War Strategy Critic To Review IED Office

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Boston Globe
April 16, 2007
Pg. 1

US effort to quell bombs questioned
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
WASHINGTON -- Alarmed by a spike in deadly roadside bombings in Iraq, the Pentagon has enlisted an early critic of the US war strategy to reevaluate the controversial office that has spent billions of dollars but failed to curb the biggest killer of American troops, according to Defense Department officials and documents.
Late last month, Undersecretary of Defense Kenneth Krieg ordered the creation of a special task force to analyze the effectiveness of the struggling Joint Improvised Explosive Devices Defeat Organization, hailed as a "mini-Manhattan Project" when it was established more than three years ago.
The review is designed to serve as an "independent sounding board," according to a Defense Department memo, and will be co chaired by Eric Evans , an electrical engineer and director of Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Paul E. Funk , a retired three-star Army general who publicly doubted that Iraq could be easily stabilized by military force.
Before US troops toppled Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Funk derided top Bush administration officials in several media interviews as thinking "all wars are small and will be over quickly." He also warned that US forces could be in Iraq "for years," believing that the United States did not have sufficient forces to pacify the country and would probably face years of resistance from home-grown forces.
Funk will grapple with what is perhaps the most deadly consequence of those predictions: improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, highly lethal booby traps fashioned from leftover mortar rounds, rockets, and other explosives. The devices are often hidden in garbage and even dead animals along US patrol routes. They are triggered by readily available items such as garage door openers and cellphones, and have vexed American commanders since the start of the insurgency.
To counter the threat, the Pentagon has added armor to vehicles, developed new ways to diffuse the bombs, and employed new tactics to help troops detect IEDs and detonate or defuse them.
To spearhead the search for innovative technologies and other defenses, the Pentagon established the IED office in 2003. The outfit has received nearly $6 billion to date, and its budget would double over the next two years under White House proposals pending before Congress.
But lawmakers have become increasingly frustrated by its secrecy and apparent lack of progress in stemming the roadside bomb threat.
Republicans and Democrats are questioning whether the organization's secrecy, its spiraling budget, and its seeming reliance on major defense contractors and high-tech solutions has been the best approach to stop the bombers, which so far have overcome most US countermeasures with relatively low-tech means.
In a recent report, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote that it is worried by "the exponential growth" of the Joint IED Defeat Organization, which has employed more contractors since it was conceived. Despite the organization's growth, "the committee has limited visibility into current staffing and future staffing requirements, and is concerned that certain contractor support is not being accounted for properly. "
Meanwhile, insurgents have continually refined their tactics, overcoming US countermeasures with bombs that are harder to neutralize.
Increasingly, insurgents are relying on more lethal bomb components -- including fist-size lumps of copper that turn into molten projectiles -- to penetrate more heavily armored vehicles, according to military officials. US intelligence officials assert that those sophisticated components, called explosively formed projectiles, are being smuggled from neighboring Iran.
Since the White House added nearly 30,000 troops to Iraq this spring, US casualties from roadside bombs have increased. Since March, several weeks after the enhanced security operations began, Defense Department data show that roadside bombs have caused more than seven out of 10 troop deaths, the largest share of combat fatalities since the war began.
In March, at least 54 out of 81 US troops were killed by IEDs, according to official casualty statistics and news reports, and the percentage has climbed higher so far this month: Of the 51 US troop deaths reported as of yesterday, nearly three-quarters, or 38, were killed in IED attacks.
IEDs have been the largest cause of US combat deaths throughout the Iraq war. But the percentage of all casualties attributed to IEDs had previously hovered between 50 and 60 percent before the stepped-up US operations this year, according to a review of the official data.
Top Pentagon officials now believe it is time for a fresh look. In his March 21 memo, Krieg said the IED review should reexamine "the goals, process, and substance of the plans" now being pursued by the IED office, which has been headed since 2005 by retired four-star Army general Montgomery Miegs . The task force is also instructed to give particular focus to "potential responses of the enemy" to US countermeasures and to assess how the threat may evolve over the coming months and years.
The task force will report its findings quarterly, according to Krieg's instructions, which were first reported by the newsletter Inside the Pentagon. The work will be conducted under the auspices of the Defense Science Board, a senior advisory panel to the secretary of defense.
Funk is an unlikely choice. An Army division commander during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, he told the Billings Gazette in Montana in January that President Bush's decision to increase US forces in Baghdad "is too late." The president's "heavy-handed, arrogant ways," Funk said, "gave up every advantage we had."
Funk, who last week traveled to the Army's National Training Center in the California desert to see some of the counter-IED efforts firsthand, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he does not think his outspoken views had anything to do with his selection. He noted that he sits on a variety of military advisory panels. But he said he believes that a review of the IED problem is sorely needed.
"We are trying to bring in people that will have some additional expertise, particularly in long-range planning and to look for other possible alternatives to solve this complex problem," he said.
He credited the IED office with making significant strides against difficult odds over the past few years. The office's science adviser, Colonel Barry Shoop , told a symposium last month that US forces are clearing about half of all IEDs planted by insurgents.
"I think they have done a fine job in a very difficult set of circumstances," said Funk, "but I may change my mind."
Evans declined to be interviewed for this story. "It's premature to engage in any public discussion" about the Pentagon review, MIT spokeswoman Patti Foley said .
The recent rise in IED deaths is attributed in part to the fact that US forces are conducting far more patrols in Baghdad. But military specialists also assert that the bombers have employed increasingly sophisticated tactics.
"Every step we take forward is being met with a comparable step forward by the enemy," said Michael O'Hanlon , a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
O'Hanlon doubts that the Pentagon could set up a better mechanism than the IED office to lead the effort. "The basic assumptions need to be reassessed," he said.
 
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