The Kentucky Air National Guard has a new member to help with search and rescue operations: Callie, a 2-year-old Dutch shepherd.

Callie is now assigned to the Kentucky Air Guard’s 123rd Special Tactics Squadron, part of its Search and Rescue K-9 program that launched in 2018 to enhance disaster response teams’ ability to detect people. According to the Guard, Callie is now the Defense Department’s only search and rescue dog.

The Army’s 911th Engineering Company out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, ran an urban search and rescue dog pilot program in 2010. More commonly, the military has partnered with state and federal agencies when it needs dogs for search and rescue missions.

“Callie is trained in live find,” said Master Sgt. Rudy Parsons, a pararescueman, in a Guard news release. “She goes into wilderness, collapsed-structures or disaster situations. She’s trained to detect living people, find them and alert me when she’s located them. We react accordingly, mark the spot and begin the extraction of those people.”

Previously, the unit’s search and rescue operations in urban areas required using drills and cameras — methods Parsons characterized as time consuming and challenging. Although heaving equipment is still involved, Parsons said Callie “beats any type of equipment or machine with just her capabilities, her nose and her intelligence.”

Parsons first became interested in launching a search and rescue program for canines after Kentucky Air Guardsmen responded to Haiti’s magnitude 7 earthquake in 2010.

Local sources told the airmen that a schoolhouse had been destroyed and that 40 kids were trapped, leading a crew of special tactics airmen to spend several days clearing the area to search for the children. The Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived days later with a dog and cleared the area in 20 minutes, concluding that no humans were trapped in the rubble.

According to Parsons, that incident shed light on the value of canines during search and rescue missions. Callie has also undergone training to help the squadron during helicopter exfiltration and infiltration, mountain rescues and other operations.

“The unique function that we can provide by developing Callie is that we can get her to places that nobody else can get to,” Parsons said. “That’s the biggest benefit. … In the situation like the earthquake in Haiti, we can get her in there (immediately), and those days … could be the difference in somebody’s life.”

Chief Master Sgt. Karl Grugel, the 123rd STS’s chief enlisted manager, noted that the civilian sector frequently uses dogs’ abilities as a “secondary requirement” during search and rescue operations.

“Pararescue is the only DoD asset dedicated to search and rescue, which is why Callie is such a mission-enhancing asset,” Grugel said. “Search and rescue dogs have already been proven time and time again on the civilian side. They have such an immense capability. When they do side-by-side testing, there’s nothing that even comes close to a canine.”

Parsons is optimistic the Search and Rescue K-9 program can mature into a program that routinely deploys with special tactics personnel recovery teams and global access teams. But for now, the focus is on Callie.

“We’re continuing just to develop her just so she can interact and function in every capability that the U.S. military could be in and there could be a need to save life,” Parsons said.

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