BAIT AND KILL 

In 2005, when the IED threat in Iraq was near its peak, Marine 1st Lt. S.D. Gobin came up with an innovative approach to securing the highway between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah--hunt the IED cells. 

(I went on the first of one of these missions--Operation White Feather.) 

The target area of the highway was reasonable cleared of IEDs, then Gobin's platoon began patrolling.  And not the typical patrolling--they broke every rule in the book.  They patrolled in a fixed and predictable pattern and then would leave the target area un-patrolled--but very well observed by a scout-sniper team. 

It didn't take long before an IED team came out in the open. 

This operation, dubbed a 'bait and kill', was deployed in several different areas in many variations around Fallujah by Gobin's platoon.  It was not always successful, but it had a higher success rate than just driving up and down the road looking for IEDs. 

Baiting is considered un-sportsman like by hunters, but it is a primal form of hunting and more importantly, it flipped the decision making process in the areas where the bait and kill was used. 

INSIDE THE LOOP 

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act--OODA. 

The decision making process as defined by Boyd is one of the best ways to judge success of a military tactic. 

In combat and competitive endeavors, if your opponent is reacting to you, you are inside his decision making loop. 

To get inside an opponent's you loop you must observe faster and with greater detail, orient with more precision and then decide and act faster than your opponent. 

In combat, the 'act' part of the loop is best when it directly causes harm to the opponent. 

Gobin's 'bait and kill' for a time got inside IED cell's loops.  The IED cell was now the hunted rather than the hunter. 

FLUSHING OUT 

In Kansas, the most curious form of hunting is coyote hunting. 

The coyotes of Kansas, mangy, hardy and cunning, are killed in an organized hunt by flushing them out. 

Flushing out a covey of birds, or channelizing a deer has practical applications to counter insurgency. 

Though it is unglamourous, boring, tedius and exhausting, census/data collection missions that create a phone book of everyone in a village, city or neighborhood is flushing out. 

For hunting a coyote, it involves driving around, scaring them out of their burrows in draws into the open pasture where they can be pursued by dogs and pick up trucks. 

With birds, it involves dogs and traipsing around to get the birds to flight. 

And channelizing deer invovles a group of people fanning out over the terrain to move a deer into a kill zone where one hunter takes the shot. 

All of these hunting techniques move the game into plain sight. 

Census/data collection combined with ID cards, bio-metrics, check-points and constant foot patrols reconfirming census data move the insurgent into plain sight--then the hunt is on and the observational training of the Marine's Combat Hunter program takes over. 

A coyote looks like a coyote and deer and birds do not look like other animals--but an insurgent is a human and therefore the traits of an insurgent must be scutinized and observed and oriented against the population in general. 

The emphasis on observation and orientation by the most sophisticated I.S.R. platform available--a human--is how wars are won. 

People fight wars, not equipment.

---