From Biosensor to Best Friend: Evolution of the Military Working Dog Team

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - III

Abstract

In 1970, in their haste to bring American involvement in the Vietnam War to a close, the U.S. decided to abandon its roughly 4,000 remaining military working dogs overseas along with other surplus gear deemed too costly to repatriate. The dogs, legally classified as equipment, were either bequeathed to the South Vietnamese Army or euthanized for being “noneffective.” Decades later, Richard Cunningham, a Vietnam War sentry dog handler, criticized this decision in a 2017 OpEd for The New York Times. While he referred to his dog as an “elite weapon” that could detect “practically invisible” booby-traps, he also described the “special bond” that they formed in Vietnam. This competing perspective of military working dogs—as both equipment and companion—highlights a central tension of using nonhuman animals as defense biotechnology. Since the program’s inception, the U.S. military has portrayed the dog as a kind of extrasensory prosthesis that bestows humans with “added powers of observation.” With each subsequent campaign, the program has refined their selection process and training procedures to reflect more “scientifically” held beliefs about canines. But they have also continued to view what handlers call “the bond” as essential to dog-handler team operations. In this paper, I draw upon archival research, interviews with former handlers, and 12 months of ethnographic data at Lackland AFB to explore the social and historical lineages that prompted the U.S. to first utilize dogs as a combat resource while also tracing the evolution and expansion of their use across several different military campaigns.

Author

• Ashley Elizabeth Drake, University of Chicago