# How To Run an Honesty Trace To Counter IED's



## tomahawk6 (25 Aug 2009)

Roadside bombs remain the number-one threat to U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. But as Noah recently reported, one Marine officer has forwarded an ingenious, off-the-shelf method for avoiding natural ambush points: The “honesty trace.”

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Matt Pottinger — now a Marine Corps first lieutenant — came up with the idea while working with Combat Logistics Battalion 3 in Helmand Province. The idea was simple: Pottinger hooked up the unit’s vehicles with commercial GPS trackers to create a digital record of the routes they were driving. Then he overlaid the routes to see where tracks were converging. It turned out that terrain often forced the Marines into natural chokepoints where the Taliban could set up ambushes.

Changing up routes is standard in military operations, but creating “honesty traces” (a term borrowed from the British in Northern Ireland, who did the same thing with tracing paper) can help troops avoid falling into unexpected — and potentially deadly — patterns. This unclassified briefing — prepared for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, but also for other International Security Assistance Force units — doesn’t involve much more than a Garmin GPS, a USB port and Excel spreadsheets.

“Honesty traces plainly tell us which wadi crossings we gravitate toward, which stretches of desert we have traversed before, and which contours and chokepoints we and our sister units tend to repeatedly navigate,” the briefing states. “Hence, the traces keep us honest.”


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## daftandbarmy (26 Aug 2009)

We did exactly the same thing in Northern Ireland with maps, talc and grease pencils. Works great. It's even better if kept in digital format, I imagine, as you can track, store and analyze patterns over extended periods of time.

What's old is new again. Nice to see common sense spanning the decades....


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## Greymatters (26 Aug 2009)

Like you say, surprising how old and previously well-known lessons keep having to be relearned...


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## daftandbarmy (26 Aug 2009)

Greymatters said:
			
		

> Like you say, surprising how old and previously well-known lessons keep having to be relearned...



Sometimes people don't even learn AT the time: Helmets on....

I was on the advance party to take over from another regiment in South Armagh and arrived on the day they had doscovered an 1100lb IED under a culvert. They were very proud of their haul, and the bags of fertilizer they choppered into the base just about covered the heli pad, stinking the place up with diesel fuel.

On previous tours I had used an honesty trace quite a bit as part of op planning, so my first reaction was to go check out their 'honesty trace': a large scale, 1:20,000 map of the TAOR overlaid with plastic. Sure enough, the bomb had been set at a choke point - a piece of slightly higher dry ground between two marshes that foot patrols got into the habit of using to keep their boots dry. They had faithfully kept up their tracing, but took apparently no action to break up this obvious pattern.

My first action when our troops arrived was to run a giant search op to check out all other such choke points they had created over their tour. Didn't find anything though, so couldn't feel fully smug...


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## Jarnhamar (26 Aug 2009)

This works unless you travel the same exact road to the same exact FOBS every day for 6 months.


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## AmmoTech90 (26 Aug 2009)

Flawed Design said:
			
		

> This works unless you travel the same exact road to the same exact FOBS every day for 6 months.



I think the point of honesty trace is to ensure that you don't do that.  Of course it has to looked at as D&B pointed out.


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## GAP (26 Aug 2009)

Flawed Design said:
			
		

> This works unless you travel the same exact road to the same exact FOBS every day for 6 months.



We found that it only took 3-4 days of consistency for the watchers to pick out the choke points and set something up, sometimes it was the next day....


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## Jarnhamar (26 Aug 2009)

AmmoTech90 said:
			
		

> I think the point of honesty trace is to ensure that you don't do that.  Of course it has to looked at as D&B pointed out.



Right. In the Canadian AOR though it's easier said then done. If you're traveling with large vehicles there's about one route too and from the FOBs.


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## daftandbarmy (27 Aug 2009)

Flawed Design said:
			
		

> Right. In the Canadian AOR though it's easier said then done. If you're traveling with large vehicles there's about one route too and from the FOBs.



Yeah, we had that too. As a result, we ran dozens of overt/covert type ops to ambush, cordon, picquet, clear every foot of MSR whenever we could, day and night. Most patrols had some kind of route check task. It got kind of manic as well with, for example, troops returning by chopper from one op being dropped off to link up with a couple of dogs and some engineers (they eat different things folks, really  ;D) to conduct a high risk clearance on a stretch of road we'd missed before passing the dogs and sappers over to another unit to head off and clear something else. The 'nights in bed' percentage was in the low 20s. All within the context of not trying to set our own patterns of doing clearances in a certain way. 

It was exhausting, and like a bizarre planning Rubic's cube; enough anyways to make you sit bolt upright at some point, slap the forehead and go 'aw crap, I forgot to....". 

And this was all in a small geographical area by Afghanistan standards, and even after all that, we still had casualties. Our only comfort was that we had fewer than some other units, which is small comfort indeed when you consider the 'luck' factor as well. 

But I sure hung onto that trace like it was some kind of magic talisman!


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## Jarnhamar (27 Aug 2009)

daftandbarmy said:
			
		

> Yeah, we had that too. As a result, we ran dozens of overt/covert type ops to ambush, cordon, picquet, clear every foot of MSR whenever we could, day and night.



Thank you.
Some of us are forced to take the same exact routes every day and night in large, slow moving convoys which made huge targets.
*All the shit you guys went through really saved a lot of lives on our end.* 
I hope in the future work continues to take place on improving routes and TTPs etc..


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## dapaterson (27 Aug 2009)

A recent edition of the Canadian Army Journal discussed the need for better CSS intelligence - both drawing from the ASIC and contributing to the overall picture.


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## daftandbarmy (29 Aug 2009)

Flawed Design said:
			
		

> Thank you.
> Some of us are forced to take the same exact routes every day and night in large, slow moving convoys which made huge targets.
> *All the crap you guys went through really saved a lot of lives on our end.*
> I hope in the future work continues to take place on improving routes and TTPs etc..
> ...


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