America’s IED Nightmare

On one side, the U.S. Department of Defense, armed with billion-dollar budgets, state-of-the-art technological savvy, and the world’s most formidable military machine. On the other, tiny groups of fly-by-night guerillas hunkered down in hideouts scattered around the world, scavenging remote-control toys or old artillery shells, soldering wires in ruined buildings or sneaking out to plant fertilizer bombs on moonlit desert roads. You’d think that the second bunch wouldn’t stand a chance. In fact, though, the makers of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are more than holding their own — still — at the cost of thousands of lives among the Americans and their allies around the world.

Though the story didn’t get much attention from the media at large, last month U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates effectively acknowledged that the Pentagon has yet to gain the upper hand in the battle against makeshift bombs. Some 80 percent of the casualties suffered by U.S troops and their allies in Afghanistan are now attributable to IEDs. By now, that once-obscure military term has presumably become a commonplace to anyone who’s been following the news. Ever since the U.S. and its friends invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003 the homemade bomb has become the weapon of choice for insurgents around the world: not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also on battlefields from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia. Two Navy SeaBees (military engineers) were killed by an IED in the Philippines at the end of September. They were the first U.S. casualties in that country since 2002. (U.S. defense officials say that some 300 IED incidents are now occurring each month outside of Iraq and Afghanistan.)

The Pentagon certainly hasn’t been sleeping. The U.S. military has repeatedly declared neutralizing the IED threat to be a top priority. Since 2003 the Department of Defense (DOD) has thrown some $20 billion at the problem, setting off a gusher of gadgets, training programs, and acronym-studded bureaucratic bailiwicks. Now Gates has pressed the restart button. Last month, he announced that he was creating a new military task force, to be headed by two Pentagon heavyweights, "to break down the stovepipes" that have kept the various anti-IED efforts across the national-security bureaucracy from cooperating more effectively.

His decision came soon after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a scathing report on the Pentagon’s inefficient and ineffective efforts through a bureaucratic jungle of agencies, working groups, and initiatives. Among other things, the report criticized the lead DOD agency on the problem, the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), for failing to maintain a database keeping track of the many efforts now tackling the problem throughout the vast American military bureaucracy — which would presumably help reduce unnecessary overlap and waste.

That’s not to say that JIEDDO and its various affiliates haven’t already accomplished a lot. Since JIEDDO was founded back in 2006, it has devised a wide variety of special jammers to block the remote-control signals used by insurgents to set off buried bombs. It has come up with advanced ground-penetrating radars that can tell operators if there’s anything suspicious under an unpaved road. It has promoted the development of sophisticated bomb-disposal and detection robots. And — even more usefully — JIEDDO has also developed new intelligence-gathering systems for thwarting bomb-making networks and retraining troops on how to deal with the threat in the field. Ex-JIEDDO chief General Montgomery Meigs, now a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, boasts that the U.S. military succeeded in reducing the casualty-to-blast ratio of IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan during his tenure. In 2002, he says, each bomb explosion caused, on average, six casualties (wounded and killed). By the end of 2007, when he left the position, that figure was down to one.

And yet troops continue to die from bomb attacks in Afghanistan at a fearsome rate. Though the Taliban and their allies were comparatively slow to discover the advantages of using IEDs, over the past two years they’ve turned roadside bombs into their primary weapon. Countering that threat in Afghanistan is proving even more of a challenge than it was in Iraq. Dakota Wood and Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington points out the makeshift bombs being used against U.S. troops in Afghanistan pose a whole new set of challenges. Iraq, they note, is a "relatively modernized 20th-century country" with paved roads, a fact that often makes it easier to figure out where bombs might be planted. Iraqi bomb-makers made ample use of explosives looted from countless Saddam-era munitions dumps scattered around the country — which tended to translate into myriad but comparatively small-scale attacks. (A Congressional Research Service report on the IED problem a few years ago noted that 40 percent of Saddam-era munitions still weren’t being properly guarded a full year after the invasion.) By contrast, Afghanistan has almost no modern infrastructure; the relatively small number of troops there isn’t enough to cover its much larger territory. And paved roads are virtually nonexistent, making it easier for Afghan insurgents to hide their explosive packages.

In Iraq, the insurgents proved adept at crafting found munitions — everything from hand grenades to 155-mm howitzer shells — into explosive booby traps. In Afghanistan, the preferred IED has been the fertilizer bomb. Even thought the number of "IED incidents" has been lower in Afghanistan, the Taliban have kept casualties high by making their bombs much bigger. The U.S. and NATO forces have responded with everything from high-tech electronic countermeasures (to block command signals) to intense drone surveillance of spots where IED activity tends to be highest. In some parts of the country American troops have even taken to seizing or buying up fertilizer from farmers — the same farmers who, presumably, have been lectured on the need to replace low-maintenance opium poppies with proper, fertilizer-intensive crops.

The biggest problem for IED-fighters, though, is simply that the target is constantly on the move. The bomb-makers have proven remarkably deft at upping the explosive ante. "There’s one thing the more candid generals will tell you," says John Bennett, a reporter with U.S. defense weekly Defense News. "I think they’ve been caught off guard a bit by how smart the enemy is, how inventive they are."

"The enemy isn’t very helpful," admits Meigs. "He keeps adapting every six months." The first Iraqi IEDs were primitive affairs that didn’t always explode like they were supposed to. But by October 2003 the insurgents had gained enough know-how to blow up an M1A2 Abrams tank, killing two of its crewmen. U.S. military planners are clearly worried that worse may be in store for their troops in Afghanistan as the Taliban hone their engineering skills.

That speed of adaptation makes it even harder for cumbersome bureaucracies to cope. The GAO report listed a bewildering mélange of competing or overlapping agencies assigned to deal with the IED threat. That proliferation is, in part, the somewhat understandable consequence of the way U.S. military planners reacted to the IED problem. As the casualty figures rose, both defense bureaucrats and congressional policymakers began urging immediate attention to the problem — and providing corresponding amounts of money to get it fixed.

According to Bennett, the Defense News journalist, "Gates is big on reducing redundancy, and he knows that, if you have a Marine program and an Army program that are doing the same things, it makes sense to free up smart people to do other counter-IED systems." In retrospect, Bennett says, it looks as though JIEDDO wasn’t provided with the "proper bureaucratic muscle" to accomplish its mission. The two men appointed by Gates to head the new task force are Marine Corps Lt. General John Paxton, the Joint Staff’s director for operations, as well as Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter — both figures of the required institutional heft.

"What Gates is doing here shows why he’s a master bureaucrat," says Bennett. "If these guys tell you to merge your efforts, chances are you’re gonna do it." Gates has shown similar determination in his high-pressure initiative to design, build, and field a new generation of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles. By essentially bypassing normal bureaucratic channels, the multibillion-dollar program has succeeded in getting 15,000 of the new vehicles to troops on the battlefield in just two years — lightning speed by Pentagon standards.

Still, no one believes that Gates or his colleagues will be able to solve the problem for good. It’s important to remember that the idea of "waging war on the IED" is a metaphor. Ultimately, notes ex-Marine Wood, you can’t hope to eradicate the threat from IEDs any more than you can the threat from bullets. He warns that the effort to protect soldiers and prevent casualties, while urgently needed, can sometimes lose sight of other vital criteria. "We place a tremendous value on human life and the prevention casualties," he says. "But there are costs to that, too. You can take a $500 artillery round and our response has been a million-dollar MRAP." While the "MRAP surge" has succeeded in equipping troops with the much-needed vehicles, the sheer speed of the effort inevitably has brought problems of its own, such as lack of spare parts or adequate maintenance programs. The services now find themselves saddled with a hodge-podge of vehicles from different manufacturers. And then there’s the longer-term issue of what to do with the new MRAP fleet once U.S. troops withdraw from the places they’re fighting in now.

What’s more, experts say, keeping troops penned up in ponderous, heavily armored vehicles may keep them safe even while undermining the mission they’re trying to achieve. Current U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine demands that troops spend as much time as possible outside of their vehicles, mingling with the local population to build trust and gain information, rather than patrolling the countryside encased in armor. The weighty MRAPs also guzzle far more fuel than previous vehicles, Wood points out, which in turn entails ever-larger supply convoys to serve them — convoys that then make wonderful targets for the bombers.

But then, of course, tech isn’t the answer to everything. As all those involved in the counter-IED effort readily acknowledge, beating the bombs isn’t just a matter of coming up with clever gadgets. It’s also about developing slippery human skills of perception and intuition. One recent JIEDDO study tried to figure out which troops were best at detecting concealed IEDs in test landscapes. Two groups scored especially well: those who had grown up hunting, and those who had grown up in crime-ridden inner cities. The reason is that the members of both groups have a knack for paying close attention to their surroundings. The test subjects who had spent their formative years glued to video screens couldn’t compete. Food for thought?