On a normal week I get at least a few hits on the site from people searching for information on “racial profiling.”  The last few weeks though have shown a huge increase in the number of visits from people searching for racial profiling.  This is of course in response to the news coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing and the resulting outcry to put a stop to racial profiling.

It couldn’t be more fitting that this story has been immediately followed in the news by the start of the trial for Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 unarmed civilians last July in a mission to strike back against multiculturalism and Islam.

This is why we don’t teach racial profiling.  Continue reading »

[ted id=1255]

In his second time giving a talk at a TED Conference, Malcolm Gladwell brings up a point in the speech that mirrors one of the purposes of The CP Journal.  After weaving a story that talks about all of the work and research the government put into building and developing the Norden Bombsight in the Second World War, he reaches his thesis: being able to drop a bomb onto your target is important, but if you can’t find the enemy you want to target, your multi-million dollar bombsight is worthless.

For Marines, you know that the mission of the Marine rifle squad is to “locate, close with, and destroy” the enemy they are facing.  And when it comes to “closing with and destroying,” the capability of U.S. Marines is unparalleled in their skill in doing this.  The biggest problems our military faces overseas and the problem our police officers face here in the states is in the difficulty of “locating” the enemy. Continue reading »

The first time I sat through a two-week Combat Hunter Course I was pissed.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought the material in the classes was incredible, but I couldn’t stop asking myself why hadn’t I been through the course before my deployments?  In 2010, something along the lines of 60-70% of all American killed and wounded in Afghanistan was the result of IEDs.  We are hearing from Marines returning from overseas, and in overwhelming numbers, about how those skills kept them alive – how it helped them find IEDs before they were detonated, or how it helped them find the people who put the IED in the ground.  But still today, not every Marine gets taught how to do this.  As I sat through that first course, I realized that this is absolutely unacceptable.

If this material was brand new, I might be able to accept that.  But it isn’t.  In fact this type of training has been available for a long time.  The problem was, being in an infantry battalion, I didn’t have the clearance necessary to go through those schools.  To steal a line from another Marine – I had a high enough clearance to step on an IED, but not a high enough clearance to learn how to uncover the people who put it there.  Continue reading »

The difference between being proactive and reactive on the battlefield gets discussed in the military a lot. People have their catchphrases that they like to use in an attempt to try and instill the proactive mindset in the troops, and you hear them pretty regularly during many training exercises. “YOU have to take the fight to enemy!” “YOU dictate when and where you fight, NOT the enemy!” “We have to get into the enemy’s OODA loop and keep him reacting to US!”

I am certainly not going to knock the concept of being proactive on the battlefield. It is what Combat Hunter was designed to do, but I am going to question our leadership (our officers, staff non-commissioned officers, and non-commissioned officers) of all ranks that are involved in training, and question how well we are doing training our warriors to actually become proactive in combat.

In a full-scale war the American military, especially the Marine Corps, has proven that our maneuver warfare principles accomplish our goal of forcing the enemy to react to us and is able to mentally and physically destroy any opponent we face. However, with the counter-insurgency we have been fighting for the last decade, we have found ourselves limited in our ability to maintain the offensive. It is a natural progression that occurs with this type of war. Since the enemy has taken off his uniform and hides behind women and children, it is much more difficult for our soldiers and Marines to separate them from the population they hide amongst.

Unfortunately for American troops, this means that often times we don’t know where the enemy is until the IED goes off, until the ambush on our patrol has been initiated, or until the sniper has taken his shot at our base. Once the enemy has taken those steps and we now know where he is, we are able to go back to our training and overwhelm them with superior firepower and defeat him. But that also means we are still reacting to his actions. Continue reading »

I’ve been getting quite a few questions lately regarding the intent for our putting this site together and how it benefits the Marine Corps or other viewers. Even though this site is operated completely independently of the Marine Corps, Marines and soldiers heading into harms way as they prepare to deploy will always be my target audience. I also include our nation’s police officers in this group. Any reference to “Marines” here is meant to apply to anyone in that audience, but here are a few reasons why this site exists:
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In 2006, as the Iraqi insurgency was spreading throughout Iraq’s Al Anbar Province, Marines on patrol were facing an increasing threat in the form of IED attacks and sniper fire.  As intelligence officials on the ground analyzed the data of these attacks, they began to see an alarming trend beginning to form: not only was our enemy actively hunting us, they were also becoming more sophisticated in their planning.  General James Mattis, the Marine Corps’ Leonidas and at the time the I Marine Expeditionary Force Commander, responsible for leading all of the Marines in Iraq (at the time of this post he is serving as the CENTCOM Commander in charge of all military personnel in the Middle East) acknowledged that this situation was unacceptable and directed the creation of the Combat Hunter Program.
Continue reading »

I have heard this phrase countless times in this past year.  I may have heard it before, but I certainly never acknowledged what it meant or even considered the significance of it.  When it comes to my study of behavioral analysis, it has been the experts and researchers specializing in human behavior that have granted me access to this world. Continue reading »

If you were going to spend the time to teach someone how to tell time, you would likely explain that there are 24 hours in a day, divided into (2) twelve-hour segments with AM coming before PM, each of those hours divided into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds.  Once they understood this framework, you might then show them a clock, teaching them that the small hand identifies the hour and the long hand identifies the minute, and through this explanation your student would walk away with an understanding of how to tell time.

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Behavioral Profiling is, first and foremost, NOT racial profiling. When identifying threats, we shouldn’t focus on race, religion, or ethnicity, but instead on behavior within a given situation. Unfortunately, since 2001, most Americans, including military and law enforcement personnel, have fallen victim to Islamophobia. We constantly look for people who look like “terrorists.” By this we implicitly mean young to middle-aged middle-eastern Muslim males. The problems with this mentality are numerous. First, only a very small percentage of Muslims are extremists, and only a small percentage of those individuals conduct violent acts. Second, criminals and terrorists come in all shapes, sizes, and ages; from all races, ethnicities, and religions; and can be either male or female.  The United States has suffered enough from its fair share of home-grown terrorists, such as Timothy McVeigh, that we should know not to assume that a person is a terrorist because of the way the person looks. Third, by focusing on unimportant things such as race or ethnicity, we miss out on the important behavioral indicators that are necessary in identifying threats. Additionally, when we allow our false pre-conceived notions to give us tunnel vision, we do not see the dangerous individuals who do not fit our “racial profile.”

What’s the difference between combat profiling and criminal profiling?

I had a conversation today with an FBI profiler from the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. During our conversation it became clear just how different criminal profiling is from combat profiling. The main difference is that criminal profiling is reactive, while combat profiling is proactive. What follows is a comparison and contrast between combat profiling and criminal profiling.

Definition:
Combat profiling: This is a method of proactively identifying threats based on human behavior.
Criminal profiling: Also called psychological profiling or Criminal Investigative Analysis, is a method of developing a personality profile about a criminal based on the characteristics of the perpetrators crime or series of crimes (Criminal Profiling by Brent Turvey).

Comparison and Contrast:
Combat profiling: Proactively identifies threats based on behavior to prevent a crime or attack.
Criminal profiling: Reactively identifies likely characteristics of an offender based on a crime already committed. Continue reading »