0.cached.png
By John Barry
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
They call it "running the gauntlet." Army Capt. Gregory Hirschey and his bomb squad would go looking for improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the streets of Baghdad. They would find them in donkey carts, paint cans, trash bags, plastic bottles and in schoolyards--explosive charges ready to be detonated by insurgents lying in wait. Operating around the clock in teams of three, Hirschey's 21-man unit responded to 2,178 incidents in seven months, from the summer of 2005 to the winter of 2006. "There were IEDs on the way there, there were IEDs on the way back," says Hirschey. Not to mention small-arms fire, ambushes and rocket-propelled grenades.
With a month left on his tour, Hirschey began to think his unit would miraculously emerge unscathed. Then an IED blew off a soldier's arm. Twelve days later, a team leader--Hirschey's close friend, Staff Sgt. Johnnie Mason--was dismantling an IED when a second one killed him instantly.
(Army bomb squads are often targeted by the insurgents for ambushes.) A strapping 12-year veteran with brush-cut blond hair, a wife and three kids, Hirschey, 38, found himself becoming numb to the IED threat. "You quit looking," he told NEWSWEEK. "I don't know what it is. You almost feel like you're part of the walking dead."
Read More on News
In every sense of the word, IEDs are crippling American soldiers in Iraq. The insurgents know that their best chance to win is to bleed America, and IEDs are the most effective way to cause the most harm at the least cost. Three years after the United States invaded Iraq, the military still has not figured out how to overcome the threat. Former administration officials blame the military bureaucracy; military officials blame a civilian leadership that did not grasp the operational challenges.
There is no doubt that the Bush administration is frustrated by the IED menace and is trying hard, if belatedly, to overcome it. President George W. Bush's tone was slightly defensive last week when he talked about "putting the best minds in America to work on this effort." In 2004, said Bush, the military spent $150 million to defeat IEDs; this year the figure is $3.3 billion--mostly for more armor and better technology. Bush himself has asked how the Pentagon could burn through so much money. Last week Gen. Montgomery Meigs, the four-star general appointed by Bush in December to lead the anti-IED effort, gave the president a little show and tell. On a long dark table in the Roosevelt Room were assembled a series of IEDs, ranging from the small, simple kind--an artillery shell detonated by a garage-door opener--to the bigger, more sophisticated shaped charges ignited by infrared beams (technology, it appears, courtesy of Iran). The former is good for tearing off limbs; the latter can take out a tank.
The Pentagon and Central Command do not like to get into specifics, for fear of tipping off the insurgents, but officials claim that the military is disarming an ever-greater number of IEDs before they can kill Americans. "We have reduced the casualty rate from IEDs by half of what it was 18 months ago," says Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman. All this may be true, but the insurgents are planting IEDs at a faster rate than the Army can eliminate them. According to Central Command, in 2004 there were 5,607 IED attacks; in 2005, there were 10,953.
"As we've improved our armor, the enemy's improved his IEDs. They're bigger and with better detonating mechanisms," Maj. Randall Simmons, whose Georgia National Guard unit escorts convoys through western Iraq, told the Associated Press. "There's a road we called IED Alley that the ordnance-disposal guys would clear regularly," says Sgt. Robert Lewis of Carrollton, Ga. "But no sooner would they reach the end of that stretch"--eight miles--"than the insurgents would be planting IEDs again at the beginning."
The bomb planters have become more inventive in hiding the devices, using animal carcasses and disguising the bombs as rocks or coating them with plaster to look like chunks of concrete. Most of the IEDs have been made from artillery or mortar shells, mines or grenades. Munitions are not hard to come by: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was awash with weapons. Left unguarded, many arsenals were looted in the wake of the March 2003 American invasion.
For detonators, the insurgents have used cell phones and garage-door openers; when the Americans figured out how to jam those signals, they began using infrared beams. The explosives got bigger and more deadly. A shaped charge can fire a jet of white-hot gas right through the armor of a tank, causing "spalling," a swirling mist of metal shrapnel that can shred the soldiers within. The Americans suspect that the Iranians have been teaching the insurgents how to make these IEDs. The Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hizbullah had years of practice building IEDs that bled--and eventually helped drive out--the Israeli Army occupying Lebanon in the 1980s and '90s.
The Pentagon was a little slow to recognize the IED threat, but a year after the invasion, CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid wrote a classified letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pleading for help. According to a military official who declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters, Abizaid warned that IEDs were "the number one killer of American troops" and asked for a "Manhattan Project-like effort," on the scale of the building of the atom bomb during World War II.
The civilian leadership of DoD agreed and let it be known that money would be no obstacle. A new Joint IED Task Force was duly convened under Army leadership--and immediately bogged down in bureaucracy. The first meeting was chaired by an Army two-star general and attended by a Navy two-star admiral, many one-star Army and Air Force generals, and "more colonels than you could count," according to a participant who requested anonymity because he was discussing a secret meeting. About an hour and a half was spent discussing the transfer to the Army of four bomb-sniffing dogs belonging to the Air Force. The cost of flying the dogs to Iraq was $35,000, but "at the end of that time, there was not a soul in the room who could say, 'I will give you the money'," a participant recalled. It was a harbinger. "We were hamstrung from the beginning by an inability to actually do anything," said another participant in the meeting. (Pentagon spokesman Whitman says that "our efforts against IEDs grew as the threat grew.")
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was frustrated by the slow progress, according to a knowledgeable official who requested anonymity because he was divulging sensitive matters. Wolfowitz hoped to use interservice rivalry to spur some competition. The Air Force had begun a "Project Eyes" to fly a plane, equipped with sensors, over Iraq looking for buried munitions. The equipment was sensitive--it kept overheating over the desert, forcing the plane to retreat to cooler altitudes--but it showed that hidden caches could be found. Wolfowitz was so fed up with what he saw as the Army's inertia that he asked Air Force Secretary James Roche to brief the rival branch. "Paul wanted to shame the Army into action," says an official involved in the operation who declined to be identified.
Pentagon officials involved in the weapons-procurement process say that Wolfowitz and his underlings were not taken seriously by the uniformed brass. The civilians were scorned for their lack of military experience, an age-old problem for civilian-controlled militaries. An iron rule of all military bureaucracies--that the best is the enemy of the good--also got in the way. Exhibit A is the story of "the Warlock."
The Warlock is a jamming device used to hunt up and down radio frequencies searching for signals that could detonate a bomb. The Army has worked heroically with the makers to upgrade the short range and limited capability of the Warlock. But in the field, competing technologies kept getting in the way. The Army uses a radio (called SINCGARS) that also hops around frequencies. The radio frequently interfered with the Warlock jammer. Unable to communicate, troops began turning off their jammers--thereby exposing themselves to IEDs.
In April 2005, a civilian team in the Pentagon suggested that the SINCGARS radios, designed during the cold war to evade interception by Soviet radio scanners, be set at a single frequency, on the ground that Iraqi insurgents do not have the same signal-gathering capabilities as Warsaw Pact armies. The answer came back from the top commanders in Iraq: not good enough. The Army wanted to keep trying for a jammer that would not interfere with radio signals--a worthy goal but one still years away.
The steep challenge of stopping IEDs with a technological fix can be illustrated by a public solicitation that appeared on a Web site run by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Translated from techno-jargon, the want ad asked for innovative ideas on how to build a gizmo able to detect hidden roadside bombs 450 yards away in one second or less; able to scan a swath of territory 110 yards wide quickly enough to warn a vehicle moving at 60mph, and small enough to fit in a space three feet wide. The notice appeared on Jan. 24, 2006; proposals were due Feb. 17.
It's a tall order. "A lot of our early efforts tended to concentrate on technology solutions," says Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman. Now, he says, the military is looking at "a mix of training, technology and intelligence."
In December, Bush brought General Meigs out of retirement to run the program to defeat IEDs. Meigs is no yes man. As commander of U.S. forces in Europe in 2002, he dryly chided Rumsfeld for not tolerating dissent. "There's an RMA [revolution in military affairs] underway," Meigs observed to The Washington Post, commenting on Rumsfeld's favorite cause. "We're going to use it to transform the military, and anybody who disagrees with us is a Luddite."
There are signs of fresh thinking in the war on IEDs. The Army is talking about setting up dedicated transportation routes that skirt cities and towns, and already the military is using the Air Force to carry more soldiers from place to place in Iraq. During one day last month, the Air Force transported 4,880 people, the largest number of passengers moved on any day since the war began. The Army also has some useful tools, like the remote-control-operated Talon robot, which has an agile mechanical arm and is nimble enough to cut the wire linking a radio to a bomb.
Captain Hirschey of the 717th Explosives Ordinance Disposal Company is glad to have the Talon. "My kick-ass robot operators are my best videogame players," he says. Hirschey is home in Fort Campbell, Ky., now, preparing to train a new batch of soldiers. By the year-end, he's likely to join them in Iraq for his second tour of duty. Maybe some scientist will have found a magic bullet by then. Hirschey, who has told his wife that he has had a premonition of dying in combat, tries to be philosophical. "If you're going to die," he says, "why not die for your country?"
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines