| | An incident on June 28 in the East Rashid neighborhood of Baghdad illuminated a disquieting trend: A single underbelly IED, so violent that investigators initially believed the blast came from several car bombs, killed five soldiers and wounded seven.
Bombmakers increasingly used homemade explosives brewed from fertilizer-based urea nitrate in kiddie swimming pools or huge aluminum cauldrons, then spread on flat rooftops to dry and packed in rice bags. On July 17, bombers detonated 1,500 pounds of homemade explosives in a culvert north of Baghdad. The blast heaved a 26-ton armored vehicle 60 feet through the air, killing two Navy crewmen, according to investigative documents. Other bombmakers in late 2006 began using acetone to leach the explosives from artillery and mortar shells; much lighter and more portable, the stuff could then be molded into car wheel wells or hidden almost anywhere.
Multiple suicide truck bombs were orchestrated to penetrate sturdy perimeter defenses, like the twin blasts in late April of this year that killed nine soldiers from the 82nd Airborne in a schoolhouse command post north of Baghdad.
Another nasty variation first appeared in October 2006 with the first use of chlorine gas in an IED. Sixteen more chlorine attacks would occur, but insurgents found, as World War I soldiers had, that "it is very difficult to create a lethal concentration of chlorine gas," an Army colonel in Baghdad reported. "The gas cloud rapidly dissipates."
***
Defeat the device. Train the force. Attack the network.
Meigs, a retired four-star Army general, had repeated those three phrases a thousand times since becoming JIEDDO director in December 2005.
In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. government's counter-IED efforts had focused overwhelmingly on defeating the device, and more than half of Meigs's budget still went to preventing detonation and, if that failed, mitigating the blast. In fiscal 2007, for example, $113 million would be spent on mine rollers, a World War II technology using heavy cylinders to trip pressure plate triggers in front of a convoy.
The "molecular sniffer" long coveted by U.S. Central Command arrived on the battlefield in the guise of Fido, a $25,000 machine developed by an Oklahoma company as part of a Pentagon program called Dog's Nose. Modern explosives have very low vapor pressures, and therefore emit few molecules for a sniffer to detect; but Fido's sensor -- heated above 200 degrees Fahrenheit -- was effective enough that hundreds were deployed, including more than 70 mounted on mobile robots. "This is the closest thing we can get to a dog," a government engineer said.
Some technologies thrived: Warrior Alpha drones; surveillance cameras on towers and blimps; ground penetrating radar mounted on a South African-built Husky vehicle to detect buried IEDs. In trying to "pre-det" -- prematurely detonate -- bombs with radio signals, EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes flew above roads in Iraq and Afghanistan. The missions were called "burning the route."
Other technologies flopped. Forerunner, an unmanned vehicle carrying counter-IED gear, was to be "tele-operated" with remote controls by soldiers in a trailing vehicle. It "simply did not work" and was banished from the theater, according to a JIEDDO document. The controls proved sluggish, and some operators developed motion sickness while trying to drive Forerunner via a television monitor in the jouncing trail Humvee.
Still more disappointing was Blow Torch, a high-powered microwave emitter built at Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania after besting four rivals in a government competition. Similar to an Israeli gadget called Dragon Spike, Blow Torch was intended to defeat the electronic circuitry in EFPs. At $175,000 each, 101 of the devices took to the field for operational testing early this year. But enduring shortcomings halted the deployment and Blow Torch was diverted to New Mexico for more testing.
Also frustrating was the scientific effort to detect the gossamer-like copper wires increasingly used to arm or detonate bombs, including about one-third of all EFPs by this summer. Certain airborne search radars gave good resolution -- a clear picture -- when looking for a thin wire strung from a hidden roadside bomb to a triggerman. But those radars failed to penetrate beneath the surface for wires slightly buried, while radars that penetrated gave poor resolution. Different soils produced varying results, depending on moisture content, alkaline levels and other arcane variables. False positives were legion in wire-strewn, trash-cluttered Iraq.
Meanwhile, the jammer saga rolled on. By midsummer, 13,000 Dukes had arrived, to be followed by an improved Duke 2. The Pentagon also signed contracts with EDO Corp. for more than $535 million to buy the first 7,450 of an eventual 11,000 jammers -- known collectively as Spiral 2.1 -- intended as the next CREW generation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Research and development has already begun on Spirals 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3, according to the Navy.
Few issues were more emotionally charged. Since early 2006, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had urged a "Take Back the Roads" campaign in Iraq. Among other solutions, he advocated a backpack jammer known as the Quick Reaction Dismounted (QRD), which would succeed the little Warlock Blue he had pushed into the field a year earlier. When a staffer called Hunter from Yuma and told him that "they have 163 more iterations of the tests still to go" on the QRD, the chairman angrily accused Meigs of "the slows" and of "delaying things from getting into the hands of the troops," according to sources familiar with the incident.
Meigs was furious. The backpack jammer was not ready for deployment, he countered, and the Duke's persistent difficulties had disrupted the test schedule at Yuma. Eventually the Pentagon announced that 1,400 backpack jammers -- a QRD model called the Guardian won the competition -- would be sent to the theater by spring of this year. (Hunter lost his chairmanship in January when Democrats took control of the House.)
Armor remained the last line of defense, and armor grew ever thicker, heavier and more expensive. Seven major vendors toiled to build the V-shaped MRAPs, and the Pentagon pondered whether to triple the buy, to 23,000 vehicles, in order to replace all Humvees in Iraq, according to senior officials. By the end of 2007, 1,300 MRAPs were to be built each month, compared with fewer than one a day a year earlier. For expediency, plans were made to fly at least some MRAPs to the war zone at a cost of $135,000 each, seven times the expense of sea transport.
A Marine general this spring publicly declared the MRAP to be "four to five times safer" than an uparmored Humvee, but Pentagon officials conceded that it remains vulnerable to EFPs and large underbelly bombs, as well as to anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. An even stouter model, designed to better parry EFPs, is under consideration.
The Pentagon in the past year also financed more than 8,000 anti-fragmentation kits, known as Frag Kit 5, which added still more armor plating to Humvees. Frag Kit 6, a still heavier version, will have doors weighing 650 pounds each -- so bulky that soldiers may need a "mechanical assist device" to open and close them. "It's over the top," said an Army colonel in Baghdad.
***
Training the force, Meigs's second imperative, has saved innumerable lives over the years. Soldiers who once spotted few roadside bombs in Iraq now detect more than half before detonation.
The "Mark 1 Human Eyeball," as troops sardonically call it, is more adept at finding IEDs than any machine. Studies to determine which soldiers made the best bomb spotters found that "it's those who hunted and fished and were much closer to their environment," an Army scientist reported. Because approximately half of all casualties occurred in the first three months of a soldier's deployment, according to a senior intelligence official, units headed overseas began receiving extensive counter-IED instruction at the Army's National Training Center in California and elsewhere.
In Iraq, SKTs -- "small kill teams" -- of five to eight soldiers learned to ambush bomb emplacers, often hiding for hours or days near IED "hot spots." Under a $258 million contract, Wexford Group International of Vienna, Va., and the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a new Army unit formed last year at Fort Meade, Md., dispatched field teams to the theater to help sharpen tactics and techniques. Troops were advised to "get off the X" -- the blast seat in an IED attack -- and to "build a box," with surveillance cameras, for example, in which to spot and trap insurgent bombers.
The new unit, now 250 strong, adopted an eccentric motto: "Normal is a cycle on a washing machine." Field commanders were urged to be unorthodox, by leaving an eavesdropping bug after searching a suspected insurgent hideout, or by shutting down microwave towers to neutralize cellphone triggers before entering a dangerous sector.
__________________  |