U.S. military bomb technicians will be getting some pre-deployment training in crime scene investigations from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau announced Tuesday. Under an expanded program with the Defense Department, an ATF special agent certified explosives specialist will join the staff of the military's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization Joint Center of Excellence at Ft. Irwin, Calif. The agent will train military bomb techs in post-blast investigations and homemade explosives.

The program was launched last year in a memorandum of agreement between the two agencies. Part of the special agent's job will be to instruct military investigators about ATF's role in an interagency organization that investigates bombings in Iraq. That organization, dubbed the Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell, or CEXC, analyzes IED debris found at blast sites and sends IED components back to the Justice Department's Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center in the United States for further analysis.

The program also calls for ATF to train six classes of military bomb technicians this year at its National Center for Explosives Training and Research at Ft. A.P. Hill, Va., and elsewhere. ATF is also developing a course on homemade explosives, which have plagued the American military operation in Iraq since the war began. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Appropriations Committee the same day that IEDs are responsible for 70 percent of U.S. military deaths in Iraq. Gates said no matter how many methods or technologies the U.S. military develops to thwart these attacks, the enemy always finds a way around them. DOD is asking Congress for $2.4 billion to fund research into technologies to counter roadside bombs.

ATF has also trained Iraqi police officers in explosives disposal and investigation and provides data on IED incidents to DFuze, an international and multilingual database about bomb and arson incidents throughout the world.

Crime scene investigation has become an interesting and challenging new mission for the military as it attempts to reverse the escalating trend in violence in Baghdad. I hinted at the military's new CSI function in The Cutting Edge column of the March issue of DTI, which referred to the Defense Department's Automated Biometric Identification System, or ABIS.

ABIS is a database of biometric data collected in the war on terrorism, and includes, for example, fingerprints from the remnants of improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

The item in The Cutting Edge was about how the U.S. Navy is testing handheld biometrics kits to screen sailors on commercial vessels against these fingerprint databases. The kits were acquired through DOD's Biometrics Task Force and are backpackable for easy use during at-sea interdictions.

--Catherine MacRae Hockmuth