HTCI has partnered with Adam Hammond of HTCI Europe and INTEVIDENCE to offer both courses under a teaming agreement in the USA. HTCI Inc is pleased to offer courses that compliment HTCI's existing expertise in site and evidence exploitation. 

Mr Hammond has coordinated such training for Australian and NATO forces and is excited to bring the skills to the continental US. "The big difference with what we're doing with tracking here is that we're not focussed on 'chasing bad-guys' in the fastest time possible", he said. "That's just asking for trouble in Afghanistan."

Instead, Mr Hammond's foundation course focusses on greatly increasing the participant's situational awareness and visual accuity to identify and interpret evidence. Safety drills are a key component of the course and students leave with a newfound respect for where and how they place their own feet on operations. 

"In the follow-on course we step it up quite a notch", Mr Hammond said. Scenarios in the ten-day course focus on integrating the skill with site exploitation procedures, evidence recovery, identifying secondary sites, and intelligence reporting.

"We still cover tactics and formations" Mr Hammond said, "but the guys we teach are rarely newbies. They're often WIT or other exploitation-tasked operators so this is really 'post-graduate' level training for these guys and girls." "We introduce some tactics they may not have seen purely as tools for the toolbox, and discuss with them what is realistic for their operations."   

For further information regarding CONUS courses, contact Rich Watson at rich@gohtci.com

For OCONUS training contact Adam Hammond at adam@gohtci.com. INTEVIDENCE & HTCI Europe and Australia.

Course Descriptions:

IED and Evidence Awareness (5 days)

The statistics speak for themselves: 102 Allied troops killed in Afghanistan in June 2010 alone; the vast majority by IEDs.

HTCI draws on expert visual tracking instructors to deliver a basic 5 day course in IED and Evidence awareness ensuring increased general situational awareness; and specific increases in the ability to recognise the signs that accompany the emplacement of a device.

No amount of technology will ever replace squared-away basic soldiering skills. One former 22 SAS instructor commented that on a recent British deployment, 80% of their IED finds were achieved through visual identification from a survivable distance following this basic training.

Visual Tracking in ISTAR Operations (10 days)

(Course Prerequisite: IED and Evidence Awareness)

To date, training in the US in visual tracking has been largely delivered from the perspective of locating a fleeing enemy or fugitive. The focus has been on closing the time and distance gap rather than on the safety drills that operating in the close terrain of an Afghan green zone necessitate. As few Commanders would ever authorise a small team to aggressively pursue Afghan insurgents in such terrain, our tracking course concentrates on tracking as an intelligence-gathering skill-set with an added emphasis on safety drills.

Given that tracking is nothing other than linking one piece of evidence to the next before making logical deductions; this skill is a vital tool in any operator’s toolbox- but especially WIT and exploitation-tasked operators in theatre. This course builds on the base level achieved in the IED and Evidence awareness course and concentrates on evidence location, interpretation, recovery, and exploitation.

The course also covers in depth:

• Utilizing visual tracking in site exploitation operations
• Intelligence reporting procedures
• Impression evidence recovery

Our expert instructors have found that if tracking is taught from this perspective; it may still be used to devastating effect in the rare situations that permit an aggressive direct action follow-up when combined with established small-unit tactics and the Tracking Safety Drill.