Beating the Roadside Bombers
How the Pentagon is fighting back against Iraqi insurgents' most lethal weapon
CAMP SHELBY, MISS. --The platoon of soldiers from the Utah Army National Guard grinds to a halt. Ahead, on the side of the road, lies a small pile of garbage. It's just the kind of place insurgents hide what the military likes to call improvised explosive devices--the roadside bombs that have become the top killer in Iraq. Staff Sgt. Randall Robinson peers through a pair of binoculars. He can't tell if the debris shelters a bomb, so he and another soldier sprint off the road for a better look. Lying on the ground some 50 feet away from the pile, they determine that it's nothing more than rubble. "Looks like garbage," says Robinson, as he returns to the platoon. Suddenly, a loud explosion erupts. Crack-boom.
"Dead, dead, dead," says Sgt. 1st Class Jeremias Osorio, a trainer at Camp Shelby, in south-central Mississippi. Osario points to Robinson and seven other guardsmen: "Take your Kevlar off; you're dead." The garbage was a decoy, and a successful one. The soldiers missed a small red wire visible on top of a recently disturbed pile of straw, a telltale sign of a roadside bomb. Few of the units that have trained at Camp Shelby in preparation for a tour in Iraq have succeeded in spotting the bomb in this exercise, Osario says. "It's a hard thing to detect. We make it that way because that is the reality."
The reality in Iraq is that improvised bombs, made from old Iraqi Army ordnance, have become the insurgency's most favored, and most effective, weapon. Improvised explosive devices planted along the roads or hidden in cars are now perhaps the biggest threat in Iraq. There were 336 reported American military deaths caused by IED s and an additional 89 by various types of suicide or car bombs as of April 29, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a website that tracks military deaths. (The count generally excludes the Marine Corps, which doesn't disclose how its troops are killed.) The numbers are even higher for Iraqis. Last Friday alone, more than three dozen Iraqis died in a bloody series of coordinated roadside and car bomb attacks.
Yard sale. It is not just the toll in dead and injured that makes the roadside and car bombs such effective tools of the insurgency. Bombings create a sense of chaos and make government officials and security forces look incompetent, helpless to stop the mayhem. For that reason, U.S. military leaders believe curbing the bomb attacks is a prerequisite to ensuring the survival of the new Iraqi government.
The nerve center of the military's efforts to stop the bombings lies in a humble set of offices deep in the basement of the Pentagon. Officers have pushed together cast-off desks to create a makeshift conference table, and the rest of the furniture looks like it was grabbed from a yard sale. This is home of the Joint IED Defeat Task Force. Originally formed in October 2003 as an Army organization, it has since been expanded to include representatives of each of the major military services, as well as Britain's defense forces.
Initially, the task force's priority was to develop tactical changes to lower the risk of bombing injuries. Take, for example, the lowly fuel can. Until spring 2004, it was common to see fuel cans on the back of humvees, says Lt. Col. Ernie Benner, the task force's operation officer. But if the vehicle was hit with an IED, the fuel cans would ignite, increasing the likelihood of casualties. "If you look now, you won't see fuel cans," says Benner. "Once you point that out, it is instantaneous, you see the idea spread." Further, the task force spent much of last year pushing new technologies to help soldiers survive bombings. They accelerated efforts to add armor to humvees and expand the use of electronic jammers that can block IED s from being detonated remotely. Task force officials say those innovations have had an effect. Chances of surviving an IED attack have risen dramatically. From April 2004 to February of this year, although the number of roadside bombs increased, the number of casualties per explosion declined by nearly half, according to the task force.
But there's a limit to what technology can do, Benner says. Insurgents can counter technological innovation: Bigger bombs overcome the armor on a humvee. Changing trigger mechanisms can render jammers useless. And there is evidence that insurgents have evolved in an effort to maintain their lethality. "There is no silver bullet," says Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, the IED task force director. "Any technology we provide will not match the brain of an adaptive enemy."
Late last year, as the limits of technology became more apparent, the task force began to emphasize a new strategy, focused less on surviving or stopping an individual bomb and more on targeting the bomb makers. The military calls it working "to the left of boom" --that is, before the explosion. "When you work against people," says Benner, "you work on offensive and you have a greater effect."
"The sheik." To help them take the offensive, the military has examined how conventional forces have dealt with bombing campaigns in other fights, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Vietnam War. The task force's British officers, based on their nation's experience in Northern Ireland, have emphasized that American military units need to learn more investigative techniques and act more like police detectives. American brigades in Iraq now collect information about every bomb: Where was it located, when did it detonate, what kind of bomb was it? From that information, the task force wants the brigades to find patterns that can help determine which bomber planted a bomb, where that bomber is based, and when he might strike again. "We are using the same techniques a policeman would use: analysis, circumstantial details, what is left behind," Votel says. "Every IED tells a story, and we have to be able to decipher it."
For the campaign to work, it requires every soldier to act like a sensor, gathering intelligence every time he leaves his base. To accomplish that requires improving soldiers' training prior to deployment to Iraq. The training gap is particularly acute for the National Guard and reserve units that currently make up about 40 percent of the forces in Iraq. At Camp Shelby, National Guard units spend five months learning the skills they need to survive in Iraq. And the No. 1 skill is avoiding, and stopping, roadside bombs. "The IED threat is ubiquitous," says Col. Daniel Zajac, the commander of the Training Support Brigade at Camp Shelby. "The only way you raise [soldiers'] awareness is if they believe they can be killed."
To prepare the guardsmen, Zajac and his boss, Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, developed a system called "theater immersion." Zajac and his soldiers have built a mini-Iraq on the grounds of Camp Shelby and De Soto National Forest. They built austere forward operating bases for the soldiers. They created Potemkin villages filled with friendly, and unfriendly, role players. Sprinkled throughout are mock bombs, lots and lots of them. Al Asad is the name of one of the fake villages. It has a police station, a mosque, and a dozen or so homes. Ali Al-Kaabi, an Iraqi immigrant from Seattle, plays the town's pro-American mayor who is locked in an unending battle with "the sheik," Ahmed Al-Kazawi, a Louisville, Ky., resident who plays the village's spiritual leader.
On this day, Lt. Jason Eichler of the Michigan National Guard gets to try to make sense of the conflict between Al-Kazawi and Al-Kaabi. In the exercise, Eichler is supposed to search the town, with the locals' permission if possible. The mayor is willing to let the soldiers search, but the sheik will have none of it. As the negotiations bog down, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Nelson's team drives toward the heart of the village in a humvee. When Nelson spots a rocket launcher he stops. Peering through the windshield, he sees a wire attached to the launcher: a tell-tale sign of an IED. He immediately pulls back--to the pleasure of the exercises' observers.
Unhappy with the intrusion into the village, the sheik orders a riot. Instantly, the 30 "villagers" --mostly residents of nearby Hattiesburg, Miss.--break out into chants: "Go home, U.S.A.! No more U.S.A.! Big liar, U.S.A!" And finally: "George Bush Ali Baba!" Carefully avoiding the rioting villagers and the hidden bombs, the soldiers begin their search.
"Think on your feet." The lesson of this scenario is that there are many power centers in every town--and many IED s. At the "hot wash," an after-action discussion of the exercise, Capt. Ken Sheets, the observer and trainer overseeing the exercise, praises Nelson for spotting the wire on the rocket launcher and avoiding an AK-47 booby-trapped with a bomb. "I am glad you looked for the wire," Sheets says. "You can't just kick things over and you can't just grab things."
As the group breaks up, Nelson admires how IED awareness is integrated into every exercise. "They really teach you how to think on your feet and react to situations as they develop," he says. And that, military trainers say, is just what they are trying to instill in soldiers preparing to go to Iraq. "It's about teaching the soldiers how to think, not what to think," says Lt. Col Alan Hartfield, a training officer with the task force.
The technological improvements, systemic intelligence analysis, immersive training, and offensive posture are making a difference, Votel says. After a spike in IED deaths in January and February, the numbers declined in March and April. Military officers hope they are seeing the beginning of a trend, but they caution that the battle is far from won. "We have made progress; we have a ways to go," says Votel. "There are a lot of soldiers who are still being hurt."
Deadly Explosions
American military deaths from roadside and car bombs
[Chart data are not available.]
[Chart labels]
Suicide Attack/Car Bomb
Improvised Explosive Device
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
July '03
Jan. '04
July '04
Jan. '05
Source: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count
USN&WR
This story appears in the May 9, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.