Why Tracking Skills Are Still Relevant To Troops On The Ground

“The ground doesn’t lie. Short of teleporting or being a ghost, a human being will leave some evidence of its presence or movement,” reads a SOFREP post on the merits and values on using tracking in modern wars. “It is science; tracking is empirical and fact-driven. It is not an abstract, ancient art form.”

The Scott-Donelan Tracking School teaches students the Rhodesian style of tracking — pioneered during the Rhodesian Bush War. The training emphasizes a reliance on hard facts to draw realistic and actionable conclusions, like reading debris patterns at the site of an attack or looking at how and where casings fell to determine how an ambush was carried out, by whom and how many attackers there were.