I’m sure by now even the most jaded, casual consumer of news about the war in Iraq has heard of the acronym IED. The difference between an IED and a landmine is that a landmine was manufactured in a factory by “authorized” people while an IED was rigged by “terrorists” or “insurgents”.
Either way, they continue to be extremely deadly:
Thirty months into the Iraq war, improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, account for more than half of all American injuries or deaths in combat. The weapon is so primitive that military bomb-squad schools once saw them as little more than the work of kids and miscreants. Now, troops bolt extra armor to their Humvees, and new arrivals receive IED awareness training.
Thirty months into the war is another way to say two and a half years. For 2.5 years the deadliest weapon used against American troops has been the IED. So what has the Pentagon actually done about it?
In October 2003, the Army created the Improvised Explosive Device Task Force (IED-TF) in recognition of the threat.
In February 2004, the Army further directed the IED-TF be made a standing capability with assigned field teams.
In April 2004, the Army proposed activation of an Asymmetric Warfare Regiment (later designated the Asymmetric Warfare Group) to oversee IED response and counter-terrorism priorities.
In July 2004, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz redesignates the Army Task Force the Joint IED Defeat Task Force (JIEDD-TF), again assigning it the mission of providing streamlined and timely support to soldiers in the field.
In July 2004, DOD establishes a Joint Integrated Process Team for Defeating Improvised Explosive Devices (Joint IED Defeat IPT) to sharpen DoD focus on IEDs.
In June 2005, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld signed a directive (DOD Directive 2000.19, Joint Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Defeat) designating DOD resources and direction to the problem.
In January 2006, Meigs’ JIEDD-TF is again redesignated as the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) and is made a permanent task force.
So thanks to a lot of fiddlin’ and diddlin’, much of it by Paul “Who Needs 130,00 Troops?” Wolfowitz, the Pentagon has been pushing paper for 2.5 years on what to do about the deadliest weapon being used against American troops.
The military has come up with some high-tech (and expensive of course) methods to try and counteract the effectiveness of IEDs:
The F/A-18D Hornet handles a lot of jobs in Iraq, these days – including bomb-hunting. Two two-seater plane looks out for improvised explosive devices with its nose-mounted Advanced Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance System, a bank of downward-looking cameras that replaces the Hornet’s standard 20-millimetere cannon.
A ground station at Al Asad air base is equipped with a new workstation that allows analysts such as Sgt. Elizabeth Zakar to lay two day’s imagery side by side to isolate the differences. This way they can spot disturbed earth, suspicious objects, piles of debris and other telltale signs that insurgents have planted a roadside bomb.
The Pentagon’s got 1 billion dollars “committed” to counter-IED programs and initiatives. And I don’t blame the soldiers for trying to rig their own anti-IED gear. After all, it’s their lives on the line:
Already, soldiers are already using new techniques and equipment – some of them as primitive and adaptive as IEDs. One unit hung chains from a six-foot boom in front of the truck, hoping they would trigger an IED before the vehicle drove over it. Other soldiers are using radio-frequency jammers to prevent insurgents from detonating IEDs by remote controls or garage-door openers.
So we’ve got homemade “feelers”, we’ve got radio jammers, we’ve got fighter jets taking aerial surveillance photography and we’ve got better armor on the vehicles that roll over the IED’s. About the only thing missing is the monkeys from Morocco and I’m sure there’s a serious DoD report on them somewhere in a file in Washington.
What we don’t have is a non-technological solution. I seriously wonder when this mindset of “technology wins all wars” came to have such a tenacious grip on the American military. I mean it isn’t like the U.S. was born fighting a “guerilla war” (or asymmetrical war, if you prefer that term). It isn’t like the U.S. didn’t fight hundreds of irregular wars against indigenous peoples. It isn’t like the U.S. didn’t fight an insurgency/guerilla war in Viet Nam just 30 years ago either. Or spent hundreds of million training the mujaheddin to do so in Afghanistan against the Soviets or the Contras against the Nicaraguan government.
Not to mention that Hizb Allah has been using IED’s for 25 years in Lebanon and the Chechens have been using them since 1994. Not to mention that the Soviets ran an extensive insurgency network behind the lines to disrupt Nazi supplies during World War 2.
In other words, IED’s are neither new inventions or hard to make and understand. The War Nerd is right, what’s missing is HUMINT – human intelligence. The fact that the Pentagon is focusing 1 billion dollars for a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem shows just how alienated the Americans are from the local populace:
The insurgents have decided to do it the easy way. As long as they can use IEDs, their low-tech standoff weapon, why should they risk close combat?
The real question is why they can get away with it. And here-well, I hate to keep saying this, but somebody needs to. The reason they can do it is because we still have NO INTEL on them. It’s the biggest failure of the war, and nobody talks about it. CI warfare is about people, not hardware. We’re all hardware and no intelligence, like a Tim Allen show. Makes me sick.
Well it makes me sick too. After two and a half years, why doesn’t the American military have insiders and contacts amongst the local populace? Why isn’t there a network of Iraqis, who either out of goodwill or the need for cash, regularly whisper to American troops where the IEDs are being planted? And what does it say that the IEDs are planted where the American vehicles are going to be operating? Who has the inside intelligence in this “war”, them or us?
And now the insurgents (or whatever name you choose to call them) are up to creating shaped explosives, which defeat all but the densest armor-plating the U.S. military has. And as we all know, Iraq has literally hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives lying around to be crafted into simple or sophisticated IED’s, each one potentially injuring or killing American troops or journalists.
To borrow Rumsfeld’s term, if there’s one “metric” that shows you’re losing a guerilla war, it’s when you fail to have enough intelligence cooperation from the population you’re supposed to be helping to stop the deadliest weapon that’s injuring and killing your troops.
This is cross-posted from Flogging the Simian
Peace
.
The fallacy of the Iraq War, ‘shock and awe’ invasion, hi-tech strategy and defeat by poor man’s IEDs.
U.S. Army 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division
Welcome to the Warhorse Website! The 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division is the U.S. Army’s first, fully digitized, and modernized heavy brigade combat team. If you are not sure what all that means, let me assure you the essence of what we do is all about training lethal crews, sections, platoons, and companies to win on the battlefield of the future. This brigade possesses the most modern, powerful, and lethal land combat systems in the world.
The brigade stays ready to fight our nation’s wars. The Warhorse Brigade is the first unit in the U.S. Army to be equipped with the M1A2SEP Abrams Tank and M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. These systems bring state-of-the-art weapons technology together with advances in digital command and control systems in order to increase the lethality and force effectiveness of today’s heavy armor brigade. The end result is to provide our soldiers with improved situational awareness on the battlefield …
Three years later …
FORT HOOD, Texas, Jan. 20, 2005 –Enemy forces watch and learn. When they observe a routine, they strike, often using improvised explosive devices, according to veterans of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instruction focuses on troops learning the technical components of the explosive as well as ways to increase awareness of enemy tactics.
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
.
British Survival Depends on Shared Intelligence
Simple answer? Because the U.S. forces have engaged the Iraqis with a surplus of armor and aggression, each and every day. The U.S. lost the war, because they couldn’t win the hearts and minds of the people. See my diary – NATO Expansion – Dutch troops send to Uruzgan province – the Europeans are mopping up behind the American Forces in Afghanistan to win the peace.
The Dutch left the Iraq operation in March 2005, because they were taking casualties in Al Muthanna, when the U.S. Army started another heavy-handed operation in Najaf to arrest Al Sadr loyalists. In these periods, Al Sadr loyalists would take over local administration and all intelligence to the Dutch would dry up instantly. The loyalty of all Iragis is to their own people and not to the invaders and occupiers.
● US Forces Have No Eyes and Ears
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I don’t question that the prevailing western view is that the various crimes againt humanity perpetuated by the brutal horde of torturers and sexual predators let loose by US on the near-defenseless populations in ancient lands is only intended to “help” them become the best corpses, limbless cripples, and gasping torture victims that they can be, for their own good, to help them learn about freedom and become advanced enough to be grateful for the privilege of being such a hefty source of revenue for Halliburton & ilk, which is a cause so dear to Americans in particular that they actually send their own sons to die for what to them is a sacred cause, annointed by Bush himself, through whom, they believe, God speaks, however, it could be that the Iraqi people, as a rule, do not hold these beliefs quite so dear, and for that reason so many of them have failed to apply through proper channels to bid for an official Pentagon contract to manufacture landmines, quite a favorite device of both covert US operatives as well as the Resistance.
Any intel “assets” we have, methods to defeat IEDs, or any other operational information is not likely to be printed in the Washington Post, and especially not on a f*cking blog. Speculate all you want, but at least some information will always remain – justifiably – classified.
And I think you know that.
Whatever the classified superiority we have, we’re close enough to elections that it’s probably time for the empire to wrap up the insurgency pretty quick now.