The death of a British explosives expert in Afghanistan has again highlighted how the crudest of bombs has proved an effective way to combat the world's most technologically advanced militaries.
British Staff Sgt. Olaf Sean George Schmid was killed in southern Afghanistan on Saturday while defusing a bomb, a tragic end for a soldier who had dedicated his career to clearing explosives. News of Schmid's death comes just days after Washington lawmakers again grilled the head of the Pentagon agency responsible for combating IEDs on why more progress hasn't been made in this area.
A Marine with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade searches for missing comrades after an IED blast in the Afghan provice of Helmand in July.
Asked last week why the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) has reduced its spending on combating IEDs, the director, Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, argued it was a result of earlier success. "[M]uch of the low-hanging fruit has been harvested," Metz told a House panel last week, "so we're left with some real tough physics problems."
But is defeating IEDs really a physics problem? Over four years after Pentagon officials talked about a "Manhattan Project" for IEDs -- a comparison to the World War II-era effort to develop the atomic bomb -- these homemade devices are still proving to be a deadly killer with no single solution. In fact, according to figures provided by JIEDDO, two clear trends are evident: Attacks in Iraq are significantly down, but they are now spiking in Afghanistan. There were 215 attempted IED attacks in Iraq and four times that number, 860, in Afghanistan during September.
"Although initially slower to develop in Afghanistan, the IED has now replaced direct-fire weapons as the enemy's weapon of choice," Metz testified last week.
More troubling, the technologies and strategies developed to battle IEDs in Iraq are often ineffective in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the Pentagon spent about $1 billion to equip troops with jammers meant to block the cell phone signals used to detonate IEDs; in Afghanistan, jammers proved futile when the military faced hard-wired IEDs. Task Force ODIN, an Army aviation battalion that used high-tech drones to track down thousands of insurgents in Iraq has so far failed to deliver the same results in Afghanistan.
Even seeming low-tech or no-tech solutions take up time and money. Case in point: According to the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. military recently spent more than $5 million and 18 months to studying which soldiers are better at spotting IEDs (apparently, soldiers from rural areas with hunting experience, and those from rough urban areas, proved to be the best IED spotters).
But the biggest problem, perhaps, is the very nature of the IED threat: it plays on the ability of insurgents to adapt, while taking advantage of the U.S. military's notoriously slow ability to respond. Even in the best cases, it takes the Pentagon months, or even years, to field a technology to combat new IEDs. Those making the IEDs, however, can often change tactics on the spot.
In other words, what JIEDDO calls a physics problem is, for insurgents, simple math.
