still the biometric that produces the most matches. Iris recognition is more accurate, but much as facial recognition, it requires the presence of the person in question. And DNA left behind at a battle scene? Costly and time consuming.
The Paratroopers were taught to use a HIIDE (Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment) an electronic gizmo that looks and feels much like a professional camera without an attached lens. The device captures images of the face, the iris and fingerprint and was designed for forward units in the field.
After a morning of classroom orientation, the Paratroopers move into hands-on labs at another training site, followed by two long days of practical battlefield scenarios in which the troopers participate in teams. The 40-hour course wraps up with a written test and one final graded scenario, said team leader Bryant Cox, a former Marine combat photographer who has worked in the intelligence community for many years.
The streets were deserted, as were the mosques, the markets and smooth-walled homes of the pan-Arabic village. There was a large mesh-walled trailer in a lot across the way brimming with bodies, life-sized plastic replicas for role-play here in the pine forests of "the box," JRTC's notorious force-on-force training center for America's warfighting units.
Still a week out from the box, 1st Brigade Paratroopers learned the basics of battlefield forensics in several rooms of one of the village buildings. Groups of eight rotated in and out of labs that taught dusting and lifting latent prints from common household surfaces, how to roll prints from detainees, how to photograph fingerprints, deceased enemies, detainees and cleared rooms, and how to document it all properly.
Cousin taught a lab on collecting materials that may contain fingerprints, during which he described the current materials used in IEDs, including common household and commercial products.
"The best thing about this course is that the instructors actually have to go work in the CEXC lab," said Cousin, referring to in-theater Combined Explosives Exploitation Cells where bomb-making materials are gathered and analyzed. "In the CEXC lab, they're processing real-world IED components. So I can tell you what the current trend is for IED components in-theater, what they're using in Afghanistan, and what they're not going to be using based off what they can find and what they can get. It's not like a PowerPoint from Warrior Leaders Course. It's what's happening today," he said.
Cousin showed detonators made of cordless phones, cell phones and washing-machine timers. In the meantime, he asked questions, testing the knowledge of his students, many of whom have seen multiple deployments with the 82d Airborne Division.
Sgt. Clifton Whitley of C Company, 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, who had taken the course just months earlier when the mobile training team had visited Fort Bragg, was one of those Soldiers.
"You learn not only to look for the basic materials, but to put two and two together," said Whitley. "For instance, in one house, a guy may be making something that you think is nothing; in the next house, a guy is making something else; and then there's a third guy. Individually, there's nothing there, but you put them all together, and suddenly you have pressure plates for an IED," he said.
Every team leader, squad leader and above, should take the training and then teach it to their junior Soldiers to give them understanding of the process beyond just kicking in the doors, said Whitley, confirming that was why he and Spc. Amos Batts, a fellow infantryman, were retaking the course.
"Before, everything was focused on IEDs on the side of the road," said Batts, noting the shift in tactical training. "Now we are looking for IED materials inside the room—and the IED makers."
Whitley said that Cousin was particularly adept at teaching the subject to the men of the 82d. "As a former Paratrooper, he can relate well, especially when talking about and bridging that gap to out-of-the-box thinking beyond the standards that are put out," said Whitley.
It wasn't long before Cousin made true on Whitley's observation. Look in the kitchen for HME's (homemade explosives), said Cousin. He asked for a show of hands of those who had looked inside Iraqi and Afghan refrigerators. A few hands rose. It was the kind of odd request that could only have been made by a combat Soldier.
"You know what I'm talking about then," he said. "In Iraq, they may have things in there you don't recognize, but in Afghanistan, you see things that sometimes need to be shot again."
When the laughter subsided, the former Ranger instructor brought home his point. The bomb makers are separating components and hiding them in the kitchen, he said.
As late as 2006 when Cousin retired from the Army, there were no battlefield forensics classes for common troops, he said.
For the foreseeable future, however, the MTT's have plenty of work, according to Cox. There will be 29 training events this year, including all of the rotations at JRTC as well as the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif., and Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany.
"The need for trained forensics collectors on the battlefield is immediate," said Cox. "During the last NTC training cycle we attended, three of the teams in our class were told before they even completed the course that they would have a forensics mission upon arriving in Afghanistan."
While the labs are important, the scenarios are the heart of the battlefield forensics course, said Cox, noting that all of the scenarios are completed in fewer than 12 minutes —typical battlefield conditions — whereas civilian law enforcement generally places no time limit on its forensics experts.
"They included a diverse array of practical problems and something that any Soldier can appreciate: real-world ways of dealing with them," said Batts.
"There's a big picture to the scenarios," said Batts. "You find a piece in one that builds on another. There's more to it than just the individual scenarios, but I don't want to give it away to those who haven't gone through it yet," he said.
Here is a real-life scenario. In a well-known video of a U.S. Soldier being shot by a sniper in Iraq, the Soldier's armor stopped the 7.62mm slug, and he was able to seek cover. Unfortunately, following the discovery of the sniper's rifle, numerous bare-handed Soldiers handled it—mugging for the camera and just to see it — obliterating the shooter's fingerprints. No chain of custody was documented, and the weapon was not packaged for most of its travel to the forensics lab.
However, after hours of meticulously dismantling the weapon and more hours of processing it for latent prints, forensics techs thinking outside the box developed many latent prints left on the rifle by the sniper. The sniper was positively identified three years later.
"Fingerprints are forever," Cousin said. "Finding and documenting this biometric data is a way for you to serve long after you're out of the Army," he said.
| Date Taken: | 04.29.2009 |
| Date Posted: | 10.03.2009 03:14 |
| Story ID: | 39625 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 464 |
| Downloads: | 263 |
This work, Paratroopers learn battlefield forensics, by SGT Mike MacLeod, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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