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Remote-Controlled Dogs.

  Dogs, particularly big dogs, have been used in warfare for millennia - at first to create mayhem amongst enemy formations and then later still as messengers between areas under fire. According to The Black Vault, U.S. security forces developed a completely novel way of employing dogs in the theatre of war known as the ‘Remote Control of War Dogs (Remotely Controlled Scout Dog)’ programme. In 1974 the dog-handlers trained their charges to respond to three different tones emitted on a radio receiver: a 400 Hz sawtooth tone, telling the dog to change direction; an 8oo Hz tone with a 50% duty cycle, instructing the dog to drop and stay; a 2,000 Hz warbling tone, for recall to handler.  Ceasing the tone was the instruction to the dog to obey the command. It is, perhaps, astonishing that the dogs were actually able to learn these commands.

   The recall and the ‘down-stay’, as the Americans called it, were easy enough to teach but the turn was more difficult as the dog could turn to left or right and would sometimes have to turn at nearly 360^O (almost on the spot) until pointing in the right direction, at which time the tone signal would be cut off and the dog would then proceed as before but this time in the new required direction.

   The programme came to eight conclusions mostly to do with the technicalities of the equipment and the expediency of the strategy itself, one of which read: “information presented in this report can serve as a prototype training manual for use by military dog training personnel in the further development, refining and standardisation of techniques for the large-scale production of highly trained war dogs”.  It was further concluded “Effective execution of the change-direction response is contingent on the orientation of the dog’s head at the instant of signal cessation, rather than on body orientation.”  Another conclusion was that “A scout dog can be trained to work off-leash at distances from its handler of ½ mile or more under the control of terrain stimuli and of radio-transmitted tone signals.”  Where terrain stimuli were described as “a trail, a road, brush line or any directional surface configuration to guide its travel, or it may be attracted toward a distant prominent landmark, such as a tree line, a single large tree, a vehicle, a building etc.”  There is no mention of the types of dogs used but pastoral dogs, sighthounds and their crosses will often focus on distant objects, as will the young of other hunting breeds.

   It’s possible that the idea for the ‘scout dog’ programme came from the actions of US army dogs in Vietnam, as featured in an article “Canine Caution Warns Troops of Concealed Dangers” in the ‘Army Research and Development Newsmagazine’, November-December, 1970.  Developed from 1967 onwards by the U.S. Army Land Warfare Laboratory, the programme was introduced to detect enemy personnel, land mines, tunnels, tripwire-actuated devices, ambushes etc. The dogs were trained to range far ahead of their handlers, off-leash and up to one hundred metres in some cases and they were required to respond to any detection by sitting. The dogs originally wore a harness that contained a motion-sensitive transmitter and when the dog sat down the signal changed, thus warning the handler who had a small FM receiver in his helmet. Eventually, as the scheme developed, all training was completed prior to deployment by the contracting agencies that supplied the dogs. Later, during this project the dogs were then trained to respond to hand signals and voice commands (shades of Frederik Pohl’s Slave Ship, 1956) although voice commands might have been dangerous with the enemy in the vicinity. Again, no mention of the breeds employed by the military was provided and the exact number of dogs was not known but the article reports that in 1970 a further sixty trained dogs were shipped out to work with the troops and the article also includes a picture of a German shepherd dog.

  The 1974 U.S. army ‘scout dog’ project may have been inspired by an early ‘sixties programme trialled by the CIA. Details of this rather cruel initiative were released to The Black Vault after a freedom of information request by John Greenewald. Whereas dog lovers may have staffed the two aforementioned strategies, this particular scheme occupied a much shadier area where electric shocks were delivered deep inside the dog’s brain by a probe introduced via a hole bored into the skull (known as the Olds effect). The anonymous author of the report states “The specific aim of the research program was to examine the feasibility of controlling the behaviour of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggered electrical stimulation of the brain… such a system… depends for its effectiveness on two properties of electrical stimulation delivered to certain deep lying structures of the dog brains: the well-known reward effect, and a tendency for such stimulation to initiate and maintain locomotion in a direction which is accompanied by the continued delivery of stimulation.” The electric shocks were referred to, throughout the report, as ‘stimulation’.  Originally, the electrodes inserted in the brains were held in place by a plastic cap but due to damage to the electrodes and to the failure of the surgical wounds to heal, causing infection, another method had to be devised to hold them in place. A better technique was found by “embedding the electrode entirely within a mound of dental cement on the skull and running the leads subcutaneously to a point between the shoulder blades of the dog where the leads are brought to the surface and fixed to a standard dog harness.”  That is, the whole contraption, including the adaptor, was cemented around the hole bored in the skull, under the scalp.

   The best electric shock to administer to achieve the ideal performance was apparently: “Shorter durations (about 200 msec) and moderate to high intensities within the range are preferred: the data showed slightly faster running times at those intensities and durations. Increases in intensity and duration beyond optimum values produced longer running times due to a variety of effects, including recoil.”

   Dogs were trained to enter a ‘food box’ to obtain food on hearing a sound tone. If the electrical stimulation were strong enough the dog would ignore the urge to obey this tone. Summarised as “brain stimulation emerged as a powerful means of behavioural control. Under optimum conditions, a strong reinforcer like food could not compete. Under less than optimum conditions, food was able to compete to a degree inversely related to the intensity of stimulation used to control the dog’s behaviour.”  So, it appears that the Olds effect trumps other training and possibly even any Pavlovian reaction.

   American agencies always appear to have a bottomless budget, no matter how absurd their schemes might at first seem. All dogs are different, however, and not surprisingly these idiosyncrasies were reflected in the results of this particular project. Perhaps for this reason the programme was eventually abandoned. Assuming it really was abandoned and not reintroduced under a different name: who knows to what (or to whom) this idea could be adapted.

 Hat tip to John Greenwalde of the Black Vault for this information.

Remote Control of Behaviour with Rewarding Electrical Stimulation of the Brain. 1965. {Some redaction}

Canine Caution Warns Troops of Concealed Dangers. 1970. P27

Remote Control of War Dogs (Remotely Controlled Scout Dog). 1974

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