Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), Article 6
Compiled by David Barth on September 14, 2008 from an article by Rick Atkinson, Washington Post Staff Writer and
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling.
Article 1: IEDs, The Electromagnetic Spectrum, and
MOASS
Article 2: Jammers
Article 3: Types of IEDs & Vehicles
Article 4: First Objective: Defeat the Device
Article 5: Second Objective: Train the Force
Article 6: Third Objective: Attack the Network
Article 7: The Story of Lt. Col. Gadson
Third Objective: Attack the Network
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 2007 did 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 hoped to begin introducing fingerprint evidence in
Iraqi trials in 2007.
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.
Human Terrain Teams (HTT)
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.
Red and Blue IED Teams
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 were been heartening in late 2007, 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."
Article 7: The Story of Lt. Col. Gadson