Billions wasted on trying to counter IEDs

Pete Cary and Nancy Youssef from the Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers have done a great job in exposing the waste and stupidity surrounding the $17 billion scandal that is the American military's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation.
Their article, JIEDDO: The Manhattan Project that bombed,  traces the history of an organisation that grew in just five years from a 12-person Army anti-homemade bomb task force into a 1,900-person behemoth aiming to find a way of stopping IEDs. Yet despite spending billions, the rate of which soldiers are able to find IEDs before they explode has remained static at roughly 50 per cent since JIEDDO was formed. 
Todd Bowers a marine who had served in Afghanistan in 2009, told the investigators the only IED detectors supplied to his unit were hand-held devices similar to those used by beachcombers: "I remember thinking, 'Here I am sitting in this quarter-million dollar armed vehicle and we're still out there searching for pennies on the beach," said Bowers, who is now deputy staff director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Other soldiers told the investigators that sniffer dogs supplied to troops were not trained to react to ammonium nitrate, the main component of IEDs in southern Afghanistan.
According to the report: "JIEDDO investigated 857 new technologies for countering actual IED devices in 2006, started work on 282 of them, eventually fielding 52. To attack bomb-making networks, it looked at 182 new technologies and fielded 21; it considered 42 new training technologies and fielded 9 of them. By the end of 2010, JIEDDO says, it had invested in approximately 1,000 counter-IED initiatives, of which 219 had been approved to be taken over by the military services or commands."
One of the CIF comments left by a reader below the article by a Mr Ronald Allen, says it all: "My associates and I have been trying for two years to get a common sense IED detector dog program funded through JIEDDO without a final UP or DOWN decision yet! No wonder nothing gets accomplished." Except a lot of big defence corporations got a lot of money for old rope.

IEDs are major killer of Coalition troops

Some interesting details on IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq emerged yesterday in testimony before the US House Armed Services Committee by Lt.Gen. Michael L Oates, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO).
Oates, whose job is to provide counter-IED solutions, told the committee that Afghanistan has experienced a near doubling of IED events in the last year, with a corresponding rise in US and Coalition casualties. At the same time the threat in Iraq is roughly 10 per cent of its 2007 peak.
The statistics speak for themselves. In the last three years casualty rates in Afghanistan have increased by roughly 50 per cent. This means IED attacks cause about 50 per cent more casualties than they did three years ago. Iraq, in comparison, has a US IED casualty rate that is about half that of Afghanistan.
In total the U.S. military recorded 8,159 IED incidents in Afghanistan in 2009, compared with 3,867 in 2008 and 2,677 the year before.
Last month, for example, 721 IEDs blew up or were defused in Afghanistan, slowing a major Marine-led offensive in Helmand province and killing 28 US and allied troops. These bombs are the leading cause of Coalition casualties by a large margin.
The number of IED attacks in Iraq, in contrast, has plummeted: at their peak in 2007, Iraqi insurgents employed 23,000 IEDs. Last year, that number fell to about 3,000, according to U.S. military figures.
The difference between the two countries is explained by the much more rural terrain in Afghanistan where there are few paved roads, allowing bombs to be hidden easily in the middle of the road or in culverts. In many places driving off-road is just not possible, making vehicles an easier target.
The use of non-metallic, fertilizer-based bombs means they are more difficult to detect and the frequency of dismounted patrols means there are more targets.