02 OCT 07

PART 4 | SPRING 2005 - SUMMER 2006

______________________________________________________________________

'If you don't go after the network, you're never going to

stop these guys. Never.'
By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 3, 2007; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- In the early spring of 2006, perhaps the most important document in
Baghdad was known as the MOASS -- the Mother of All Spreadsheets-- a vast
compilation of radio frequencies that insurgents used to trigger roadside bombs.

In some areas of Iraq, 70 percent of all improvised explosive devices were radio-
controlled, and they caused more than half of all American combat deaths. An
overworked Army intelligence officer tracked the frequencies, and an equally
overworked Navy electrical engineer matched them against 14 varieties of electronic
jammer used by coalition forces.

As new frequencies popped up, the updated MOASS was analyzed by the National
Security Agency, by Navy electronic warfare specialists in Maryland and by Army
specialists in New Jersey, which led to recommended adjustments in the jammer settings.
Those modified "loadsets" were then e-mailed to U.S. military forces throughout Iraq so
that the jammers could be reprogrammed. The cumbersome process took weeks, by
which time new frequencies had been logged into the spreadsheet, requiring further
analysis and further reprogramming even as hundreds of new jammers arrived in Iraq
each month. "It was a mess," a senior defense official recalled.

By the end of 2006, the Department of Defense had spent more than $1 billion during the
year just on jammers. Fielding them "proved the largest technological challenge for DOD
in the war, on a scale last experienced in World War II," according to Col. William G.
Adamson, a former staff officer for the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the
Pentagon office coordinating the campaign.

The U.S. strategy was defined in six words: "Put them back on the wire." By neutralizing
radio-controlled bombs, the jammers would force insurgent bombmakers to use more
rudimentary triggers, such as command wire. Those triggers would be simpler to detect,
in theory, and would bring the triggermen closer to their bombs, where U.S. troops could
capture or kill them.
That strategy has succeeded. In the subsequent 18 months, radio-controlled bombs would
shrink to 10 percent of all IEDs in Iraq. Today, bombs triggered by simple command wire
have increased to 40 percent of the total.

But the threat from IEDs has barely diminished. In the first seven months of this year,
there were 20,781 roadside bomb attacks in Iraq, one every 15 minutes. And as of this
morning, IEDs have killed 440 U.S. troops this year. Putting them back on the wire has
proved a mixed blessing.

***

Different jammers worked by different means. Active jammers screamed constantly,

disrupting radio-controlled bombs with a barrage of radio waves on pre-selected
frequencies that drowned out the triggering signal. Reactive jammers "scanned and
jammed" by monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum -- like a human ear in a crowded
restaurant listening for a voice that whispered "detonate, detonate, detonate" -- and then
blocked the frequencies they were programmed to block.

Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, a hodgepodge of jammers had arrived in
Mesopotamia, both active and reactive, weak and powerful: Warlock Green, Warlock
Red, Warlock Blue, ICE, MICE, SSVJ, MMBJ, Cottonwood, Jukebox, Symphony.
Collectively they were now known as CREW, an awkward acronym within an acronym:
counter radio-controlled IED electronic warfare.

As more jammers flooded the war zone, the mess grew messier. For many months, the
shortcomings in electronic warfare expertise had been evident among Army and Marine
units. "We had all these boxes over there and people didn't know how to use them," said
Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. "They'd turn
them on, thinking they were protected when they weren't."

Electronic "fratricide" intensified, with more instances of jammers disrupting coalition

radios and even the radio links to unmanned aerial vehicles. More troops switched off
their CREW systems rather than risk disrupting their radios; rumors circulated that
jammers actually detonated IEDs.

In some instances, according to a senior officer in Baghdad, investigations of fatal IED

attacks revealed that "the device that killed them was triggered by a frequency that could
have been stopped by proper jamming." A now-retired Army lieutenant colonel said,
"There were a whole lot of things that made you just want to cry."

Among the biggest problems was simply the crowded electromagnetic environment in
Iraq. Most fiber-optic and above-ground telephone lines had either been destroyed during
the 2003 invasion or subsequently looted by copper-wire scavengers. Now 27 million
Iraqis used unregulated cellphones, walkie-talkies, satellite phones, long-distance
cordless phones and, in hundreds of instances each month, radio-controlled bombs.
About 150,000 coalition troops also sent out a great spray of electronic emissions, which
mutated dramatically every time new equipment or a new contingent of soldiers arrived,
including some with old Warsaw Pact electronics. "People have said it's the most
challenging electromagnetic place in the world," a Navy captain said. "It's very complex."
Trying to make sense of the signals, he added, was "like having your head underwater."

This was especially true in Baghdad, where the electromagnetic environment seemed to
vary between neighborhoods, between seasons, between times of day. "No one realized,"
the senior Pentagon official said, "how much tougher jamming was going to be in the
ground plane" -- the ground-air interface, where earth meets sky. The Army logistician
added: "We didn't scientifically map out the problem set, so we didn't know the normal
electronic noise of a taxi driver doing his thing, the doorbells, the garage door openers,
the satellite communications. . . . You have to know the normal program of life."

The Pentagon would spend millions of dollars trying to replicate Baghdad's idiosyncratic
airwaves in laboratories and at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. Senior commanders in
Baghdad "were going bonkers," the Army colonel recalled. "They were saying, 'How do
we fix this?' "

Worse yet, there were problems with Duke, the sophisticated reactive jammer the
Pentagon had decided would replace the various models being used in Iraq. Syracuse
Research Corp., a not-for-profit company created by Syracuse University in 1957, had
won the competition for Duke using design concepts developed by Army engineers at
Fort Monmouth, N.J. The contract was signed in June 2005, with the first Duke -- a big
box with a big antenna -- completed in November. But deployment to Iraq was delayed to
allow adjustments and more tests.

This state of affairs pleased no one, but it particularly displeased the Marine Corps.
Marine casualties had been severe in Anbar province, where high-powered radio-
controlled IEDs were pernicious. Some Marine officers also feared that they could be
shortchanged as Dukes reached the field, that the Army was "taking all the good stuff," as
one source put it. "The issue got ugly with recriminations."

"It was part service rivalry, part delivery schedules, and partly that no one could make
stuff fast enough," said Macy, the rear admiral. "You can't walk into Circuit City and say,
'I want 25,000 high-powered jammers.' "

The Marines had already hedged their bets. Med-Eng Systems, a Canadian firm, made an
active jammer that worked by "blasting away, locking up everything," according to a
retired Navy captain. As a foreign firm, Med-Eng needed a U.S. partner to work on
classified programs. Soon a corporate marriage was arranged with General Dynamics
Armament and Technical Products in Charlotte.

If inelegant, the jammer had showed promise in tests conducted in the summer of 2005.
Because it could be reprogrammed to meet changing insurgent threats, from key fobs to
cellphones, the gadget was named Chameleon.
The Marines bought 1,000 Chameleons in November 2005. After encouraging tests at
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and elsewhere, the Marines
announced on Feb. 8, 2006, a $289 million contract that increased the purchase to 4,000
Chameleons, which later grew to 10,000.

General Dynamics threw its considerable heft into the project, even using a corporate jet
as a delivery van to pick up components nationwide, according to company sources.
"Marines take care of their own," a General Dynamics talking point advised, but the
company also eyed a bigger prize. The first Dukes had deployed overseas in February
2006, yet the jammers' difficulties in Iraq's electromagnetic environment persisted.

Noting an "Army requirement of 20,000 systems" worth $1.5 billion by 2008, General
Dynamics intended to "pursue the Army requirement and displace Syracuse Research,"
according to a defense industry document. A corporate information campaign would
promote Chameleon's virtues to Army and congressional leaders.

"We've pursued business opportunities," a General Dynamics spokesman said last week.
"We were well aware of the Army requirement." A spokesman for Syracuse Research
declined to comment, citing "contract restrictions."

In Baghdad, confusion only intensified as hundreds and then thousands of new jammers
flooded in, some active and others reactive. Duke's shortcomings -- "it was looking like a
turkey," the senior Pentagon official said -- grew so grievous by late spring that officials
considered scrapping the jammer altogether in favor of Chameleon.

A naval officer, Capt. David J. "Fuzz" Harrison, had spent the winter of 2005-2006 in
Baghdad trying to figure out how to fix the jammer problem. "The ground electronic
warfare fight that's killing so many soldiers and Marines would be greatly aided by
having people here who know electronic warfare," Harrison reported. That meant the
Navy, which had extensive experience in electronic combat and had recently been chosen
to coordinate all of the military's CREW systems.

Retired Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, head of the Pentagon's counter-IED effort, returned
from Baghdad in early February 2006 with similar conclusions. Expertise was needed in
divisions, brigades, regiments and battalions. Harrison and Col. Kevin D. Lutz,
commander of Task Force Troy, the counter-IED brigade in Iraq, calculated that nearly
300 electronic warfare officers would be required. The Navy agreed to provide them.

After brief training at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state, the first
batch of 33 Navy electronic warfare experts -- including submarine, aviation, surface ship
and engineer officers and sailors -- arrived in Baghdad on April 15, 2006. Hundreds
followed. Distributed throughout the force, they made an immediate impact.
Now soldiers and Marines had an expert to adjust those finicky boxes and antennas, and
to offer advice on using jammers as a weapon against radio-controlled bombs. "It was,"
Meigs later said of the Navy's commitment, "a stroke of genius."

***

By the summer of 2006, radio-triggered IEDs had dropped to less than half the total, and
they would keep plummeting for the next year. Duke became a valued battlefield asset in
Iraq, and 2,300 eventually reached Afghanistan to begin replacing the venerable Acorn,
which had first arrived in 2003. The integration of active and reactive jammers in both
theaters proceeded apace. "Scar-tissue learning," as Meigs called the process, turned
soldiers and Marines into capable electronic warriors.

Yet insurgent bombers found other options. Simple pressure plates -- two metal strips that
completed an electrical firing circuit when pressed together by a tire or an unsuspecting
boot -- appeared in great numbers. More than one-quarter of bomb triggers were soon
classified as "VO": victim-operated.

These included growing numbers of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which often
used passive infrared triggers tripped by a passing victim. EFPs became as flamboyant as
they were deadly; a bomb with 54 warheads configured in nine "arrays" was discovered
before detonation on May 17, 2006. Despite increasingly sharp warnings from the Bush
administration to Iran, which was accused of supplying the bombs and other war
materiel, EFPs continued to take a horrific toll in Shiite-controlled sectors of Iraq.

Six cavalry troopers would be killed in a blast on March 15 of this year, and from April 1
through July 31 roughly 300 EFP attacks occurred. EFPs still account for only about 3
percent of all roadside bombs in Iraq, but the 250 Americans killed by the devices since
2004 amount to 17 percent of all bomb deaths, according to military sources.

Underbelly or "deep buried" IEDs continued to take an even greater toll -- more than half
of all coalition forces killed early this summer, for example, although only 15 percent of
all bombs were classified as deep buried. The Pentagon agreed to buy at least 7,800
sturdy Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles with V-shaped hulls for
approximately $1 million each. Prudent soldiers on patrol now searched every road
culvert; some units began welding shut manhole covers.

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.

"Our mission is to challenge the culture of the whole Army," said Col. Robert Shaw, the
group commander. "The institution is not designed to react as fast as our enemy reacts."

Last winter, another new Army unit, Task Force ODIN -- the acronym derives from
"observation, detection, identification and neutralization" -- began hunting IED emplacers
with unmanned aerial vehicles, attack helicopters and spotters in C-12 airplanes.
Operating from Tikrit in northern Iraq, the task force eventually averaged "40 to 50
engagements per month," according to a senior Army official. A sequence of operations
in northern Iraq -- code-named Snake Hunter, Snake Killer and Black Widow -- increased
the number of suspected emplacers killed from a weekly average of 22 last fall to 71 per
week this spring, an Army lieutenant colonel said.

"The enemy's killing us with a thousand cuts, and we're trying to kill him with a thousand
cuts, too," the lieutenant colonel added. "Can you kill your way to victory?"

***

Ultimately, eliminating IEDs as a weapon of strategic influence -- the U.S. government's

explicit ambition -- is likely to depend on neutralizing the networks that buy, build and
disseminate bombs. Military strategists have acknowledged that reality almost since the
beginning of the long war, but only in the past year has it become an overarching
counter-IED policy. "Left of boom" -- the concept of disrupting the bomb chain long
before detonation -- is finally more than a slogan.

"If you don't go after the network, you're never going to stop these guys. Never. They'll
just keep killing people," the senior Pentagon official said. "And the network is not a
single monolithic organization, but rather a loosely knotted web of networks."

The resemblance of bomber cells to a criminal enterprise has meant a greater reliance on
law enforcement techniques, an approach Meigs had stressed as commander of NATO
forces in Bosnia in the late 1990s. In Iraq, that has included such tactics as analyzing the
copper found in an EFP slug to determine where it was mined and bringing modern
forensics to Mesopotamia.

"We were policing up guys on the battlefield and turning them over to the Iraqi judicial
system, which was releasing them because we didn't have any experience in gathering
evidence," the senior intelligence official said. Convictions in 2006 ran as low as 20
percent in some areas.

Eventually, 18 weapons intelligence teams, drawn largely from the Air Force, began
collecting evidence both from bombs that detonated and from those that did not. At Task
Force Troy in Baghdad, four cyanoacrylate fuming chambers now use a concoction of
Super Glue and high humidity to tease latent fingerprints from electrical tape or IED
components. One million known Iraqi fingerprints are stored at a Pentagon biometrics
center in West Virginia. In the first seven months of this year, technicians examined
112,000 items and recovered an average of 600 latent prints each month.

In June, for example, 17 fingerprint matches led to the detention of 10 Iraqi suspects and
a hunt for seven others, officials said. Because the Iraqi judicial system traditionally has
relied on confessions, witness statements and photographic evidence, two American
forensics experts on July 13 gave 30 judges at the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad a
90-minute tutorial on fingerprinting. U.S. officials hope to begin introducing fingerprint
evidence in Iraqi trials this year.
Ninety retired agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other
agencies also have been hired as field investigators in a $35 million pilot program that
began a year ago. About 150 prosecutions for bombmaking activities have taken place in
Anbar province alone, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

Other unconventional initiatives include "human terrain teams," made up of

anthropologists, social scientists and sundry experts who advise brigade commanders on
tribal structure, local customs and cultural nuances. A preliminary assessment last month
of an HTT in eastern Afghanistan concluded that the team had "a profound effect" in
reducing "kinetic operations" -- gunplay -- and had even discerned that a local village
would help stop Taliban rocket attacks against U.S. troops in exchange for a volleyball
net. From an original $20 million plan for half a dozen teams, the Pentagon now
envisions nearly 30.

To anticipate future bomb designs, scientific "red teams" last year began building IEDs
that insurgents might build, while "blue teams" calculated how best to defeat them. Other
red teams include 100 cadets and midshipmen from the nation's military academies, who
have also been recruited as surrogate bombmakers. "Show me how many different ways
you can flip a switch at a distance," the students were told. "Be conceptually
sophisticated, but use the most simple, cheap and available material that you can."

Last fall, in an office building in Northern Virginia, a JIEDDO operation began fusing
data from the CIA, the DIA, the NSA other organizations in an effort to give brigade
commanders timely intelligence for targeting IED networks. Telephone eavesdropping,
surveillance video, spy reports, roadside-bomb trends: all are packaged electronically and
sent forward. The operation can build in 12 hours a three-dimensional video showing, for
example, a street in Ramadi or Baqubah where an Army patrol intends to drive tomorrow,
with extraordinary detail about past IED events on this corner or down that alley.

Attack-the-network results have been heartening in recent months, according to Pentagon

officials, who cite the seizure of bomb caches and the destruction of several cells. Still,
scarcely an hour passes in Iraq without someone planting a bomb.

"It's a hard problem. There is no solution, just better ways of dealing with it," Deputy
Defense Secretary Gordon R. England said in an interview. "You keep mitigating as
much as you can, but at the end of the day, it's warfare."

***

At 9:30 p.m. on Monday, May 7, a convoy of four uparmored Humvees rolled through
the heavily fortified gate at Camp Falcon in southern Baghdad before turning north onto
Route Jackson at 35 mph. Each Humvee carried a jammer against radio-controlled
bombs, either a Duke or an SSVJ. Each had been outfitted with Frag Kit 5, and a Rhino II
protruded from each front bumper as protection against EFPs detonated by passive
infrared triggers. As recommended, the drivers kept a 40-meter separation from one
another.
The senior officer in the third Humvee, Lt. Col. Gregory D. Gadson, 41, had driven to
Falcon to attend a memorial service for two soldiers killed by an IED. Now he was
returning to his own command post near Baghdad International Airport. As commander
of the 2nd Battalion of the 32nd Field Artillery, a unit in the 1st Infantry Division,
Gadson was a gunner by training. But as part of the troop "surge" that President Bush
announced in January, the battalion had taken up unfamiliar duties as light infantrymen in
Baghdad.

After 18 years in the Army, including tours of duty in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in
Afghanistan, Gadson was hardly shocked by the change of mission. He knew that,
proverbially, no plan survived contact with the enemy. Raised in Chesapeake, Va., he had
been a football star in high school and an outside linebacker at West Point before
graduating in 1989. The nomadic Army life suited him and his wife, Kim, who had been
a classmate at the academy before resigning her commission to raise their two children.

In the darkness on Route Jackson, no one noticed the dimple in the roadbed, where
insurgents had loosened the asphalt with burning tires and buried three 130mm artillery
shells before repairing the hole. No one saw the command wire snaking to the east
through a hole in a chain-link fence and into a building. No one saw the triggerman.

They all heard the blast. "The boom is what I think about every day," Gadson would say
three months later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A great flash exploded beneath
the right front fender. Gadson felt himself tumbling across the ground, and he knew
instantly that an IED had struck the Humvee. "I don't have my rifle," he told himself, and
then the world went black.

When he regained consciousness, he saw the looming face of 1st Sgt. Frederick L.
Johnson, who had been in the trail vehicle and had brought his commander back from the
dead with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Lying on the road shoulder 50 meters from his
shattered Humvee, Gadson was the only man seriously wounded in the attack, but those
wounds were grievous. Another soldier, Pfc. Eric C. Brown, managed to knot tourniquets
across his upper thighs. Johnson hoisted Gadson, who weighed 210 pounds, into another
Humvee, an ordeal that was "extremely complicated due to the extensive injuries Lt. Col.
Gadson sustained to his lower extremities," an incident report later noted.

Thirty minutes after the blast, Gadson was flown from Camp Falcon to the 28th Combat
Support Hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone. For hours he hovered near death, saved by 70
units of transfused blood. "Tell Kim I love her," he told another officer.

Two days later, he was stable enough to fly to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in
Germany; two days after that, he reached Walter Reed, where Kim was waiting for him.
On May 18, a major artery in his left leg ruptured; to save his life, surgeons amputated
several inches above the knee. The next day, the right leg blew, and it, too, was taken off
at the thigh.
Gadson would be but one of 22,000 American casualties from IEDs in Iraq and
Afghanistan, but that isolated incident along Route Jackson on May 7 was emblematic of
the nation's long struggle against roadside bombs.

He had been wounded despite the best equipment his country could give him and despite
the best countermeasures American science could contrive. His life had been saved by the
armored door that shielded his head and torso, and by the superior training of his soldiers,
the heroic efforts of military medicine and his own formidable grit. He had lost his lower
limbs despite flawlessly following standard operating procedure. He faced months, and
years, of surgery, rehabilitation and learning to live a life without legs.

Gadson's war was over, but for his comrades and for the country it goes on. An additional
$4.5 billion has been budgeted for the counter-IED fight in the fiscal year that began this
week. JIEDDO, which started four years ago this month in the Pentagon basement as an
Army task force with a dozen soldiers, now fills two floors of an office building in
Crystal City and employs almost 500 people, including contractors.

The House Armed Services Committee concluded in May that the organization "has
demonstrated marginal success in achieving its stated mission to eliminate the IED as a
weapon of strategic influence." Others disagree, including England. "Monty Meigs was
the best thing that ever happened to us," he said, "and to the [Pentagon], and to the guys
in the field."

Whether because of the surge, or despite it, total IED attacks in Iraq declined from 3,200
in March to 2,700 in July, an 8 percent drop. IED-related deaths also declined over the
summer, sharply, from 88 in May to 27 in September.

If heartened by the recent trend, Meigs is cautious. He notes that sniping, another
asymmetrical tactic, tormented soldiers in the Civil War. "Snipers are still around, and
they're darned effective," he said. "Artillery has also been around a long time. There are
some tactical problems that are very hard to solve. There are no silver bullets, no
panaceas."

Virtually everyone agrees that regardless of how the American expeditions in Iraq and
Afghanistan play out, the roadside bomb has become a fixture on 21st-century
battlegrounds.

"IEDs are a factor in the future," Macy added. "Wherever we go, for whatever reason we
go there, if there are people who don't like us, we're going to have to be prepared to deal
with IEDs."

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