In airports, roadblocks and home searches, a trained dog’s snout can detect as little as a picogram of a compound in the air. That’s a trillionth of a gram—and some tests suggest an even greater sensitivity than that. This powerful nose has allowed individual dogs to save hundreds of civilians and deployed troops in searches for roadside bombs and car bombs.

The problem—there just wasn’t enough dogs to go around.

Bomb-detection gap

In 2007, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory identified a major bottleneck in America’s ability to stem the loss of lives to IED attacks. The Marines lacked available dog teams with the specific off-leash training needed to perform in the field.

To be sure, the military was training 40 percent more dogs than it had before 9/11. But with hundreds of dogs operating abroad for the more than 150,000 troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, there were simply far too few.

It didn’t help that the U.S. military was playing catch up. The Pentagon didn’t have dogs trained for hunting bombs before 9/11. Commanders in the field barely understood how to best deploy K-9 teams, which often left the earliest dog teams struggling to find the best way to deploy their mutts.

Rather than expand Lackland’s ability to breed and supply dogs, the Marine Corps and Army looked to civilian contractors for dogs and training. The Marines’ IED Detector Dog—or IDD—and the U.S. Army’s Tactical Explosives Detector Dog—or TEDD—programs funded the transformation of soldiers into dog handlers through short nine-week training programs.

The Marines began their program with Labrador Retreivers in 2007, doubling the program’s output in 2010. K2 Solutions provided the first five weeks of training for IDD dog teams. The next four weeks of training took place at Enhanced Mohave Viper for large-scale pre-deployment exercises. In 2011, one IDD lost his life during a lane-clearing exercise.

Army TEDDs and their handlers underwent the same 14-day proficiency training as permanent military dog handlers at the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9 course held at Yuma Proving Ground. The course and final test at Yuma gave handlers the invaluable chance to learn from instructors with experience “outside the wire.”

But a dog is only as good as its handler. The downside to the IDD and TEDD programs? Unit commanders picked potential handlers based on who volunteered for job. Without a strong background with dog handling and a particular aptitude, IDD and TEDD handlers suffered a major handicap. They did not have the same extensive training and experience as military police handlers, who make up the majority of the military’s dog handlers.

This potentially left handlers with a lack of confidence and familiarity. The Marines, in particular, seemed to lump dogs and volunteers together in the hope that something would click. The result was more dogs in the field, but many of these were second-tier dog teams.

This is the major lesson of military working dogs after Vietnam. When the military downsized its ability to maintain institutional memory and experience, it ended up shorthanded when it needed that capability later on.

Hunting down IED makers

The fight against IEDs wasn’t just reactive. From 2011, JIEDDO and the Joint Warfighting Center launched the “Attack the Network” campaign to promote an offensive on the people, money and communications that kept the insurgencies going. Dogs played a role here too with the 2010 revival of the Vietnam-era specialty of combat tracking canines.

Tracking is traditionally associated with police bloodhounds that search for fugitives on the run. The combat tracker dogs sent to Vietnam found inspiration in similar teams deployed to British counter-insurgency operations in Kenya and Malaya. Like the modern SSD teams, the first handlers sent to Vietnam initially trained with the British Army Jungle Warfare School.

In Iraq, combat trackers hunted for booby-trappers and IED makers that supplied the insurgency with the tools to kill and maim American troops. Every moment wasted in getting these dogs to the source of a scent is a handicap for their ability to trace the minute particles of skin, hair and sweat left behind by their quarry. The dog sniffs out the scent in the air or along the ground while their handler checks for footprints, scuffs or blood trails.

The canines “can smell skin cells, bacteria and fear-scent odors a couple days after a person has been in an area, and he can track for four or five miles at a time,” Spc. David Hydro of the 500th Military Police Detachment said in a 2009 Army news story.

The Marines first became serious about combat tracking in August 2007 through its 15-day “Combat Hunter” course under the instruction of law enforcement and hunting professionals. The goal was to turn the tables on the insurgents who had been actively hunting U.S. troops.

But if ever there was an example of a military service forgetting the lessons of wars past, it is the Marine Corps’ belated recognition of its need for combat tracker dogs. By the time the Combat Hunter course began, the situation in Iraq had deteriorated into civil war—and nearly 4,000 U.S. troops had died.

The first combat tracker dogs didn’t enter service until 2009 with the Army. Contractors trained the first tracking dog teams before Lackland took over in 2010. Like the TEDD and IDD, the Army and Marine Combat Tracking Dog handlers are volunteers who undergo a nine-week training course. They are infantrymen first, dog-handlers second.

Even in 2010, the joint training facility was only training around 10 such dogs per year. As a result, IED bomb-makers and insurgents whose scent might have been otherwise caught by the canine’s nose slipped away to fight another day. Since 2012, the signs have not been good for the future of military working dogs “outside the wire.”

The spirit of inter-service cooperation that existed in the early years of the program has frayed. The Air Force pulled out of the Inter-Service Advanced Skills K-9—or ISAK—course at Yuma Proving Ground in 2012 to create its own pre-deployment capability. The ISAK course itself seemed to have been lucky to secure three more years of funding that same year—and now that funding is up.

That same year, the Air Force Military Working Dog program—which operates Lackland’s dog-training program—was investigating how it could save the service money. In addition, the IDD and TEDD programs are winding up, and the Air Force, citing its preference for dual-use dogs, is keen to kill the SSD program in favor of a PEDD course with more training devoted to off-leash activities.

Further, JIEDDO—now renamed JIDA—began downplaying the importance of dogs in counter-IED work. “Among the systems, we still employ the dogs, but we’re sort of de-emphasizing them because we find that other technologies are far more effective,” JIEDDO spokesman Rod Korba told the Washington Times in 2012. “The problem is our troops end up befriending these animals and they engage with them on different levels, and it kind of hurts their effectiveness.”

These are all foreboding signs for the military working dogs that saved thousands of lives during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As we look to Syria and the possibility of American boots on the ground in future war zones, we should be asking ourselves whether we want to deprive our soldiers of the best tool available to deal with a weapon that has killed and maimed thousands of servicemen and women.

The military already asked itself this question. “We’ll always have a requirement to have canine assets to counter IEDs because IEDs are here to stay,” Army Lt. Col. Richard A. Vargus said in 2011.

Let’s hope the Pentagon remembers that.

James Simpson is contributor to War is Boring and a Japan-based writer covering Japanese security news and military history. This article first appeared in War is Boring.

Image: Flickr/ United States Marine Corps.