Richard WarnickWashington Post Series on IEDs
The Washington Post has a comprehensive four-part excellent series by Rick Atkinson that covers the history of US military efforts to counter improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the most effective enemy weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan. I will add a link to each part below as it comes online. Highly recommended reading.
The series is drawn from more than 140 interviews over the past six months with military and congressional officials, contractors, scientists and defense analysts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Washington and elsewhere. Most agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. Ten senior officers or retired officers, each of them intimately involved in the effort to combat IEDs, were asked to review the findings for accuracy and security considerations.
One thing I learned from the series is that U.S. Navy electronic warfare experts have played a key role in the anti-IED campaign from the beginning.
Part 1: ‘The IED problem is getting out of control. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.’
Part 2: ‘There was a two-year learning curve . . . and a lot of people died in those two years’
Part 3: ‘You can’t armor your way out of this problem’
Part 4: ‘If you don’t go after the network, you’re never going to stop these guys. Never.’
I have not blogged about the struggle to counter the IED threat, which emerged as a result of the failure of occupation forces to secure or destroy the enormous stockpiles of munitions left over from the Saddam regime. There are a lot of anecdotes, but specific information is hard to come by. It’s a sensitive issue due to operational security. Also, the military doesn’t like to discuss this because the anti-IED effort has not been very successful.
What’s clear is that IEDs have caused 22,000 American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 1,625 soldiers killed, 440 so far this year. The monthly death toll peaked last June, and remains high. Many more of our people have suffered severe injuries. The bottom line: the anti-IED effort has reduced this weapon’s overall effectiveness, but there are many more IEDs in Iraq now and the casualties haven’t been reduced. In the first seven months of this year, there were 20,781 roadside bomb attacks in Iraq, one every 15 minutes.
In addition to the direct toll on the occupation forces, the widespread IED campaign tends to thwart counterinsurgency efforts by turning coalition soldiers against the very people they are supposed to be trying to help.
The Pentagon has tended to favor the technological quick fix (though “quick” is often a misnomer given the DOD bureaucracy). The emphasis has been on trying to defeat the devices themselves. Not enough attention has been paid to stopping the insurgents who plant IEDs. The strategy of focusing on the insurgent networks is called “moving left of boom,” which is the title of the WaPo series. It involves seemingly obvious (but new to Iraq) techniques such as collecting fingerprint evidence from bomb components.
UPDATE: On a related topic, the War of the Bridges continues. Main and Central reports on a tanker bomb explosion that destroyed al-Seha bridge in western Mosul.
