thedrifter
10-02-07, 06:14 AM
'You can't armor your way out of this problem'
By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 2, 2007; A01
BAGHDAD -- On Aug. 3, 2005, the deadliest roadside bomb ever encountered by U.S. troops in Iraq detonated beneath a 26-ton armored personnel carrier, killing 14 Marines and revealing yet another American vulnerability in the struggle against improvised explosive devices.
"Huge fire and dust rose from the place of the explosion," an Iraqi witness reported from the blast site in Haditha, in Anbar province. In Baghdad and in Washington, the bleak recognition that a new species of bomb -- the underbelly, or "deep buried," IED -- could demolish any combat vehicle in the U.S. arsenal "was a light-bulb moment for sure," as a Pentagon analyst later put it.
Of the 81,000 IED attacks in Iraq over the past 4 1/2 years, few proved more devastating to morale than that "huge fire" in Haditha. At a time when coalition casualties per IED steadily declined, even as the number of bombs steadily increased, the abrupt obliteration of an entire squad -- made up mostly of reservists from Ohio -- revealed that the billions of dollars being spent on heavier armor and other "defeat the device" initiatives had clear limits.
Haditha provided a light-bulb moment for insurgents as well. During the next year, underbelly attacks just in the Marine sector of western Iraq would increase from a few each month to an average of four per day. By early summer of this year, the underbelly IED -- considered a specialty of Sunni bombers -- was killing more American troops in Iraq than all other variants of roadside bombs combined.
A bomb with 100 pounds of explosives detonating beneath an armored vehicle was equivalent to a direct hit from a six-gun artillery battery, but with an accuracy no gunner could hope to achieve. A single 155mm artillery round, which by itself can destroy a tank, typically contained 18 pounds of explosives. "That's just a damned difficult thing to defeat," said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, the current chief of staff for the Multinational Corps in Baghdad.
Two weeks after the Haditha killings, Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, who headed the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, lamented the failure of American science to vanquish the roadside bomb. "If we could prematurely detonate IEDs, we will change the whole face of the war," he said. For "a country that can put a man on the moon in 10 years, or build a nuke in 2 1/2 years of wartime effort, I don't think we're getting what we need from technology on that point."
Technology was trying. The Pentagon's Joint IED Task Force had spent almost $1.5 billion by the late summer of 2005, with an additional $3.6 billion planned for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1; $4 of every $5 went to defeat-the-device technologies intended to foil the bomb or mitigate the blast. But with an IED attack occurring in Iraq every 48 minutes in 2005 -- twice the frequency of the previous year -- there was much to foil and a great deal to mitigate.
True, the number of troops killed and wounded was escalating at a lower rate than the number of roadside bombs. "We are being effective," said Brig. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, director of the task force. "The casualties are not going up as much as the IEDs are." Yet nearly 500 troops had been killed in Iraq through August 2005, including those 14 at Haditha. "This thing could unravel on us by wearing down the American public with these IED casualties," Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, told Votel.
Some promising technologies fizzled. The Defense Department invested more than $2 million in the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, including extensive research at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the "Manhattan Project-like" effort that Abizaid had called for had realized its goal: a nuclear bomb. Various engineers were pursuing the "scientific molecular sniffer" that Abizaid had also envisioned shortly after taking over at Centcom in 2003, but Los Alamos hoped to exploit the honeybee's keen sense of smell as a means to detect explosives.
Researchers placed each bee in a tiny harness, exposed the insects to various explosive scents for six seconds, and then provided a sugar water reward. This Pavlovian conditioning soon caused a bee to extend its proboscis -- tongue -- in anticipation of sugar whenever it detected a whiff of TNT or C-4 plastic explosive. A small television camera placed in a box where the bees were harnessed would allow a soldier watching a monitor to see whether the "proboscis extension reflex" signaled the presence of explosives. In 2004, bees had stuck out their tongues at 50 pounds of TNT in a simulated IED, according to Robert Wingo, a Los Alamos chemist.
Votel's reaction upon learning of the project was typical: "What?" The practical applications in combat seemed limited. "How do we operationalize this?" he asked. "How does, say, 1st Platoon manage their bees?" Among other problems, harnessed bees tended to be short-lived. After an analysis concluded that the honeybee's "explosive-detection capabilities have significant reliability issues," as a Defense Department official put it earlier this year, the Pentagon withdrew its support.
Other technologies reached the battlefield only to find that the battle had moved on. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was aghast to learn that there was no "man-portable" electronic jammer for dismounted infantrymen. The thousands of jammers already sent to counter radio-controlled IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan -- Warlock Green, Warlock Red, ICE, SSVJ, MMBJ -- were designed to be mounted on vehicles only.
With a sharp push from Hunter and $10 million from Congress, factories in California and Maryland produced 10,000 jammers the size of walkie-talkies. The device was named Warlock Blue, although Hunter called it Little Blue. As the first models emerged from the production line in early July 2005, barely a month after the order was placed, the chairman touted "a new spirit of patriotic production." By August, soldiers and Marines were carrying the jammer on foot patrols across Iraq.
But Warlock Blue was designed to counter a low-power radio threat that had never posed much danger to dismounted troops and had nearly disappeared in recent months as other jammers drove bombmakers to more powerful radio triggers.
The Blue was a half-watt jammer at a time when some engineers suspected that 50 watts might be too weak. Each one used eight lithium batteries, which required frequent replacement. In anticipation of Blue, the government bought 400,000 CR123 lithium batteries, according to the Navy. "Do you know what it's going to cost me for batteries for these systems?" one skeptical Army general asked an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) officer in Baghdad.
Some troops appreciated the Blue, and even considered it a good-luck talisman, like an electronic rabbit's foot. But many commanders believed the jammer was extraneous to the fight they faced, another well-intentioned gadget of marginal relevance. An electrical engineer with long experience in Iraq and Afghanistan later recalled: "A lot of people felt it was being crammed down their throats."
***
By late summer 2005, the explosively formed penetrator, like the underbelly IED, had become an appallingly lethal weapon for which there was no obvious countermeasure.
Although still a small fraction of all roadside bombings, EFP attacks since spring had increased from about one per week to roughly one every other day. When fired, the semi-molten copper disks struck with such violence that casualties tended to be higher and more gruesome than in other IED attacks. "This was beyond the capability of anything in our arsenal," an Army brigadier general said. "And, by the way, you can't armor your way out of this problem."
The passive infrared trigger used with most EFPs was not only immune to radio jamming, it was difficult to detect. When a mock EFP was installed on a Florida range used to train new EOD technicians, the device "killed" at least 400 of them in three months. Not one, according to an instructor, spotted the small lens that tripped the bomb.
Just as alarming was the first confirmed appearance, on July 6, 2005, of an EFP that combined a passive infrared trigger with a radio-controlled "telemetry module," electronic circuitry that allowed a triggerman to be selective about what he attacked.
Previously, an EFP would fire when the infrared sensor detected the first warm object to pass, whether a Humvee or an Iraqi tractor. But the telemetry module, which had civil uses in transmitting data, let the insurgent wait to arm the EFP with a radio signal as a U.S. convoy approached. Worse yet, those radio signals tended to use a frequency outside the "loadsets" programmed into most American jammers, according to an Army colonel.
These developments sparked diplomatic and military countermeasures. Washington and London reportedly sent protests to Iran, which was accused of supplying both training and materiel to Shiite insurgents in Iraq. In August 2005, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asserted that "it is true that weapons, clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq," an accusation Tehran denied.
The telemetry module that had been captured on July 6 was sent to the Terrorist Explosives Device Analytical Center in Quantico for examination by the FBI and other specialists. More EFPs followed, although in at least one instance -- involving an array with five warheads -- difficulty in transporting explosives and securing overflight permission delayed the shipment for weeks.
At the IED task force, Votel again contacted the Israelis, who in June had sent several counter-IED technologies to Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona for testing, which was inconclusive. "I know you've got some systems on this," he told an Israeli officer. "Can we get them?"
An Army lieutenant colonel again flew from Washington to Tel Aviv. Soon a pair of vehicle-mounted microwave devices, called Dragon Spike, arrived in Iraq aboard an Air Force jet, freshly painted and with all Hebrew markings removed. Field tests again showed mixed results.
Meanwhile, soldiers in the field pursued their own solutions. Because a passive infrared sensor reacted to heat signatures, one inventive trooper proposed mounting a giant hair dryer on a bumper to blow hot air in front of the vehicle. Another took a toaster purchased at a bazaar, plugged it into his Humvee and dangled the glowing appliance from a long pole welded to the front of the vehicle.
A similar but more practical idea, also proposed by a soldier, became a countermeasure called Rhino. A glow plug -- a pencil-shaped object with an electrical heating element, often used in diesel engines -- was placed inside a metal ammunition can, which was then attached to a metal pole 10 feet in front of a Humvee or truck. The red-hot can decoyed the infrared sensor into triggering prematurely so that the copper EFP slug fired at the Rhino rather than the vehicle.
Within four to six weeks, insurgents began countering the countermeasure by aiming the EFP to fire at an angle so the slug struck 10 feet back from the Rhino. "Anything that's effective becomes ineffective," an Army colonel observed, "because this enemy will morph." The counter-countermeasure in turn provoked further measures in a variation called Rhino II, including the use of a telescoping pole that let troops vary the distance between glow plug and vehicle.
Rhino II would remain a standard feature on U.S. military vehicles in Iraq. At a cost of $1,800 each, more than 13,000 have been built, mostly at Letterkenny Army Depot in central Pennsylvania. The rectangular box on a long pole protrudes from nearly every Humvee and truck sent into harm's way in Iraq.
"Psychologically," a former Army officer said, "it's huge."
***
On the morning of Monday, Dec. 12, 2005, a tall, shambling 60-year-old man with thinning hair and the bearing of a former four-star general walked into the Pentagon basement to take command of the nation's troubled counter-IED program.
Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had agreed to expand the task force: A 22-page Pentagon directive would create the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, with orders to attack "the entire IED system." Votel, a capable but junior brigadier general, would soon join the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, to be replaced as director by a more senior leader with greater stature and experience.
In an emotional farewell party at the Union Street Public House in Alexandria, Votel's comrades for the past 2 1/2 years in the counter-IED struggle sent him off with sustained applause. "This was the hardest job I've ever had," he told his colleagues. "And it's the one for which I was least prepared."
His successor, Montgomery C. Meigs, seemed to have been preparing all his life for the challenge. Descended from military men, including Abraham Lincoln's quartermaster general of the same name and a father who was killed leading a tank battalion in France a month before Meigs's birth, his combat experience included the Ashau Valley in the Vietnam War and Medina Ridge in the Persian Gulf War.
Before retiring from active duty in 2003, Meigs had commanded the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and the 57,000 U.S. Army soldiers in Europe. His doctoral dissertation, written at the University of Wisconsin in 1982, scrutinized the management of the Manhattan Project during construction of the atomic bomb. He had also written a book on the elaborate -- and successful -- methods used to defeat German submarines in the North Atlantic during World War II.
Despite his credentials, Meigs in other respects was an unlikely choice. Skeptical of the war in Iraq, he had also publicly accused the Pentagon leadership of evincing an attitude that "anybody who disagrees with us is a Luddite." At Syracuse University, where he had held a chair in public policy, he taught a course titled "Why Presidents Go to War When They Don't Have To."
But to Meigs, the roadside bomb was personal. Among his oldest friends was an Army colonel, whose daughter, Laura M. Walker, had captained the West Point women's handball team that won a national championship. On Aug. 18, 2005, after commissioning as an Army engineer, 1st Lt. Laura Walker was killed in Afghanistan by an IED triggered with a pressure plate. She was 24.
As the motto for his new organization, Meigs adapted a Latin inscription favored by the English physicist and novelist C.P. Snow: "Aut viam inveniam aut faciam." I'll find a way or make one.
Whether found or made, a way was needed. By New Year's Day 2006, the number of U.S. troops killed in action by IEDs in Iraq approached 700. "Complex attacks" had become more common, with roadside bombs used to stop or slow a convoy that insurgents then attacked with small-arms and mortar fire.
One assessment calculated that an IED could be detonated 90 ways, but Meigs knew that the number was almost infinite. Bombmakers used the world's vast consumer electronics market as a research lab and test bed. "Microsoft pumps out enhancements of software about every nine months," Meigs said. "You get a new generation of cellphones between a year and 18 months. That's the rhythm we're on, and it's a totally different way of doing business. . . . You can't just play defense in this game."
Most "low-hanging fruit" -- off-the-shelf technology that could be sent to the field quickly -- had been harvested. "We should focus less on the bomb than on the bombmaker," Votel had often said. But only 13 percent of the counter-IED budget for fiscal 2006 was dedicated to "offensive operations." Little headway had been gained in getting the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus into the fight by searching for the financiers, bombmakers and cell leaders who formed the insurgent networks. JIEDDO's intelligence cell totaled four people.
Simply sketching a coherent picture of IED trends was difficult. Much of the data were "dirty," with the anomalies and errors inevitable in combat reports. Some analysts believed that 20 percent or more of all IEDs were never reported. An infantry platoon, bomb squad and medical team might report the same incident using three 10-digit grid locations, which in a database could become three incidents. Was the "Kia" cited in various reports a Korean-made vehicle or "killed in action?" Were soldiers using local time or Zulu (Greenwich Mean Time)?
On Jan. 18, 2006, Meigs left on a two-week visit to both war zones. Flying first to Afghanistan, he found troubling signs. The 782 IEDs in 2005 had more than doubled over the previous year, and the number would double again in 2006. A single Army brigade occupied a country larger and more populous than Iraq. Many commanders believed the Taliban and al-Qaeda were resurgent, because the U.S. military, including bomb squads, had been diverted to Iraq.
"The IED fight was not put in check," an Army colonel complained. At a Central Command conference in Qatar in January 2006, another colonel showed a slide of vast stacks of equipment in a huge assembly area. It was labeled "Counter IED in Iraq." The next slide showed a man on a donkey holding a basketball. It was labeled "Counter IED in Afghanistan."
Suicide attacks were approaching three each week, according to State Department and United Nations figures, from three in all of 2004 and 17 in 2005. Often recruited in Pakistani madrassas and frequently driving a Toyota Corolla painted to look like a taxi, the typical bomber was male, 15 to 35 years old, "clean-shaven . . . nervous, restless, eyes fixed, glazed, avoids eye contact," according to a U.S. military description. Hair samples from dead bombers showed that many were drugged with sedatives.
The Spider Mod 1 radio-controlled bomb trigger first seen in 2002 continued to appear, but evolutions had reached the Spider Mod 5. Those, too, came from Pakistan, U.S. intelligence believed, often with the radio frequency and firing code written on the case by the bombmaker for the emplacer's benefit. The Acorn jammer initially sent to Afghanistan in 2002 still worked against the Spiders, but additional jammers would be needed against other devices detonated by radio waves.
No EFPs had appeared in Afghanistan; instead, double-stacked anti-tank mines provided the explosive punch in the most powerful IEDs. A unique "pressure-cooker bomb" -- a lidded metal rice pot filled with explosives -- also proved increasingly lethal, especially in the Pech River Valley to the northeast.
In Iraq, things were much worse. A sharp spike in attacks in late 2005 had pushed the number above 1,500 a month, twice the annual figure in Afghanistan. Troops and commanders alike had grown wary of help from Washington. "Stuff was coming in without control," one colonel recalled. "It would just show up, and we'd say, 'How the hell did that get here?' "
A review of 70 IED countermeasures found that only half had been tested in the United States before being shipped overseas, and that fewer than one-third were evaluated after arriving in the theater. Assessing what worked was exceptionally hard.
Under what circumstances did Rhino succeed? If it failed, was it because the Humvee was going too fast? Too slow? Was the glow plug functioning properly? Where did Warlock Green work best? Which was better, ICE or SSVJ? If a radio-controlled IED failed to detonate, who could be sure it was because the jammer jammed? "That makes it very difficult to determine where to put your money," one senior analyst said.
Meigs proselytized. IEDs were the insurgents' fires, their artillery, used for political effect to erode American will, he said. The enemy attacked idiosyncratically, leveraging their capabilities "against our structural weaknesses."
Three years into the Iraq war, the U.S. military remained too much on its heels. "We spend a tremendous amount of money trying to defeat the device, because that's the immediate way of preventing casualties," Meigs would later observe. "But we really need to spend more on attacking the enemy's system, attacking the networks. . . . You can kill emplacers all day and you're not going to slow this thing down."
In a heated four-hour meeting on Jan. 26, in a headquarters conference room at the Al Faw Palace, west of Baghdad, Meigs complained that data from the field failed to reach JIEDDO quickly, making it difficult to swiftly assess trends and take action. A new counter-IED organization, Task Force Troy, which would grow to 1,000 people in Iraq, joined EOD teams, the Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell and half a dozen newly arrived weapons intelligence teams, designed to investigate bomb scenes. Meigs believed CEXC and WIT should report directly to JIEDDO, which paid most of the costs.
This sat badly in Baghdad. "Sir, General Meigs wants everything you've got," Col. Kevin D. Lutz, the Task Force Troy commander, told his corps commander, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli. "He says that if he bought it, he owns it."
This also sat badly at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, where Meigs flew to see Abizaid after returning from Iraq in early February. "You need to tell Meigs he's not a general anymore," a senior officer in Baghdad had advised Abizaid. "He's general retired."
"Look, Monty, you're not helping the way you're going about doing this," Abizaid said. Meigs demurred, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Better integration was needed between the theater and Washington, he said, along with better integration between intelligence and operations. Several IED networks led to Iran. "These are a problem. These are hurting us."
Abizaid bristled. "I've been doing this for three years. What are you going to tell me about it?" When Meigs persisted, Abizaid snapped, "Hey, look, this is not your [expletive] war to fight."
The brief squall soon passed. Both men vowed to continue, in Abizaid's words, "as brothers in battle." Later he would muse, "Meigs coming on the scene has been nothing but good. . . . He's a brilliant guy."
***
Early on the morning of Saturday, March 11, 2006, Meigs walked into the White House Roosevelt Room, across the hall from the Oval Office. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 stood on the fireplace mantle, beneath a portrait of Roosevelt on horseback as a Rough Rider. Military service flags lined one wall, bracketing an oil painting of Indians crossing the Platte River.
On a long, dark conference table, several IEDs with the explosives removed had been arrayed. The "petting zoo," as it was known at JIEDDO, included a radio-controlled device and an EFP with a passive infrared trigger. Around the table sat President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several other luminaries.
Meigs spoke for 10 minutes, using five briefing slides. He displayed a chart showing how IED attacks continued to climb in Iraq while the number of bombs causing coalition casualties remained flat. Another chart depicted the evolution of IED triggers, including the sharp reduction in low-power, radio-controlled detonators, the recent appearance of cellphones, and the persistence of passive infrared triggers. The latter were tied to EFPs, which in turn had Iranian links.
Bush showed little interest in the petting zoo but listened attentively to Meigs. He noted that JIEDDO's annual budget approached $4 billion. Why, he asked, does it have to be so large? Meigs explained that the counter-IED strategy now followed three distinct paths: defeat the device, attack the network, train the force. Simple, cheap gadgets, like those on the table, were expensive to vanquish. JIEDDO's mission was not to thwart all roadside bombs, but to "defeat IEDs as weapons of strategic influence." Since the invasion three years earlier, 32,000 IED attacks had occurred in Iraq.
At 8:46 a.m., a door swung open to admit reporters. "The general has spent a lot of time thinking about the enemy's tactics and techniques, and how our military can adjust to them," Bush said. Before the session broke up, a reporter posed a final question about IEDs "from foreign, neighboring countries."
Bush was ready. "If the Iranians are trying to influence the outcome of the political process, or the outcome of the security situation there, we're letting them know of our displeasure."
Two days later, on Monday, March 13, the president gave a speech at George Washington University, where he described Meigs's recent visit to the White House. IEDs allow "the terrorists . . . to attack us from a safe distance, without having to face our forces in battle," the president said, and "some of the most powerful IEDs we're seeing in Iraq today include components that came from Iran."
But the country had a plan. "We're on the hunt for the enemy -- and we're not going to rest until they've been defeated," Bush added. "We are putting the best minds in America to work on this effort."
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
Ellie