TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01 - TRADOC - U.S. Army

TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01Sergeant Topping switches to what the unmanned aerial systems supporting his operationwere seeing. Four suspicious looking military-age males milled about at a roadside stand. Theydidn’t seem to be armed. He would approach cautiously and then make the call on whether ornot to stop and interrogate the men. He had recently reviewed tactical questioning techniques.He’d be looking for weapons residue on their persons with his remote sniffer while runningdigital images through the system to check identification. After assessing the risk was low, hecould simulate getting out of the FSV-R to talk to them using a hand-held translator. Besides, thesuspicious men were just video images. He’d have to list the questions he wanted to ask and runthem through the system to see if they would produce any useful information.All came up negative, but the digital response indicated that the men would have told themthey had seen the enemy moving to the road but the sounds of the aerial drone had scared themoff. The enemy has been harassing the locals for days and finding shelter with local supporters.Topping taps in a verbal thanks and keys the biometric device to determine veracity. In reality,he would have to be on the ground to talk to the men, but on this range, just indicating you wereusing the device produced a result.“They’re telling the truth, Sergeant Topping,” his sensor specialist reported. “Looks likewe’re being asked to do something about the potable water availability. Want me to reportthat?”“Tell me what it means and I’ll answer your question.”“Well, Sergeant, if the bad guys, the Anderians, I mean, had cut off the water supply, thatwould be valid intelligence, right?”“Right you are Specialist. And, Mike,” he asked the gunner, “what do we do with this littletidbit of information?”“Digital spot report, you know, Sergeant Topping. How many times have you drilled thatinto us?”Topping played this little question and answer game with his squad to keep them on theirtoes. It was all well and good to have all the computer generated course, tests, and virtualverification that you’d made the right decision and taken the right action, but it was plain oldleadership that makes you check and recheck your Soldiers just to be sure any one of them couldtake over your duties or anyone else in the crew should it be necessary.They finished the run on the range with close to 95 percent accuracy on their reports. “Notbad for a squad that had to do three iterations statically,” Topping thought. It had been a goodweek. After they got back to the motor pool he’d give them some time to unload and service thevehicles and then cut them loose.Topping accessed his education portal on his hand held computer selecting the automatedArmy Career Tracker to see if the system had updated his educational transcript. He jumped tohis career map. He was gunning for staff sergeant and wanted to verify the prerequisite classes129