Pentagon Shifts Focus in Hunt for Deadly Afghan Bombs

Soon after U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003, Islamist extremists hit upon what a senior official calls a "winning'' strategy: targeting U.S. troops with cheap but deadly makeshift bombs hidden in roadways, trash heaps and abandoned cars.

The United States has mounted a costly and ambitious effort to detect these Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), spending billions of dollars on sophisticated detectors and sensors, like ground-penetrating radar and high-tech jammers. The Pentagon has spent $32 billion on heavy armored trucks alone, even though insurgents have found ways to blow some of them up, too.

As IED attacks spread to Afghanistan, improved training enabled American troops to spot many of the devices before they exploded.


The result: Five years ago, about half of all IEDs detonated before they could be found and disarmed. Today, about half of all IEDs still detonate before they are found. Worse, the number of IEDs planted in Afghanistan is roughly doubling every year, taking a horrifying toll on American troops. In both theaters of war, IEDs have killed 2,575 Americans and seriously wounded 24,120 since 2001, according to the most recent Pentagon accounting.

Now, the new director of the Pentagon's war against IEDs, Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, is taking a different approach. Fed up with a sluggish Pentagon bureaucracy and risk-averse defense contractors, Oates is leading a renewed effort to penetrate and dismantle the shadowy enemy networks that acquire, emplace and explode IEDs.

However, this new approach demands far better intelligence than has been available to U.S. ground commanders in Afghanistan so far. According to a recent assessment by Army Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan, the intelligence community is "only marginally relevant . . . unable to answer basic questions'' about the country and "hazy about who the power brokers are and how we might influence them.''

Oates, a veteran of two combat tours in Iraq, took over leadership of the Defense Department's Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) last December. He took one look at its multibillion-dollar struggle to use costly technology against cheap IEDS and made a quick decision.

"You're gonna lose that fight,'' he said in an interview.

In Afghanistan, for instance, Taliban insurgents have mixed homemade explosives using diesel oil and fertilizer, a few cents worth of wire and old flashlight batteries to make devices buried in plastic buckets beneath dirt roads -- and destroyed the heaviest (and most expensive) armored vehicles the United States can field.

Now there are signs, Oates said, that the enemy is moving to more sophisticated devices, including IEDs detonated by remote control using a cell phone or a garage-door opener, as insurgents learned to do in Iraq. Do the math, Oates suggests: Insurgents have hundreds of options for building slightly different IEDs. For each variant, he said, the United States has to provide a technological fix for each variant, across the entire force.

I did the math, and the bottom line looks like this: In Afghanistan, what the military calls IED "incidents'' -- in which an IED is found or explodes -- rose from 2,677 in 2007 to 3,867 in 2008 to 8,159 last year. The bombs that exploded killed an increasing number of U.S. and allied troops: The death toll rose from 77 in 2007 to 183 in 2008 to 322 last year. Those wounded rose from 415 in 2007 to 790 in 2008 to 1,818 last year.

That is what Oates calls "a winning proposition'' for the insurgents, with this strategic consequence: The rising cost of the war, including casualties, is already causing serious doubts among the European allies about the wisdom of continuing.

For the United States, he said, "that kind of fight, where the enemy has the advantage of both low cost and high numbers, is not winnable.''

He is especially frustrated that when troops in the field come up with smart ways to defeat IEDs, the Pentagon bureaucracy is too slow and cumbersome to respond in time. "It's a dog's breakfast of rules and regulations, protocols and procedures,'' Oates said.

"I have enormous resources invested in the technical end of this and not a whole lot to show for it,'' he told an audience of Army officers and defense contractors last month. "If that upsets anyone, I apologize, but I've been around too many of these things when they go off.''

JIEDDO, for instance, has invented a simulator in which, soldiers can play both the role of an insurgent devising and planting an IED and a soldier trying to thwart him. Officials have found it a valuable tool for teaching soldiers to think like insurgents. "We produced a couple of these, but the services don't seem interested,'' he said. "Eventually I think they'll get around to it, but by that time a couple of years will have gone by.''

A smarter strategy, he said, is to fight the IED network – the Eliot Ness equivalent of attacking inside Al Capone's crime syndicate instead of just going around smashing bottles of bootleg gin. Oates' organization has launched a significant effort to crack the networks, to "understand these networks, why they are engaging us and what is their purpose,'' Oates said. "Every IED has a purpose, whether it's criminal, tribal or ideological.''

Getting inside the networks, understanding the players and their motivations, can give U.S. battalion and company commanders local insights on how to operate against them, instead of merely staying in a defensive crouch and trying to whack Taliban leaders.

But there's more to it than just identifying the network leaders.

In Oates' analysis, the Taliban is structured more like a tight military organization than is generally appreciated.

"It's very different from Iraq," Oates said. "The Taliban really have very good control over their fighters. Guys are taking military orders. The leadership is very capable.''

As a result, he said, U.S. forces have concentrated on trying to identify and kill Taliban leaders. "That's a losing strategy in the long term, because the No. 2 guy just moves up,'' Oates said. "Some of these guys you do have to kill or capture. Some you can de-motivate. Some criminal factions can be manipulated.''

At JIEDDO, teams of analysts are working through reams of data, including unclassified media reports and academic papers as well as highly classified information gathered from electronic eavesdropping and reports from agents on the ground, to help build understanding of enemy IED networks and what motivates individuals within them.

But as the Army's Flynn warned, it's an uphill battle. In a highly critical paper he published through the Center for a New American Strategy, a centrist think tank in Washington, Flynn argued that U.S. intelligence has been too focused on "scanning the countryside in hopes of spotting insurgents burying bombs,'' and is largely ignorant about the larger population, where their sympathies and loyalties are, and how they can be "brought over to our side.''

In the few places in Afghanistan where battalion commanders have focused their intelligence collectors and analysts to understand and work with the local environment, IED attacks fell dramatically, Flynn wrote. Oates is pushing his teams of analysts to scan more data, to reach out beyond traditional military sources of information, and to help analysts and commanders in the field build comprehensive pictures of the friendly and enemy forces in their operating area.

At his end, Flynn is demanding that more analysts be sent out of headquarters and down to the battalions spread out across Afghanistan to make sense of the reams of information already available from sources like soldiers strolling through local markets and civilian aid officials working with local Afghan organizations. Meanwhile, shipping expensive armored trucks to Afghanistan will continue -- the Marine Corps recently announced it is spending more than $1 billion on 1,200 new armored trucks.

The sustainment costs of these Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles -- the operating costs as well as spare parts and maintenance -- run about half the purchase price each year, Oates said. "There's no way you could buy a $20,000 car and be paying $10,000 a year to keep it going, but that's what we're doing,'' he said. "I don't think that's wasteful -- you need the dad-gum vehicles. And you can't surrender that part of the fight to the enemy.

"But the real fight is at the network. We have to keep trying to figure out how to keep these guys off the firing line.''