Report for Year 2011 on Military Working Dog Project 2010-2012

The duration of the Military Working Dog project described is three years with 2011 being the second year. It is a continuation of the work that started in 2007, aiming at increasing the efficiency and quality of mine detection dog training. This year's work included the finishing preparations of the new method for training and sustaining the performance of mine detection dogs. The concept of using a water solution of purified TNT has been used to teach the dog to find all types of buried landmines containing TNT. During 2011, two attempts to accredit a dog team according to the "Operations SOP 1.2 Explosive Detection Dog Accreditation Sudan" have been performed, using one of the four project dogs. The criteria's for a successful accreditation was not fulfilled. However the results were still promising since the dog found and marked some of the landmines within the stipulated distance. Air samples were collected after the test to measure the presence of TNT available at the time of the accreditation trial. The samples revealed the presence of TNT at all the locations where the dog made improper marking of landmines. This indicates that the unsuccessful accreditation could be a result of the need for more training on pinpointing the landmine rather than the method itself being a failure. The new training method is useful, since it seems to facilitate the training of the dogs with reference to learning them to search on the ground and marking the landmines. The work during 2011 also included the beginning of addressing the training methods for search dogs for detection of an Improvised Explosive Device, IED. The research question to investigate is whether a dog can learn to find the least common denominator of an IED or not. Dogs from the military unit of the Swedish Air Force, F17 have for that purpose been trained on three different energetic salts that are common ingredients in IED´s. The salts have been used without the fuel that turns them into explosives. The benefit is that the salts alone, are non-explosives and therefore easy to handle. There has been no problem to teach the dogs these three substances. The dogs were trained to find approximately 0,5 gram of each energetic salt. With 250 performed searches the percentage of failure is less than 10%. The time it took to learn the dogs the three new scents was approximately six working hours. During 2012 these dogs will also be tested on buried IED dummies. FOI has also visited two training courses for route clearance with detection dogs. The courses were held by SAFDIC (Swedish Armed Forces Dog Instruction Centre) and their Norwegian counterpart, in Nordic defence collaboration.