Home-made horror Feb 28, 2010 12:00 AM | By - © The Times, London

Source: Times live

It is not uncommon to see US and British soldiers vomit from fear before they go on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan. The chances are high that they will be killed - or maimed for life - by an IED. The innocuous abbreviation refers to the improvised explosive devices which can be assembled by villagers in their back yards and detonated by remote control. In the past three years, writes Christina Lamb, the Pentagon has spent $15.5-billion on research to combat the insurgents' weapon of choice

---

Current Font Size:

• 
• 
• 
• 

FALLEN COMRADES: US soldiers kneel during a memorial ceremony in Afghanistan for Captain Daniel Whitten and Private First Class Zachary Lovejoy, who were killed by a home-made bomb while on patrol this month Picture: REUTERS

In 2003 there were 81 recorded IED incidents in Afghanistan. Last year there were 8159

he soldier breathes loud and fast as he lays a timed charge on an explosive in a Baghdad street. "I want these people to know if they're going to leave a bomb on the side of the road for us, we're just going to blow up their f***ing road," he growls, walking away.
Before he can reach safety, an Iraqi punches a code into a cellphone. The explosion sends the soldier flying in a cloud of dust and debris.
The opening eight minutes of the Oscar-nominated movie The Hurt Locker bring to light the terrifying work of bomb disposal units. The special effects may be Hollywood, but there is no exaggerating the horror of IEDs, or "improvised explosive devices", that are by far the biggest killers of British and US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The improvised bomb has supplanted the Kalashnikov to become the insurgent weapon of the 21st century. It can be assembled by villagers in a back yard and it enables the Taliban to take on an enemy with far superior numbers and fire power.
In Afghanistan now, in the battle for Marjah, the coalition has 15000 soldiers ranged against an estimated 400 Taliban fighters. It sounds like no contest. Yet progress is slow and bloody because the Taliban have ringed the town with the bombs in what soldiers call the "belt of death".
The work of the British and US soldiers who disarm these devices is heroic. But the real race to counter the threat is going on thousands of kilometres away in secret laboratories on the US's east coast.
Over the past three years, the Pentagon has spent $15.5-billion and employed top scientific minds in an effort to come up with the best ways to detect and survive IEDs. Its scientists and engineers are working around the clock on robots, lasers, chemical detectors and even trained bees.
This massive, shadowy programme brings together brainpower and money on a scale last seen in World War Two when the Manhattan project raced to develop the atom bomb.
Its headquarters is a grey office block with no name. Inside, the Wall of Fallen Heroes is covered with plaques bearing the names of US soldiers killed by patched-together bombs. January was a bad month, with about one a day killed, all in Afghanistan. In 2003 there were 81 recorded IED incidents in Afghanistan. Last year there were 8159. In Helmand it is common to see soldiers vomit before they go on patrol because the chances of being hit are so high.
Improvised explosive devices are nothing new. Guy Fawkes used one to try to blow up England's parliament. Lawrence of Arabia placed bombs on the road and railway to disrupt Turkish supply routes during World War One. They were common in Vietnam when the Vietcong fashioned them from unexploded US ordinance. The term IED was coined in the '70s by the British Army when the IRA made bombs from fertiliser and Semtex smuggled from Libya.
The war in Iraq saw them used on a new scale. The country had enormous stockpiles of munitions. By September 2003 there were 100 explosions a month, soon rising to 2000. General John Abizaid, who took over US central command in July 2003, asked the Pentagon for a "Manhattan project-like" approach. The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (Jieddo) now has more than 3000 staff and funds of $4-billion a year.
The man in charge is General Michael Oates, a four-tour veteran of Iraq. "The war against IEDs is very personal," he said. "I've lost many of my men to them and I've been in proximity many times. A vehicle behind you blowing up, a vehicle in front, your own vehicle getting hit ... My driver killed. Virtually every soldier I know has seen an IED or been close to one or knows someone who died."
About half of all US soldiers who died in Iraq were killed by IEDs, while in Afghanistan the figure is now about two-thirds. But insurgents quickly learnt that they inflict more than just death and injury. "The IED is a tactical weapon in that people use it to maim and kill us, but also a strategic weapon in that it impacts the will of our countries to operate overseas," said Oates. "So tactically we need to find ways to detect and defeat it, and survive it if we don't, but in our national capitals we have to remove it as a weapon that overly influences our strategy, and that's very difficult."
Oates views the task of defeating IEDs as a combination of improving protection for the troops, detection and interrupting the financial networks behind the attacks. To this end, his team includes all sorts, from FBI agents specialising in gangs, top scientists, cultural specialists and social anthropologists as well as demolition specialists.
To see what progress was being made, I headed north to the Aberdeen proving ground in Maryland. It's a spooky place that houses the world's first programmable computer (on which the ballistic calculations for the Manhattan project were done) and sealed buildings behind barbed wire.
In a hangar, a group of soldiers was operating a remote-control robot the size of a lawnmower. The men are explosive ordnance disposal specialists in the 20th Support Command, whose informal motto is "Initial success or total failure".
At $150000 a time, the robots are expensive, but cheap in comparison with the lives they save. When robots do not work, the technicians have to put on a blast-resistant suit and a transparent face shield, resembling an astronaut's mask. The suit is enormously heavy and suffocatingly hot.
The irony of amassing all this money and brainpower to defeat a bunch of largely illiterate Afghan farmers assembling bombs in their mud houses using fertiliser packed in kitchen jugs is not lost on Dr Augustus Way Fountain, the US army's chief chemist and an expert in electro-optics.
"Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to defeat," he said. "As Americans we like technology, we like complicated things. That's what I've been trying to get my head round - how to think more simply."
One of the more bizarre suggestions has been to use bees because of their acute sense of smell. The small hairs that bees use to detect pollen can be used to detect any scent, prompting them to stick out their tongues.
A defence research laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico , has found they can be trained within 20 minutes to recognise a particular chemical. It proposes putting bees in a detecting machine with a monitor that registers a signal when the bees stick out their tongues. But the logistics of carrying bees inside army vehicles moving around Afghanistan have proved unworkable.
Scott Schoenfeld, a computational physicist, said that, whatever his team comes up with, the insurgents always seem to be one step ahead. "As soon as we discover a way to find this stuff or protect our men, the enemy adapts."
First the army strengthened the Humvee from a 1.25-ton chassis to 2.5 tons. Then it built 20-ton mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles with V-shaped hulls to deflect blasts. Now even those are being hit as the Taliban have adapted by using larger explosives.
"You might argue, Why don't you just armour more," said Oates. "But the problem is, you reach a crossover point where you can so protect yourself you can't do your mission. What we really want to do is cause the population to stop people placing IEDs and we can't do that if we're inside vehicles so protected we can't go outside."
Last month Afghanistan banned ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which is the main ingredient of Taliban bombs. But most of it comes from across the border. And there's no ban - yet - on ammonium nitrate in Pakistan.
The most common home-made bombs in Afghanistan are simple pressure plates - two wooden blocks with metallic strips inside that make contact when a person or vehicle goes over them, attached to a command wire that sets off the explosion.
The problem with the basic pressure-plate design is that the insurgent cannot select a target and may end up blowing up a farmer and his goat. For a while, insurgents were using wireless devices that could be triggered by punching a code into a cellphone as a convoy passed. When coalition forces started using jammers on their vehicles to block the phone signal, the Taliban devised new command-wire and pressure-plate bombs. These are hard to detect because they use graphite for the connections to avoid being found by metal detectors, though this is expensive. The insurgents are also working on ways to defeat the jammers.
Back in Jieddo's head office, Oates, though optimistic that his scientists will come up with new means of detection, said the real answer was to go after the financiers who pay for the explosives. To help, he has brought in organised crime experts from the FBI as well as experts in Afghan culture and society.
"IED networks are like organised crime - people have turf," he said. "You've got to understand who is operating where and why. At first we assumed the IEDs were all there to kill us, but they may not be. The purpose may be very different if you're involved in a criminal enterprise such as drug smuggling. The last thing you want is coalition forces interdicting your free flow, so you may put a device out there to say 'Don't mess with this porcupine'."
The money Oates has to spend is almost double the entire spending of the Afghan government. Not everyone agrees throwing all this money at the problem is the best way to go. "Defeat of the IED is not an arms-race type environment where you win by protecting or detecting," said Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian general who commanded Nato forces in Kandahar until November.
"It's the Afghan population who will defeat IEDs - it's them who see them being made and planted. Just as your towns are safe not because of the police but because of you - picking up the phone to the police to say there's someone doing X," said Vance.
Oates does not agree. How could he? The money protects his soldiers. It saves lives, civilian as well as military. And he knows what it feels like to face IEDs when you are just trying to do your job.
His emotion when he talks about it is infinitely more powerful than the Hollywood special effects that give The Hurt Locker its force. "After you've survived one but clearly felt the effect, you know the feeling next time you go out, when you're looking around all the time so much your neck hurts, waiting for the next," he said. "Try to explain that to someone. That's why we're doing this."