Roadside Bomb Hunting: Learned Skill or Intuition?

It was dusk and just over 100 degrees as the truck convoy designated Dagger Three Seven snaked past concrete barriers and coils of razor wire and crept onto a road pocked with scars where previous convoys had been hit with IEDs. Our gun truck was escorting two dozen tractor trailers carrying food, ammo, and spare parts from an air base to an outlying post, and to make sure we got there OK, Army Specialist Francisco B. Fimbres was up in the turret, sweeping the landscape with eagle eyes. Left ... front ... right ... front ... left.

The route, two lanes of broken pavement, was lined with trash, plastic bags, a wrecked car, the carcass of a dog, an old refrigerator, a mound of dirt -- each one a potential roadside bomb. Fimbres, a 36-year-old from Tucson, was jumpy from a couple of cans of Monster energy drink and Marlboro Lights, and his hard eyes interrogated each trash bag, each pothole. Soldiers had been killed on this road, with a terrifying lack of predictability or pattern. Like countless convoys before, on this night the men wearily set out equipped with frayed nerves and lucky charms -- and a cosmic conviction that Fimbres would see the IED before the blinding shock wave and searing heat and jagged shrapnel got them all.

"Plastic bag, left side,'' Fimbres called out on the intercom. "Clear!'' he said a second later, meaning not an IED. "Pothole coming up on the right,'' Fimbres said a minute later as the dusk deepened. "Roger, pothole on the right, stay left,'' said the convoy commander on a radio net that carried the warning to each truck. Behind us several hundred tons of combat supplies on wheels drifted left and undulated back when the suspicious pothole was passed.

It was exhausting hours of work for Fimbres, but he got the convoy through safely.

But how, the military is wondering, did he do it?

With IED casualties since 2001 mounting (2,451 dead, 23,650 wounded, in Iraq and Afghanistan as of Dec. 5), the military is mounting a determined effort to find out whether spotting IEDs is an intuitive, innate skill, like the ability to quickly pick up a new language, or whether it is learned through experience. Because if it's learned through experience, the military can teach other people to be good at it. And save lives.

The same questions arose 40 years ago when the Army and Marines began to wonder if they could clone the guys who were really, really good at walking point and guiding the troops around mines and booby-traps. Two major studies were completed, but the military lost interest as the war wound down and its attention turned back to the Cold War.

Now, those questions have again become critical. In eight years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has found individuals within its ranks who excel at spotting IEDs. Most of them, like Fimbres, have no idea how they do it. "I just look,'' he shrugged when I asked him.

To find the answers, the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, launched a study of IED hunters to find out how they work. The three-year study, done by the Army Research Institute, the Air Force Research Lab, and the Army Research Lab, is finished. But the results are on close hold.

"We don't want any of the bad guys to know'' what they came up with, said Dr. Steve Burnett, a retired command sergeant major and a psychologist who oversaw the research.

The little he will say is that the ability to spot IEDs, to out-think insurgents who have become cunning about disguising the roadside bombs, rests on three traits: vigilance, memory and visual acuity. Together, they can enable a person to instantly recognize change, as in, "There's a small mound of dirt that wasn't there yesterday -- somebody's dug a hole there -- watch out!''

That's more difficult than it may sound, considering that the spotter is probably in a moving vehicle, and he or she is absorbing the stress of knowing a lethal IED could explode at any second. But there are people who can do it.

"I don't think it's a shock to anyone that there are certain people who are really good at visual detection,'' Burnett told me. "You could call them natural hunters.

"The question is, can we improve this capability through training? We don't know. That's the next phase of research,'' he said.

Meantime, the military is spending hundreds of millions of dollars training troops to spot IEDs, mostly through experiential learning. Last year JIEDDO spent $454 million building realistic counter-IED training facilities at 57 locations in the U.S., Europe and Korea, and has spent $71 million on hiring Iraqis, Afghans and others to be role-players at the training sites.

The IED organization also built a virtual environment trainer at Fort Bragg, N.C., in which soldiers run a simulated mission in an IED-saturated environment, and then get to play the insurgents who plan when and how to attack the U.S. soldiers. That's designed to give them insights into outfoxing the enemy by learning to think like the enemy: Here's where I would put an IED -- maybe that's where the insurgents would put it, too.

Is it possible to use scientific insights to make "natural" IED hunters into super-hunters?

"I don't think we're going in that direction,'' said Burnett. "As a sergeant major (the most senior enlisted position) you learn how to read people and you know certain people have capabilities that make them stand out from the others, who are good at this. We want to make the people who aren't so good, better.''

Gen. Tom Metz, who recently retired as director of JIEDDO, told me once that the "best sensor for detecting IEDs on the battlefield is the human eye.''