30 SEP 07

PART 1 | SUMMER 2002 - SUMMER 2004

______________________________________________________________________

About Left of Boom: The Fight Against Roadside Bombs

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/28/AR2007092801888.html

The Washington Post

Sunday, September 30, 2007; Page A11

Beginning today and continuing through Wednesday, staff writer Rick Atkinson
describes the effort by the U.S. military to combat the improvised explosive devices used
by insurgents in Afghanistan and iraq from 2002 until now. Part one describes the effort
through the summer of 2004.

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.

_______________________________________________________________________

'The single most effective weapon against our deployed

forces'
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/29/AR2007092900751_pf.html

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; A01

It began with a bang and "a huge white blast," in the description of one witness who
outlived that Saturday morning, March 29, 2003. At a U.S. Army checkpoint straddling
Highway 9, just north of Najaf, four soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division, part of the
initial invasion of Iraq, had started to search an orange-and-white taxicab at 11:30 a.m.
when more than 100 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive detonated in the trunk.

The explosion tossed the sedan 15 feet down the road, killing the soldiers, the cabdriver
-- an apparent suicide bomber -- and a passerby on a bicycle. Lt. Col. Scott E. Rutter, a
battalion commander who rushed to the scene from his command post half a mile away,
saw in the smoking crater and broken bodies on Highway 9 "a recognition that now we
were entering into an area of warfare that's going to be completely different."

A member of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps holds an improvised explosive device, which has become a fixture on the
battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. As early as 2003, Army officers talked of C. (Brent Stirton / Getty Images)

Since that first fatal detonation of what is now known as an improvised explosive device,
more than 81,000 IED attacks have occurred in Iraq, including 25,000 so far this year,
according to U.S. military sources. The war has indeed metastasized into something
"completely different," a conflict in which the roadside bomb in its many variants --
including "suicide, vehicle-borne" -- has become the signature weapon in Iraq and
Afghanistan, as iconic as the machine gun in World War I or the laser-guided "smart
bomb" in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

IEDs have caused nearly two-thirds of the 3,100 American combat deaths in Iraq, and an
even higher proportion of battle wounds. This year alone, through mid-July, they have
also resulted in an estimated 11,000 Iraqi civilian casualties and more than 600 deaths
among Iraqi security forces. To the extent that the United States is not winning militarily
in Iraq, the roadside bomb, which as of Sept. 22 had killed or wounded 21,200
Americans, is both a proximate cause and a metaphor for the miscalculation and
improvisation that have characterized the war.

The battle against this weapon has been a fitful struggle to regain the initiative -- a
relentless cycle of measure, countermeasure and counter-countermeasure -- not only by
discovering or neutralizing hidden bombs, the so-called fight at the roadside, but also by
trying to identify and destroy the shadowy network of financiers, strategists, bombmakers
and emplacers who have formed at least 160 insurgent cells in Iraq, according to a senior
Defense Department official. But despite nearly $10 billion spent in the past four years
by the department's main IED-fighting agency, with an additional $4.5 billion budgeted
for fiscal 2008, the IED remains "the single most effective weapon against our deployed
forces," as the Pentagon acknowledged this year.
As early as 2003, Army officers spoke of shifting the counter-IED effort "left of boom"
by disrupting insurgent cells before bombs are built and planted. Yet U.S. efforts have
focused overwhelmingly on "right of boom"-- by mitigating the effects of a bomb blast
with heavier armor, sturdier vehicles and better trauma care -- or on the boom itself, by
spending, for example, more than $3 billion on 14 types of electronic jammers that
sometimes also jammed the radios of friendly forces.

For years the counter-IED effort was defensive, reactive and ultimately inadequate,
driven initially by a presumption that IEDs were a passing nuisance in a short war, and
then by an abiding faith that science would solve the problem.

"Americans want technical solutions. They want the silver bullet," said Rear Adm. Arch
Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington, which now
oversees several counter-IED technologies. "The solution to IEDs is the whole range of
national power --political-military affairs, strategy, operations, intelligence."

The costly and frustrating struggle against a weapon barely on the horizon of military
planners before the war in Iraq provides a unique lens for examining what some Pentagon
officials now call the Long War, and for understanding how the easy victory of 2003
became the morass of 2007.

This introduction and the four-part narrative that follows are drawn from more than 140
interviews 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, because of the sensitivity of the subject, or because
they are not authorized to comment. Ten senior officers or retired officers, each of them
intimately involved in the counter-IED fight, were asked to review the findings for
accuracy and security considerations.

As U.S. casualties spiraled from dozens to hundreds to many thousands, the quest for
IED countermeasures grew both desperate and ingenious. Honeybees and hunting dogs
searched for explosives. Soldiers fashioned makeshift "hillbilly armor." Jammers
proliferated, with names like Warlock, Chameleon, Acorn and Duke. Strategists
concocted bomb-busting techniques, such as "IED Blitz" and "backtracking" and
"persistent stare."

Yet bombs continued to detonate, and soldiers kept dying. The 100 or so daily IED
"events" -- bombs that blow up, as well as those discovered before they detonate -- have
doubled since the 50 per day typical in January 2006. The 3,229 IEDs recorded in March
of this year put the monthly total in Iraq above 3,000 for the first time, a threshold also
exceeded in May and June. "The numbers," one Army colonel said, "are astonishing."

In Afghanistan, although IED attacks remain a small fraction of those in Iraq, the figures
also have soared: from 22 in 2002 and 83 in 2003, to 1,730 in 2006 and a thousand in the
first half of this year. Suicide attacks have become especially pernicious, climbing to 123
last year, according to a United Nations study, a figure that continues to grow this year,
with 22 in May alone.

Insurgents have deftly leveraged consumer electronics technology to build explosive

devices that are simple, cheap and deadly: Almost anything that can flip a switch at a
distance can detonate a bomb. In the past five years, bombmakers have developed six
principal detonation triggers -- pressure plates, cellphones, command wire, low-power
radio-controlled, high-power radio-controlled and passive infrared -- that have prompted
dozens of U.S. technical antidotes, some successful and some not.

"Insurgents have shown a cycle of adaptation that is short relative to the ability of U.S.
forces to develop and field IED countermeasures," a National Academy of Sciences paper
concluded earlier this year. An American electrical engineer who has worked in Baghdad
for more than two years was blunter: "I never really feel like I'm ahead of the game."

The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial
complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet
system. "If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement
system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.

"We all drank the Kool-Aid," said a retired Army officer who worked on counter-IED
issues for three years. "We believed, and Congress was guilty as well, that because the
United States was the technology powerhouse, the solution to this problem would come
from science. That attitude was 'All we have to do is throw technology at it and the
problem will go away.' . . . The day we lose a war it will be to guys with spears and
loincloths, because they're not tied to technology. And we're kind of close to being there."

Or, as an officer writing in Marine Corps Gazette recently put it, "The Flintstones are
adapting faster than the Jetsons."

***

Military explosives technicians learning their craft at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida are
taught that the bomb triggering the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886 was the first
modern IED. T.E. Lawrence -- of Arabia -- wrote in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" that
roadside bombs, which mostly targeted Turkish trains in World War I, made traveling
around "an uncertain terror for the enemy."

The bomb that destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the truck bomb
Timothy McVeigh used to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995, the devices
detonated on trains in Madrid in 2004 and in the London transportation system in 2005 --
all were IEDs.

British troops encountered 7,000 IEDs during 30-plus years of conflict in Northern
Ireland, according to a U.S. Army ordnance officer. But what the British faced in more
than three decades is equivalent to less than three months in today's Iraq. Indeed, "the
sheer growth of the thing," as a senior Army general put it, is what most confounds
Pentagon strategists.

"The IED is the enemy's artillery system. It's simply a way of putting chemical and
kinetic energy on top of our soldiers and Marines, or underneath them," said Montgomery
C. Meigs, a retired four-star Army general who since December 2005 has served as
director of the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization, the Pentagon's multibillion-
dollar effort to defeat the weapon. "What's different is the trajectory. Three 152mm
rounds underneath a tank, which will blow a hole in it, are artillery rounds. But they
didn't come through three-dimensional space in a parabolic trajectory. They came through
a social trajectory and a social network in the community."

Unlike conventional artillery, IEDs have profound strategic consequences, because the
bomber's intent is to "bleed us in a way that attacks American political will directly and
obviates the advantages we have in military forces," Meigs added. Thousands of bombs
have also made U.S. troops wary and distrustful, even as a new counterinsurgency
strategy expands the American military presence among the Iraqi people.

Insurgents often post video clips of their attacks on the Internet, the equivalent of taking
scalps. They also exploit the Web -- either openly or in password-protected sites -- to
share bomb-building tips, emplacement techniques, and observations about American
vulnerabilities and countermeasures.

For example, a 71-page manual titled "Military Use of Electronics Prepared by Your
Brother in Allah" was posted on a jihadist Web site earlier this year. Comparable in
sophistication to an introductory college electrical engineering class, the manual provided
color photos and detailed diagrams on "remote wirelessly operating circuit using a mobile
phone for moving targets" and "employing timers to explode detonators using
transistors."

The lack of success in combating IEDs has left some military officials deeply pessimistic
about the future. "Hell, we're getting our ass kicked," said a senior officer at U.S. Central
Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We're watching warfare
that's centuries old being played out in a modern context and we're all confused about it.
The toys and trappings have changed, but asymmetric fighting, and ambush, and
deceiving and outwitting your opponent, and using the strengths of your opponent against
him, are ancient."

Others point to several heartening developments. The number of IED attacks declined in
Iraq late this summer after five more U.S. brigades took the field as part of a troop
"surge" ordered by the White House. American casualties from IEDs also dropped.
Throughout Iraq, more than half of all makeshift bombs are found before they detonate.

Moreover, improved body and vehicle armor, as well as sophisticated combat medicine,
mean that the proportion of wounded U.S. soldiers to those killed in Iraq is about 8 to 1, a
survivability ratio much higher than in previous wars. Also, about 70 percent of wounded
soldiers return to duty within three days, according to Pentagon figures.

"We've saved a lot of lives," Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England said in an
interview last month. "We've had people killed and injured, but we've probably saved
five or 10 times that number of people by preventing attacks, or capturing and killing
[insurgents], or getting caches of weapons, or disabling them."

In 2003, almost every IED caused at least one coalition casualty. Now, Pentagon figures
indicate, it takes four of the bombs to generate a single casualty. In addition to more
aggressive attacks against IED networks, rather than simply defending against the device,
various technological advances have shaped the battlefield.

The military, for example, now has about 6,000 robots, compared with a handful four
years ago. And bombs detonated by radio-controlled triggers, which had become the most
prominent killer of U.S. forces, today amount to only 10 percent of all IEDs in Iraq after
the deployment of 30,000 jammers, with more on the way.

Still, as a "Counter IED Smart Card" distributed to American troops warns, "In Iraq,
nothing is as it appears." The cycle of measure, countermeasure and counter-
countermeasure continues.

Two particularly deadly IEDs now account for about 70 percent of U.S. bombing deaths
in Iraq: the explosively formed penetrator, an armor-killing device first seen in May
2004, and linked by the U.S. government to Iran, and the "deep buried," or underbelly,
bomb that first became prominent in August 2005.

Grievous as the IED toll has been on U.S. and coalition forces, the impact on Iraqis is
greater. The Pentagon considers an explosion to be "effective" only if it causes a coalition
casualty; this reflects a judgment that the strategic impact of an IED derives from its
ability to erode American will, which in turn is predicated on casualties suffered by U.S.
troops or their non-Iraqi allies. By this yardstick, the suicide truck bombs that killed more
than 500 civilians in northwest Iraq on Aug. 14 of this year are considered "ineffective";
so, too, the IED on Sept. 13 that killed a prominent sheik in western Iraq whom President
Bush had publicly praised a week earlier for his opposition to al-Qaeda extremists.

But few military strategists doubt that Iraq's future depends on reducing IED attacks of
all sorts. "If you can't stop vehicle-borne IEDs from being detonated in public spaces, you
can't build a stable society," a Navy analyst said.

No one is ready to declare the dip in the number of bombs this summer to be an enduring
decline. Insurgents appear "able to put out more IEDs to maintain that constant level of
death-by-a-thousand-cuts," a senior Pentagon analyst said. "We have not seemed able to
put an upper bound on that number."
And there is another mostly unspoken fear. With approximately 300 IED attacks
occurring each month beyond the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan -- a Pentagon
document cites incidents in the Philippines, Russia, Colombia, Algeria and Somalia,
among other places -- the question occupying many defense specialists is whether the
roadside bomb inevitably will appear in the United States in significant numbers. "It's one
thing to have bombs going off in Baghdad, but it will be quite another thing when guys
with vests full of explosives start blowing themselves up in Washington," said the Navy
analyst. "That has all sorts of repercussions, for the economy, for civil liberties."

For now the device remains an indelible feature of the Iraqi and Afghan landscapes. "The
enemy found a seam," said an Army colonel. "I don't think they knew it was a seam, but
it just happened."

Staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this
report.

_______________________________________________________________________

'The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to

stop the bleeding.'
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/29/AR2007092900750_pf.html

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; A13

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- By the late summer of 2002, as the first
anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington approached, an
American victory in Afghanistan appeared all but assured.

A pro-Western government had convened in Kabul. Reconstruction teams fanned out

through the provinces. U.S. and coalition troops hunted Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in
the mountains along the Pakistani border.

Among the few shadows on this sunny Central Asian tableau -- besides the escape of
Osama bin Laden -- was the first appearance of roadside bombs triggered by radio waves.

There were not many. U.S. forces would report fewer than two dozen improvised
explosive devices of all sorts in Afghanistan in 2002. But the occasional RC -- radio-
controlled -- bombs were much more sophisticated than the booby traps with trip wires
typically seen by American troops.
A triggerman with a radio transmitter could send a signal several hundred yards to a
hidden bomb built with a receiver linked to an electrical firing circuit, which in turn
detonated an attached artillery shell or a scavenged land mine.

That receiver included a slender box about three inches square housing a modified circuit
board resembling a long-legged spider. The Spider Mod 1, as the device was dubbed,
would remain a weapon of Afghan bombmakers in various iterations for more than five
years -- and an emblem of defiance against the world's only military superpower.

Captured Spider devices were shipped to the United States for forensic examination. Maj.
Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the U.S. task force in Afghanistan, had a sense of
what his troops were up against. "What can we do to protect our forces?" he asked his
subordinates. "I'll take a 30 percent solution. That's better than zero."

Even that modest request seemed daunting. U.S. soldiers and Marines had no mobile
electronic countermeasures capable of disrupting RC triggers by blocking the radio
signal.

Bomb squads -- known in the military as EOD teams, for explosive ordnance disposal --
carried a feeble jammer called the Citadel, which created a stationary protective "bubble"
around technicians defusing a device. But the few Citadels in service could not be
mounted on vehicles to protect patrols and convoys, and they were too weak to provide
protection beyond a few yards.

Special Operations units employed electronic countermeasures, and the Secret Service
used powerful mobile jammers to shield presidential motorcades and other prominent
targets. Yet such gadgets were few in number, much in demand and highly classified.

That left the Navy as a solution. For decades, electronic countermeasures had been a vital
part of airborne combat for Navy fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission,"
as did surface ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me," said Rear
Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington.

After a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck stuffed with explosives killed 241 U.S. troops in
Beirut in October 1983, the Navy began investing in a top-secret program in counter-RC
technology. That led to a family of jammers, known as the Channel series, intended to
protect ships arriving at foreign ports where RC bombs could be hidden in the docks.

By 2002, some of these devices were considered obsolete and had been consigned to a
warehouse shelf. But Navy specialists in Indian Head, Md., 30 miles south of
Washington, reconfigured a jammer they called Acorn, which neatly matched the
frequencies used by the Spider Mod 1 in Afghanistan. In November 2002, 45 days after
the first plea for help from Afghanistan, several dozen Acorns began arriving at Bagram
Air Base.
Army EOD experts distributed each device, mounting the gray box and antenna on
Humvees and Special Forces sport-utility vehicles. Instructing soldiers in the nuances of
wave propagation and other electronic mysteries proved challenging; one device
reportedly was installed on a water truck that never left the base. Successful jamming
meant troops had no way of recognizing that they were even under attack by a radio-
controlled IED. Acorns could also interfere with radios and other electronics.

Still, Vines's "30 percent solution" was more than fulfilled. As one retired Navy captain
later recalled of Acorn: "We expected it to last six months before the bad guys figured it
out." Instead, more than 2,000 Acorns eventually outfitted the force in Afghanistan
where, like the Spider, it would remain a fixture on the battlefield for the next five years.

***

While U.S. forces parried the fledgling IED threat in Afghanistan, secret planning for the
invasion of Iraq had accelerated. Little thought was given to roadside bombs as a serious
obstacle to the American juggernaut. But U.S. strategists feared that Saddam Hussein
would destroy his own oil production facilities rather than let them be captured.
Scorched-earth tactics by retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 had turned Kuwait's oil fields
into an inferno.

U.S. intelligence in early 2003 reported that wellheads in southern Iraq had been wired
for detonation, and that Iraqi forces probably had the ability to use radio-controlled
triggers to detonate those demolition charges. Jammers would be needed to secure the
fields.

Even as the Navy converted Acorn into a battlefield countermeasure, Army engineers at
Fort Monmouth, N.J., were working on their own mobile jammers. First in a laboratory
and then in field tests, they modified an old system called Shortstop, originally built in
1990 as a footlocker-size gadget to confound the proximity fuses in incoming artillery
and mortar shells.

By intercepting and modifying the radio signals emitted by such fuses, Shortstop tricked
the shells into believing they were approaching the ground, causing them to detonate
prematurely. Shortstop had been completed too late for use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
and it was deployed to Bosnia only briefly. A Pentagon inventory showed that the Army
had almost 300 systems in storage.

With different computer chips and a cleverly modified ham radio antenna, Shortstop
made an admirable jammer. The wife of one Fort Monmouth engineer collected
miniature kitchen witches that inspired a new name for the device: Warlock Green. After
final fixes in California, five Warlocks were shipped to Kuwait in time to accompany the
invasion forces plunging into Iraq in March 2003, according to a senior officer involved
in the effort.
The countermeasure proved unnecessary. Not a single oil well was rigged for radio-
controlled detonation. Some oil facilities were sabotaged, but the damage was less
grievous than feared.

Yet the Army jammer had found a home on the battlefield. As Shortstops were
transformed into Warlock Greens -- each device cost about $100,000, according to a
contractor involved in the program -- they were shipped in large Rubbermaid storage
cases to Afghanistan, where a technician laminated his business card onto the devices so
soldiers knew whom to call for help. Others would be packed up, driven to the Baltimore-
Washington international airport in a rented van and flown to Iraq.

By late summer 2003, almost 100 Warlocks had been deployed, according to an Army
document that said IEDs were "increasing in number and complexity at an alarming rate."
Another Navy jammer, originally designed to protect four-star flag officers, also began
arriving in the theater -- first six, then 30 and eventually 300.

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of all sorts would be
in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had started. "We're going to need a lot more
jammers," Col. Bruce Jette, who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort
Belvoir, told a Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to
need a jammer on every vehicle."

***

Bombmaking by definition required explosives, and in that commodity, as in oil, Iraq was
richly endowed. "The entire country was one big ammo dump," Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates would observe this past March. "It's just a huge, huge problem."

The problem was also huge in 2003. Yet U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed
to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands
of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more
than 1 million tons of explosives. "There's more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've
ever been in my life, and it's not securable," Gen. John P. Abizaid told the Senate
Appropriations Committee shortly after taking over U.S. Central Command in July 2003.
"I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control. We don't."

To forestall looting, U.S. forces tried spreading putrid substances across the dumps, as
well as cementing artillery rounds together or burying large caches. "We're now finding
people tunneling 30 feet down and carting the stuff away," an analyst noted earlier this
year. Sloshing diesel fuel across the dumps and lighting it, among several haphazard
"blow and go" techniques, often simply scattered the rounds. More than a year after the
invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or
destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If
properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army
owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more
blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines
storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord,
according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers of IEDs. Main
Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys driving between Baghdad and
Kuwait, became a common target. Three artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji,
discovered on July 29, reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were
soon found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car key fobs or
wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common brand -- with a range of 200
meters or less. Radio controls from toy cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor
attached to a bomb detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and
triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious signals could cause
premature detonations, sometimes killing the emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install
safety switches in the contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway

guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often
used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again
and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about
one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large FOBs -- forward operating bases -- with
few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the initiative on these common routes," according to a
2007 account of the counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority
of IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began
stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs
to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would
most likely pull over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month, according to a House
Armed Services Committee document. Most were a nuisance; some proved stunning and
murderous. A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a
70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two
crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19 that
demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special
representative and 22 others.
Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of battle, vanished"
in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

***

IEDs had quickly moved to the top of Abizaid's anxieties at Central Command. A
Lebanese American who spoke Arabic and who had studied as an Olmsted scholar at the
University of Jordan in Amman, the four-star general had seen for himself the
aggravation that roadside bombs caused Israeli forces in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Abizaid
publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt
appraisal that reportedly irked the Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of
unsecured ammunition in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the
realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and disgruntled after the
national army was disbanded in late May -- possessed extensive skill in handling
explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that could detect
bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or something," as he put it. "We
thought the problem would spread," Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly
sophisticated." Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American
ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long after the capture of
Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq, told Pentagon
strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's "footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an
occupation force that was two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I
don't want is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior Army
commander.

That meant mounting most troops on Humvees, few of which were built to withstand
bombs or even small-arms fire. Soldiers had begun fashioning crude "hillbilly armor" for
their vehicles from scrap metal. Even factory-built armored vehicles had been designed to
resist projectiles fired at a distance, according to a senior Army scientist, and not against
point-blank explosions in which steel fragments and blast overpressure -- from gases
hotter than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit forming in 1/10,000th of a second -- struck
simultaneously.

Production of the stout "uparmored" Humvee started in 1996, but as a specialty vehicle
for military police and Special Forces; an average of one per day had been built before
the war, according to congressional documents. The entire fleet of uparmored Humvees
in the theater in 2003 totaled 235, the Army chief of staff would later report.

With no master list of where uparmored Humvees were deployed, logisticians searched
U.S. motor pools around the world. Seventy were found in Air Force missile fields in
North Dakota and elsewhere, according to a former senior officer on the joint staff, but it
took a four-star order to pry them away for duty in the Middle East.

Protecting individual soldiers was a bit simpler. In June 2003, the Pentagon decided to
outfit every trooper in theater with tough interceptor body armor. By December, eight
vendors would produce 25,000 sets a month, according to congressional documents, and
by April 2004 all U.S. military personnel in Iraq had received high-quality protection.
The documents show that Congress has appropriated more than $4 billion for body armor
so far.

But as summer yielded to fall in 2003, the final defense against roadside bombs often fell
to a few hundred EOD technicians, whose informal motto -- "Initial success or total
failure" -- suggested the hazards in what was known as "the long walk."

Summoned to neutralize a suspected bomb, a tech donned a cumbersome, blast-resistant

outfit that resembled a deep-sea diving suit, with a transparent face shield and extra
padding to protect femoral arteries, genitals and the spinal column. The robots then
available to "interrogate" a device were crude and few in number, forcing the tech to
conduct the examination himself.

"All you can hear is the fan in your helmet, your heart beating and your breathing,"
recalled Sgt. First Class Troy Parker, who served in Iraq in 2003. "And you're wondering
if this is the last walk you're ever going to take."

Sometimes it was. On Sept. 10, 2003, in Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Joseph E. Robsky Jr. was
trying to disarm an IED when an apparent RC-trigger detonated a mortar shell packed
with C-4 plastic explosive. Robsky, 31, would be among more than 50 EOD technicians
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the late summer of this year.

Within hours of his death, a call went out to assemble all EOD robots in Baghdad at the
international airport for an inventory, according to a senior Navy EOD officer in Iraq at
the time. They found 18 robots, and only six of them worked.

***

By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed
that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew,
but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is
getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to
stop the bleeding."

A Lebanese American West Point graduate like Abizaid, Cody was the son of a
Chevrolet dealer in Montpelier, Vt. Stocky and intense, with thick hair the color of
gunmetal, he had fired the first shots of the Gulf War in January 1991 while attacking an
Iraqi radar site as commander of an Apache helicopter battalion. His appetites ran to hard
work, New York Times crossword puzzles, Red Man chewing tobacco, Diet Coke and
two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms, which he could eat in one sitting.

Hughes drafted a sheaf of PowerPoint slides labeled "IED Task Force: A Way," which
proposed forming a small unit with a Washington director and two field teams "designed
to respond to incidents." To recruit active-duty Special Operations troops would take at
least nine months, so with Cody's approval and a chit for $20 million, Hughes hired
Wexford Group International, a security consultant in Vienna, Va. Two retired Delta
Force soldiers soon arrived in room 2D468 of the Pentagon to begin assembling the field
teams from a "black Rolodex" of former special operators.

To run his task force, Cody chose one of the Army's most charismatic young officers,
Joseph L. Votel, then 45, who had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general.
A tall, good-humored Minnesotan, Votel had commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in
Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. More recently, in Iraq, three of his Rangers had been
killed near Haditha with a suicide bomb detonated by a pregnant woman; two other
Rangers had died in a roadside bombing on Route Irish, near the Baghdad airport.

Votel expected the job of controlling IEDs to take six months, maybe eight. "And then
we move on," he said. He moved his small staff into a shabby, malodorous corner of the
Army operations center in the Pentagon basement and posted a sign on the wall: "STOP
THE BLEEDING."

Even by Pentagon standards, the hours were brutal. Those who lived in the Washington
exurbs typically rose at 3:45 a.m. to be at their desks by 5:30, where they remained until
9 p.m. or later. To avoid bureaucratic friction with other agencies, Votel advised: "Stay
small, stay light, be agile, move quickly. . . . There's goodness in smallness."

About a dozen former Delta Force operators were hired as contractors for the nucleus of
the field teams. Some would earn $1,000 a day while deployed, according to two
knowledgeable officers. Cody sent them to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to
interview soldiers wounded by IEDs, to learn "what they wished they had done" before
being blown up.

To arm the teams, the task force borrowed rifles from the Old Guard ceremonial regiment
at Fort Myer and drafted permission slips for the contractors to carry weapons in Iraq.
Instead of standard Army pistols, the men requested the Glock 9mm. "Sir," Votel told
Cody, "these guys want Glocks." Cody gestured impatiently. "So get them Glocks."

In his diary on Nov. 17, 2003, Cody scribbled: "We have to make sure our commanders
and soldiers are not at the end of this process but are engaged throughout the process."
Toward that end, Votel and Hughes flew to Baghdad to secure a small compound at
Camp Victory and to explain the task force to senior officers in Iraq.

The intent was to train troops to recognize and counter IEDs, Votel said, and to "build an
architecture between the theater and Big Army" back in the States. IED incidents would
be documented in detail at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and notably effective tactics and
techniques would be disseminated to units preparing to deploy.

Eventually, Votel added, the effort would move "left of boom" by attacking bomber
networks before devices could be placed and detonated. In the IED battle, the task force
was to help "protect, predict, prevent, detect and neutralize" -- known as "tenets of
assured mobility" -- which Votel borrowed as his conceptual framework from the Army
Engineer School.

"Why are you bringing me a 7,000-mile screwdriver to fix this from D.C.?" asked one
skeptical general in Baghdad. "Nothing good ever comes from Washington." Still, most
commanders welcomed the assistance.

The first seven-man field team flew to Iraq on Dec. 12, 2003. Several others were to
follow, including one sent to Afghanistan. Working initially with the 4th Infantry
Division, and shuttling between bases in unarmored Chevy Suburbans, the team members
in Iraq advocated infantry basics: "shoot, move, communicate, clear routes, don't set
patterns." Troops were advised to watch for wires and triggermen away from the road, to
be unpredictable, to use a "porcupine approach" in patrols and convoys, with all guns
bristling and flank guards deployed.

By February 2004, the number of IED attacks in Iraq approached 100 a week. About half
detonated, a proportion that would remain relatively constant for the next three years. The
bleeding had hardly stopped, but to Central Command it seemed to have stabilized.

The casualty-per-blast ratio was dropping. Troops quickly learned counter-IED survival
skills. Some bombers were arrested or killed. On good days the number of attacks
dwindled to single digits, and U.S. bomb fatalities in February totaled nine, fewer than
half the number in January.

"It looks to me like we're winning this thing," Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the
Centcom deputy commander, told Abizaid at their forward headquarters in Qatar. "We're
kicking ass."

Abizaid gave a thin smile. "Stand by," he said. "They're just plotting."

***

On March 28, 2004, U.S. troops shut down the incendiary newspaper of Moqtada al-Sadr,
a Shiite cleric with a volatile following in the Baghdad slums. "All hell broke loose," a
Centcom officer later noted. By late spring, IED attacks had nearly doubled, with
bombers apparently drawn from the ranks of disaffected Shiites as well as Sunnis.

IEDs had become "the greatest casualty producer" in Iraq, Abizaid told Congress,
surpassing RPG-7s, a rocket-propelled grenade. Insurgents increasingly promoted their
deeds with videotapes released to al-Jazeera and other Arab media outlets. Spectacular
explosions of Abrams tanks and other "icon vehicles," as U.S. officers called high-value
targets, soon filled airwaves and Web sites.

For Joe Votel and his task force in Washington, the IED fight had become a complex
exercise in phenomenology. How did blast and shrapnel interact at close range? How did
bomber cells thrive? Why did jammers seem to work in some areas and not others? The
six- to eight-month time frame he foresaw for controlling IEDs would require an
extension.

More than 500 mobile jammers had reached Iraq, but thousands more were needed. By
late spring 2004, the task force had finally established a jammer strategy: get as many
systems into theater as possible -- including Warlock Green, a sister device known as
Warlock Red, and a Navy jammer called Cottonwood, which was removed from the
Suburban in which it typically rode, installed in an armored vehicle and renamed
Ironwood. Meanwhile, engineers would develop a single powerful variant that covered as
much of the RC spectrum as possible.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a former paratrooper and Vietnam veteran from San
Diego who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, watched the Army's response
to IEDs with impatience. In February 2004, a committee memo to the service noted that
"arsenals, depots, industry, and steel mills" were not at full capacity in making heavy
plates for uparmored Humvees. House staffers visited the steel plants, extracting pledges
to defer commercial work until almost 7,000 Humvee armor kits were finished in May,
six months ahead of the Army's original schedule.

Hunter was particularly incensed to find skittish troops bolting thin steel and even
plywood to military trucks traveling along Route Tampa and other hazardous Iraqi roads.
In January, he had asked Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to
design an armored gun truck similar to those used in the Vietnam War, the sole surviving
example of which he found in the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Va.

In March, a five-ton prototype, with steel and ballistic fiberglass protection added to the
cab and truck bed, was shipped for testing to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

On June 4, Hunter appeared at the Pentagon's River Entrance with a freshly painted gun
truck and placards, mounted on easels, listing its virtues. Cody and others from the top
brass wandered out to kick the tires. No one wanted to buck the powerful chairman, but
several paratroopers soon appeared to inform Hunter "how much they loved the Humvee
better than these big things, how nice and small and agile it was," he later recalled.

Hunter was not dissuaded. Nearly 100 gun-truck kits would be sent to Iraq, at $40,000
each, and 18 to Afghanistan. Some soldiers sang the truck's praises, while others found it
top-heavy and "something of a grenade basket," according to a senior commander in the
10th Mountain Division. Still, of more than 9,000 medium and heavy military transport
trucks rolling through Iraq in late 2004, only about one in 10 had armor, according to
GlobalSecurity.org. The convoys remained vulnerable.
A Vietnam-era relic would hardly solve the IED threat permanently. Several influential
voices in Washington now questioned the Pentagon's approach. Retired Adm. Dennis C.
Blair, the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses and a former U.S. commander in
chief in the Pacific, complained to the joint staff about the lack of systematic, rigorous
analysis of IED trends. "The Army is not dealing with the IED problem well, because it's
not in their nature," Blair said. "They're used to taking off from the line of departure,
capturing the enemy capital and having a victory parade."

Moreover, the emphasis on defeating the device, Blair added, was "like playing soccer
and you're spending all your money and attention on the goalie's gloves. At that point, not
only is this the last line of defense, but the ball is already in the air."

At Centcom, Smith also was frustrated by the lack of urgency. Four months after
concluding that "we're winning this thing," he now had doubts about the national
commitment to overcoming IEDs. "We have got to get at this thing in a different way
than we're addressing it right now," he advised Abizaid in Qatar in June 2004. "We've got
to have something like the Manhattan Project."

The allusion to the crash program that had built the atomic bomb in World War II -- an
effort eventually employing 125,000 people and many of the nation's finest scientific
minds -- appealed to Abizaid's imagination. Several days later he wrote a personal
message to the Pentagon leadership asking for a "Manhattan Project-like" approach to
IEDs.

"What the [expletive] does he think we're doing?" Cody snapped upon learning of the
request. But the Centcom commander's plea could hardly be brushed aside. In a meeting
with Cody and Votel, according to a participant in the session, Air Force Gen. Richard B.
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked whether the Army could meet
Abizaid's request.

The Army believed it could, particularly if the service was made the executive agent for
an expanded effort that involved the entire Defense Department. That meant getting the
other services to relinquish money, personnel and bureaucratic control, an encroachment
that quickly triggered alarms.

Meetings convened, exchanges grew stormy. The Navy and Marine Corps had pursued
their own counter-IED programs, and the Air Force particularly resisted putting the Army
in charge of a Pentagon-wide enterprise.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz believed change was necessary. Why, he
had asked his staff, did it take so long for armor, jammers and other counter-IED materiel
to reach Iraq and Afghanistan? "Where is all this stuff?" he complained. "When is it
going to get to theater?"

The effort seemed fragmented and ad hoc -- "sucked into technology rabbit holes," as
Votel put it. A survey by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk that spring had found that
at least 132 government agencies were now involved in IED issues, from the FBI and
CIA to the National Security Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center in
Charlottesville, Va., according to an Army brigadier general.

The battle against IEDs exceeded the management capacity of a single service,
Wolfowitz concluded. On July 12, 2004, he signed a one-paragraph order that
transformed the Army task force into a joint task force. Votel would remain director, with
cramped offices in the Army operations center. But he now reported to Wolfowitz rather
than to Cody, and the task force would draw expertise from all services.

Cody, who became the Army's four-star vice chief of staff in late June, accepted the
decision graciously, even as he told one senior Army officer who now worked for
Wolfowitz, "Don't forget where you came from."

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S. effort. A $100
million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3 billion in 2005. In subsequent
meetings with industry executives and the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz
declared that there was no higher priority.

Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to exterminating
Osama bin Laden.

"This is a major strategic effort," Wolfowitz told one group. "What can you put into it?"

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOSSARY
Compiled by washingtonpost.com
Friday, September 28, 2007; 7:52 PM

"Left of boom" - U.S. military's effort to disrupt insurgent cells before they can build
and plant bombs

"Right of boom" - U.S. military's effort to mitigate effects of IED attacks with better
equipment, trauma care

CENTCOM - U.S. Central Command overseeing security in the Middle East, Central
Asia and Northern Africa. The command is headquartered at MacDill Airforce Base in
Tampa, Fla.

CEXC - Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell, a counter-IED forensic unit

CPE - Cupola protective ensemble, an armored suit worn by Humvee gunners

CREW - Counter Radio-Controlled IED Electronic Warfare, various jamming devices
employed to combat radio-controlled IEDs in Iraq; including the SSVJ (Self-Screen
Vehicle Jammer), ICE (IED Counter Electronic Device) and MICE (Modified ICE)

EFP - Explosively Formed Penetrator, an armor-piercing explosive

EME - Electromagnetic environment, or space and frequencies used by insurgents to

operate radio-controlled bombs

EOD Unit - Explosive ordnance disposal, or U.S. military bomb squad teams

FOB - Forward operating base

HME - Homemade explosive, usually made with urea nitrate

IED - Improvised explosive device

JERV - Joint EOD Response Vehicle, a 26-ton armored personnel carrier

JIN - Joint IED Neutralizer, need definition from that sidebar here

MRAP - "Mine Resistant Ambush Protected" U.S. military vehicles

PBIED - Person-borne IED, or suicide bomber

RC Bombs - Explosives detonated by remote control

RPG - Rocket-propelled grenade

SVBIED - Suicide vehicle-borne IED, or a suicide car bomb

UAV - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, drones operated by remote control or preprogrammed

flights

VBIED - Vehicle-borne IED, or an IED planted in a car

VO - Victim-operated triggers, such as trip wire or pressure plates

WIT - Weapons Intelligence Teams, tasked to U.S. military's counter-IED effort