One tough mutt

Rico says his friend Bill Austin sends along this about Cairo the SEAL dog:

When President Barack Obama went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, last week for a highly publicized, but very private, meeting with the commando team that killed Osama bin Laden, only one of the eighty members of the super-secret SEAL unit was identified by name: Cairo, the war dog.
Cairo, like most canine members of the elite SEALs, is a Belgian Malinois. The Malinois breed is similar to German shepherds but smaller and more compact, with an adult male weighing in the 30-kilo range. (German shepherds are still used as war dogs by the American military, but the lighter, stubbier Malinois is considered better for the tandem parachute jumping and rappelling operations undertaken by SEAL teams.) Like their human counterparts, the SEAL dogs are highly trained, highly skilled, and highly motivated special ops experts, able to perform extraordinary military missions. The dogs carry out a wide range of specialized duties for the military teams to which they are attached: with a sense of smell forty times greater than a human’s, the dogs are trained to detect and identify both explosive material and hostile or hiding humans. The dogs are also twice as fast as a fit human, so anyone trying to escape is not likely to outrun Cairo or his buddies.
The dogs, equipped with video cameras, also enter some danger zones first, allowing their handlers to see what’s ahead before humans follow. SEAL dogs are even trained parachutists, jumping either in tandem with their handlers, or solo if the jump is into water. Last year canine parachute instructor Mike Forsythe and his dog Cara set the world record for highest man-dog parachute deployment, jumping from more than 30,100 feet up— the altitude that transoceanic passenger jets fly. Both Forsythe and Cara were wearing oxygen masks and skin protectors for the jump (photo).
As well, the dogs are faithful, fearless, and ferocious, and incredibly frightening and efficient attackers.
It has been repeatedly reported that the teeth of SEAL war dogs are replaced with titanium implants that are stronger, sharper, and scare-your-pants-off intimidating, but a SEAL spokesman has denied that charge.
When the SEAL DevGru team (usually known by its old designation, SEAL Team Six) hit bin Laden’s Pakistan compound on 2 May , Cairo’s feet would have been four of the first on the ground. And, like the human SEALs, Cairo was wearing super-strong, flexible body armor and was outfitted with high-tech equipment that included “doggles” —specially designed and fitted dog googles with night-vision and infrared capability that would even allow Cairo to see human heat forms through concrete walls.
Now, where on earth would anyone get that kind of incredibly hi-tech doggie gear? From Winnipeg, of all places. Jim and Glori Slater’s Manitoba hi-tech mom-and-pop business, K9 Storm Inc., has a well- deserved worldwide reputation for designing and manufacturing probably the best body armor available for police and military dogs. Working dogs in fifteen countries around the world are currently protected by their K9 Storm body armor (illustration).

Jim Slater was a canine handler on the Winnipeg Police Force when he crafted a Kevlar protective jacket for his own dog, Olaf, in the mid-1990s. Soon Slater was making body armor for other cop dogs, then the Canadian military and, soon, the world. The standard K9 Storm vest also has a load-bearing harness system that makes it ideal for tandem rappelling and parachuting.
And then there are the special hi-tech add-ons that made the K9 Storm especially appealing to the SEALs, who bought four of K9 Storm Inc.’s top-end Intruder “canine tactical assault suits” last year for $86,000. You can be sure Cairo was wearing one of those four suits when he
jumped into bin Laden’s lair.
Here’s an explanation of all the K9 Storm Intruder special features: just as the SEALS and other elite special forces are the sharp point of the American military machine, so too are their dogs at the top of a canine military heirarchy. In all, the U.S. military currently has nearly three thousand active-duty dogs
deployed around the world, with roughly six hundred now in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A dandy photo essay about U.S. war dogs just appeared in the journal Foreign Policy. Several of the photos included here are from Foreign Policy, while other photos are from K9 Storm Inc.
As for the ethics of sending dogs to war, that’s pretty much a moot point. If it’s ethical to send humans into combat, why not dogs?
At least the U.S. now treats its war dogs as full members of the military; at the end of the Vietnam War, the combat dogs there were designated as “surplus military equipment” and left behind when American forces pulled out.