Profiling and Tactical Tracking

1. What they did

This is a student handout from the Basic Officer Course at The Basic School, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) school for new officers. It is teaching material, not a study. It covers two skills the Marines teach together: combat profiling (reading people’s behaviour to spot threats hidden among civilians) and tactical tracking (reading the tracks and signs people leave on the ground).

The lesson sets out learning objectives: officers should be able to watch an area, establish a “baseline” of what is normal, detect “anomalies”, decide whether they are a threat, and identify spoor using combat tracking indicators.

The tracking part covers tracking terms, how tracks are seen, the parts of a footprint, the characteristics of human gait, and the observable indicators a tracker looks for.

2. What they found

Combat profiling

• Everything has a baseline, and an anomaly is something that rises above it (something there that should not be) or falls below it (something absent that should be there).
• Baseline plus anomaly leads to a decision. One cue is usually not enough; once three anomalies are found, a decision must be made (the “rule of threes”).
• The handout describes six domains for reading people: heuristics (mental shortcuts), proxemics (distances between people and how they move towards or away from others), geographics (how people use places, including “natural lines of drift”, the paths of least resistance that become pathways), atmospherics (the mood of a place), kinesics (body language) and biometrics (involuntary body reactions such as blushing, sweating and pupil changes).
• Every reading must be made in the context of the local culture.

Tactical tracking

• Tracking is described as gathering information from the “forensic evidence” an enemy leaves in the natural environment, to build a picture of their size, activities, location, unit, time, equipment and intent. A tracker asks: how many are there, how well trained, how armed, how healthy, what is their morale, and do they know they are followed?
• The handout quotes a tracker’s saying: “One step a word, several steps a sentence, a whole line of steps a paragraph”, so that a set of tracks tells a story.
• Terms: spoor (tracks or sign), follow-up (a trained team following spoor), quarry (the person tracked), active track (the quarry is still moving), passive track (cold tracks, followed for intelligence), and the time and distance gap between team and quarry.
• How tracks are seen: changes in texture, unnatural outlines and shapes, changes in colour and shine, and regular spacing that stands out from nature’s irregular rhythm.
• The footprint: the primary impact point (usually the heel when walking forward; the toe when walking backwards, sprinting or climbing), the foot roll, and the terminal point.
• Human gait: stride (about 30 inches on average), straddle, pitch angle (outward, inward or neutral), pressure, dwell time, and rhythm and balance. Good rhythm and balance suggests purpose; a lack of it suggests uncertainty. With constant training, a team can work out things such as age, gender, load, pace, mental state, attempts to hide tracks, and whether the person moved by day or night.
• Observable indicators: displacement (such as footprints in soft ground, cut vegetation, crushed grass at rest stops, box marks from loads), ground spoor (shown by regularity, flattening and transference), sign (colour changes on overturned stones, broken dirt seals around rocks, displaced dew, water on stream banks, disturbed insects and spider webs), litter, signs of booby traps and buried explosives, blood spoor (showing where and how badly someone is wounded), and body waste (urine, faeces, vomit; faeces can show the quarry’s health).

3. What they concluded

The handout’s summary says these are tools to help Marines observe and operate in their environment: staying alert, remembering what they see, and judging what is normal and abnormal. It presents profiling and tracking together as ways to keep the initiative in attack and defence, and stresses that all decisions must be legal, moral and ethical.

4. How tracking was or was not used

No tracking was carried out; this is training material about tracking people. It teaches tracks and signs identification (footprints, gait, disturbance, blood, body waste, litter) and trailing (the “follow-up” of a quarry by a tracking team, on active or cold tracks). It says tracking is learned through practical application and constant training, and that tacit knowledge is best passed on hands-on, with a mentor.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Optics and other observation devices are mentioned in the learning objectives.
• The profiling method draws on ideas from psychology: Boyd’s decision cycle (observe, orient, decide, act), explicit and tacit knowledge, template and prototypical matching, “perceptual fill”, channel capacity and emotional memory in training.