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.
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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.
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