Soldier Dogs (7 page)

Soldier dogs are called to serve their country. But their country is unlikely to be their country of origin. If it were, these dogs would serve the military of places like Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, and Germany. Although
some military dogs are purchased in the U.S., even the bulk of American-bought military dogs originally hail from these parts of Europe. They just happen to be brought back by vendors in the U.S. to be sold here.

The Department of Defense dog program wants to buy American to support American business, so who are these dogs who are so special they have to be imported from Europe? Are they so top-notch that we can’t produce them here? And what about Jake and other average American dogs? Would they have had a stab at being war dogs? Would Jake have passed the stringent testing to become a military working dog, at least back when he was a lad?

I sorted through my questions about soldier dog procurement with Stewart Hilliard, the MWD breeding program manager, who headed dog procurement for years and is still involved in procurement evaluations. “Doc Hilliard,” or “Doc,” as he’s known around here, is a civilian who works at Lackland Air Force Base, set in the dry, rugged terrain on the outskirts of San Antonio. The base is at the center of the military working dog universe. Let’s step inside one of the new buildings here.

To enter, you have to dip the soles of your shoes in a vat of green disinfectant called Roccal-D that looks eerily like the acidic
“
Dip” from
Roger Rabbit
. My escort, Gerry Proctor, and I tramped upstairs with slightly damp, smelly shoes.

The “Doc” in Doc Hilliard comes from his PhD in behavioral neuroscience, which he likes to point out “is a fancy term for animal learning.” With a name like Doc, one might expect a short, plump, older, bespectacled man, perhaps with a white fringe of beard. So when a six-foot-four, fit, clean-shaven, brown-haired man walked into the large meeting room, it was a bit surprising.

Doc Hilliard has worked in just about every capacity with big, strong dogs for decades. He began training working dogs in 1980 and went on to specialize in Schutzhund and other dog sports popular in Europe—sports that test dogs for traits like courage, protective instinct, intelligence, and perseverance. These are vital qualities in law-enforcement dogs and military working dogs. Doc made a name for himself in the field and eventually got plucked up by the Military Working Dog Program. He’s been at Lackland since 1997 and has worked in every capacity, from dog behavior evaluator to the director of training for the program. These days, bringing the best dogs for the buck to the U.S. military is his main concern.

About five or six times a year, Doc and a small embassy of veterinarians, vet techs, handlers, and evaluators fly from San Antonio to Europe to buy young dogs they hope will become soldier dogs. During these buy trips, the team visits roughly five dog brokers in Western Europe, primarily in the Netherlands. The team’s goal is to supply hundreds of new working dogs for the Department of Defense annually.

If talking about dogs in terms of brokers sounds impersonal, then the synonymous term
vendors
is even less warm and fuzzy. But, again, officially these pooches are considered equipment, not soldiers. Vendors buy dogs from breeders in order to sell them to governments and law-enforcement organizations. They develop relationships with breeders, buying hundreds of dogs a year from them, and putting them all up for one-stop shopping for military entities.

Visiting a vendor has been likened to going to a flea market, but other than having dozens or hundreds of items (dogs) in one area, there’s actually little resemblance. The U.S. team isn’t jostling with
the military buyers from other countries. On the days Doc Hilliard’s crew goes in to buy, it’s U.S. only. And there is no haggling, no “This dog is worth twice that! You should see what that guy over there from Yemen will give me for him, and don’t get me started on that South African buyer!” Prices are set by strict government purchase rules and regulations. The Department of Defense publishes a requirement, and brokers compete to fulfill the requirement with the lowest possible priced dogs for what the U.S. needs.

No one—not even Doc Hilliard—will officially say how much the dogs cost. The closest Doc will come is “You couldn’t buy a new car with the money, but it’s substantial.” A few sources close to the buying process say when the U.S. buys in bulk, we get dual-purpose (patrol and detection) dogs for somewhere between $3,000 and $4,500. The price adds up when you consider how many dogs we buy each year, but it’s far less than some other countries pay.

The Israeli Defense Forces, for instance, have a reputation for buying the strongest, most resilient dogs available and paying top dollar—upward of $7,000 per standard military dog, and occasionally even double that. Of course, Israel needs far fewer dogs than the U.S. does, so the country can afford to spend more on a dog. But there are plenty of handlers and trainers who wish the U.S. could spend the money needed for superior genetics in order to get dogs who have the ability to better withstand the rigors of war, from their physical robustness to their unflappable mental makeup.

“Compared to the dogs that bring top dollar, our dogs aren’t really the best. The buy teams do whatever they can within the financial limits, and trainers and handlers can make a shit dog into an excellent war dog, but it would be helpful to be able to pay for a better product,” I was told by a longtime MWD trainer.

Doc Hilliard isn’t sure that spending more money is the answer. Training and maturity can take a dog from zero to sixty in no time. “We get a lot of first-class animals. And dogs that don’t look first-class while in training may become awesome working animals in the field with maturity and experience.”

More than one-tenth of the dogs the U.S. buys will end up as washouts, failing to meet the Military Working Dog Program’s physical or behavioral standards. These dogs have problems that weren’t evident during the lengthy testing of the dogs by the dog-buying team. Most of the troubles stem from environmental issues, like fear of loud gunfire and explosions, or the inability to learn necessary basic tasks. Like people, some dogs are just slow learners. “Some are Einsteins, some are rocks,” says veterinarian Walter Burghardt, chief of behavioral medicine and military working dog studies at Lackland’s Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital. Since they have only a set amount of time to go through the canine version of basic training, the dogs who take too long to learn aren’t going to make the cut.

Some of the failed dogs become “training aids”—dogs who help students at Lackland’s dog-handler school learn the basics of dog handling. Dogs who aren’t aggressive enough to do both patrol and explosives work can become explosives dogs only and can still deploy. Others can go to local law-enforcement agencies or can be adopted out to the public.

Ten percent isn’t a bad attrition rate compared with what it was just five to six years ago, when more than one-fourth of the dogs bought by the United States would end up washing out. Improved training techniques—with more carrot, less stick—may have a lot to do with the success of these dogs, say those who have been
involved with the dog program for the last decade. It makes sense. Would you rather work for someone who gets really nasty when you don’t do something perfectly, or for someone who notices the good stuff and isn’t usually too harsh about the less-than-stellar performances?

Better knowledge of what goes into making a strong military working dog accounts for some of the increase in dog draftees who go on to become soldier dogs. Hilliard and his team spend most of their time at the vendors running tests on the dogs, evaluating everything from general health to the desire to chase a ball, to see if dogs—even those bought on a lean budget—have what it takes.

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T
he nature and nurture of military dogs is complicated because of their breeding and where they come from, to be sure, but it is necessarily diverse because there is such a range of jobs they do. To understand which breeds of dogs get selected for which jobs in the military, it helps to know a little about the range of roles these dogs have. You might think “Seen one military working dog, seen ’em all”—but these dogs are as varied as the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines they work beside.

Just about everything in the military has an acronym, from the sublime (COPPER for Chemoterrorism Operations Policy for Public Emergency) to the ridiculous (POO for Point of Origin; when a dog handler told me about how he had to go back to the POO in order to start his mission, it painted an odd picture). Military working dog jobs are no exception. It is simpler to divide the dogs into some broad categories and then tap into the acronyms.

Single-purpose dogs
are used for one purpose only: sniffing out explosives or narcotics (or in the case of combat tracking dogs, humans). They tend to be “sporting” breeds, like Labrador retrievers,
golden and Chesapeake Bay retrievers, Viszlas, and various short- and wire-haired pointers. Jack Russell terriers and even small poodles sometimes make appearances.

Single-purpose dogs don’t need to be aggressive. They can be all nose, no bite. Some single-purpose dogs might get naturally protective, but as most handlers of dogs like Labs will attest, they’re more likely to lick you to death. A couple of the jobs (CTDs and MDDs) tend to employ dogs more typically associated with dual-purpose work, like German shepherds, Belgian Malinois, and Dutch shepherds.

These dogs are trained to locate either drugs
or
explosives—never both. You don’t want to have to stand there guessing if Balco M492 is alerting to a stash of heroin or a pressure-plate IED. “When your dog makes an alert, you need to know whether to run away and call the explosives people or whether to go arrest someone,” says Doc Hilliard.

Types of single-purpose dogs and the jobs they do include:

EDD (explosive detector dog)
—This is your standard-fare single-purpose dog, used in all branches of the military. The handlers of these dogs are military police who spend months going through dog-handler school at Lackland Air Force Base.

NDD (narcotics detector dog)
—Just like the EDD, except this dog detects drugs instead of explosives.

SSD (specialized search dog)
—This dog goes a step beyond EDD work. SSD dogs are a special class of dogs trained to work off leash at long distances from a handler in order to find explosives. They work by hand signals and in the marines can also receive commands via radio receivers they wear on their backs. (The air force and the navy don’t have SSDs.) These dogs can also be breeds
that are usually reserved as dual-purpose dogs, like German shepherds.

CTD (combat tracker dog)
—Explosives dogs and SSDs can detect where IEDs and weapons caches are located, but it’s up to the highly trained CTDs to track down the person who stashed the explosives. This is a marine program only. Although the job is in our single-purpose dog list, combat tracker dogs are more typically dual-purpose dog breeds these days. “Labs were too goofy for the work,” a longtime CTD trainer told me. CTDs generally work on a long retractable leash.

MDD (mine detection dog)
—These dogs do slow and steady off-leash searches for buried mines and artillery. This is an army program only. Labs, shepherds, and Malinois are the preferred breeds for this job.

TEDD (tactical explosive detector dog)
—Lackland doesn’t procure dogs for the army’s TEDD program. Contractors do, and they generally buy them from U.S. vendors. The program is a temporary one created in response to a request from former general David Petraeus for an influx of special sniffer dogs to help with IED detection. Select infantrymen from deploying units are given short-term training on how to work with these dogs, who are trained by contractors.

IDD (IED detector dog)
—As with TEDDs, this is a temporary program created to fulfill the urgent need for bomb dogs. It’s run by the Marine Corps and accounts for the majority of sporting breed dogs in the Department of Defense Military Working Dog Program. The dogs are bought from breeders and vendors around the U.S. by contractors, who train them and the infantrymen who will be their handlers. (The training of IDD handlers and TEDD
handlers is far shorter than that of other MWD handlers—many say too short to ensure the safest and most effective dog teams.)