02 OCT 07

PART 3 | SPRING 2005 - SUMMER 2006

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'You can't armor your way out of this problem'

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 2, 2007; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- On Aug. 3, 2005, the deadliest roadside bomb ever encountered by U.S.
troops in Iraq detonated beneath a 26-ton armored personnel carrier, killing 14 Marines
and revealing yet another American vulnerability in the struggle against improvised
explosive devices.

"Huge fire and dust rose from the place of the explosion," an Iraqi witness reported from
the blast site in Haditha, in Anbar province. In Baghdad and in Washington, the bleak
recognition that a new species of bomb -- the underbelly, or "deep buried," IED -- could
demolish any combat vehicle in the U.S. arsenal "was a light-bulb moment for sure," as a
Pentagon analyst later put it.

Of the 81,000 IED attacks in Iraq over the past 4 1/2 years, few proved more devastating
to morale than that "huge fire" in Haditha. At a time when coalition casualties per IED
steadily declined, even as the number of bombs steadily increased, the abrupt obliteration
of an entire squad -- made up mostly of reservists from Ohio -- revealed that the billions
of dollars being spent on heavier armor and other "defeat the device" initiatives had clear
limits.

Haditha provided a light-bulb moment for insurgents as well. During the next year,
underbelly attacks just in the Marine sector of western Iraq would increase from a few
each month to an average of four per day. By early summer of this year, the underbelly
IED -- considered a specialty of Sunni bombers -- was killing more American troops in
Iraq than all other variants of roadside bombs combined.

A bomb with 100 pounds of explosives detonating beneath an armored vehicle was
equivalent to a direct hit from a six-gun artillery battery, but with an accuracy no gunner
could hope to achieve. A single 155mm artillery round, which by itself can destroy a
tank, typically contained 18 pounds of explosives. "That's just a damned difficult thing to
defeat," said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, the current chief of staff for the Multinational
Corps in Baghdad.

Two weeks after the Haditha killings, Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, who headed the Marine
Corps Combat Development Command, lamented the failure of American science to
vanquish the roadside bomb. "If we could prematurely detonate IEDs, we will change the
whole face of the war," he said. For "a country that can put a man on the moon in 10
years, or build a nuke in 2 1/2 years of wartime effort, I don't think we're getting what we
need from technology on that point."

Technology was trying. The Pentagon's Joint IED Task Force had spent almost $1.5
billion by the late summer of 2005, with an additional $3.6 billion planned for the fiscal
year that began Oct. 1; $4 of every $5 went to defeat-the-device technologies intended to
foil the bomb or mitigate the blast. But with an IED attack occurring in Iraq every 48
minutes in 2005 -- twice the frequency of the previous year -- there was much to foil and
a great deal to mitigate.

True, the number of troops killed and wounded was escalating at a lower rate than the
number of roadside bombs. "We are being effective," said Brig. Gen. Joseph L. Votel,
director of the task force. "The casualties are not going up as much as the IEDs are." Yet
nearly 500 troops had been killed in Iraq through August 2005, including those 14 at
Haditha. "This thing could unravel on us by wearing down the American public with
these IED casualties," Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, told Votel.

Some promising technologies fizzled. The Defense Department invested more than $2
million in the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, including extensive research at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the "Manhattan Project-like" effort that
Abizaid had called for had realized its goal: a nuclear bomb. Various engineers were
pursuing the "scientific molecular sniffer" that Abizaid had also envisioned shortly after
taking over at Centcom in 2003, but Los Alamos hoped to exploit the honeybee's keen
sense of smell as a means to detect explosives.

Researchers placed each bee in a tiny harness, exposed the insects to various explosive
scents for six seconds, and then provided a sugar water reward. This Pavlovian
conditioning soon caused a bee to extend its proboscis -- tongue -- in anticipation of
sugar whenever it detected a whiff of TNT or C-4 plastic explosive. A small television
camera placed in a box where the bees were harnessed would allow a soldier watching a
monitor to see whether the "proboscis extension reflex" signaled the presence of
explosives. In 2004, bees had stuck out their tongues at 50 pounds of TNT in a simulated
IED, according to Robert Wingo, a Los Alamos chemist.

Votel's reaction upon learning of the project was typical: "What?" The practical
applications in combat seemed limited. "How do we operationalize this?" he asked. "How
does, say, 1st Platoon manage their bees?" Among other problems, harnessed bees tended
to be short-lived. After an analysis concluded that the honeybee's "explosive-detection
capabilities have significant reliability issues," as a Defense Department official put it
earlier this year, the Pentagon withdrew its support.

Other technologies reached the battlefield only to find that the battle had moved on. Rep.
Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was
aghast to learn that there was no "man-portable" electronic jammer for dismounted
infantrymen. The thousands of jammers already sent to counter radio-controlled IEDs in
Iraq and Afghanistan -- Warlock Green, Warlock Red, ICE, SSVJ, MMBJ -- were
designed to be mounted on vehicles only.

With a sharp push from Hunter and $10 million from Congress, factories in California
and Maryland produced 10,000 jammers the size of walkie-talkies. The device was
named Warlock Blue, although Hunter called it Little Blue. As the first models emerged
from the production line in early July 2005, barely a month after the order was placed, the
chairman touted "a new spirit of patriotic production." By August, soldiers and Marines
were carrying the jammer on foot patrols across Iraq.

But Warlock Blue was designed to counter a low-power radio threat that had never posed
much danger to dismounted troops and had nearly disappeared in recent months as other
jammers drove bombmakers to more powerful radio triggers.

The Blue was a half-watt jammer at a time when some engineers suspected that 50 watts
might be too weak. Each one used eight lithium batteries, which required frequent
replacement. In anticipation of Blue, the government bought 400,000 CR123 lithium
batteries, according to the Navy. "Do you know what it's going to cost me for batteries
for these systems?" one skeptical Army general asked an explosive ordnance disposal
(EOD) officer in Baghdad.

Some troops appreciated the Blue, and even considered it a good-luck talisman, like an
electronic rabbit's foot. But many commanders believed the jammer was extraneous to
the fight they faced, another well-intentioned gadget of marginal relevance. An electrical
engineer with long experience in Iraq and Afghanistan later recalled: "A lot of people felt
it was being crammed down their throats."

***

By late summer 2005, the explosively formed perpetrator, like the underbelly IED, had
become an appallingly lethal weapon for which there was no obvious countermeasure.

Although still a small fraction of all roadside bombings, EFP attacks since spring had
increased from about one per week to roughly one every other day. When fired, the semi-
molten copper disks struck with such violence that casualties tended to be higher and
more gruesome than in other IED attacks. "This was beyond the capability of anything in
our arsenal," an Army brigadier general said. "And, by the way, you can't armor your
way out of this problem."

The passive infrared trigger used with most EFPs was not only immune to radio
jamming, it was difficult to detect. When a mock EFP was installed on a Florida range
used to train new EOD technicians, the device "killed" at least 400 of them in three
months. Not one, according to an instructor, spotted the small lens that tripped the bomb.
Just as alarming was the first confirmed appearance, on July 6, 2005, of an EFP that
combined a passive infrared trigger with a radio-controlled "telemetry module,"
electronic circuitry that allowed a triggerman to be selective about what he attacked.

Previously, an EFP would fire when the infrared sensor detected the first warm object to
pass, whether a Humvee or an Iraqi tractor. But the telemetry module, which had civil
uses in transmitting data, let the insurgent wait to arm the EFP with a radio signal as a
U.S. convoy approached. Worse yet, those radio signals tended to use a frequency outside
the "loadsets" programmed into most American jammers, according to an Army colonel.

These developments sparked diplomatic and military countermeasures. Washington and

London reportedly sent protests to Iran, which was accused of supplying both training
and materiel to Shiite insurgents in Iraq. In August 2005, Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld asserted that "it is true that weapons, clearly, unambiguously from Iran have
been found in Iraq," an accusation Tehran denied.

The telemetry module that had been captured on July 6 was sent to the Terrorist
Explosives Device Analytical Center in Quantico for examination by the FBI and other
specialists. More EFPs followed, although in at least one instance -- involving an array
with five warheads -- difficulty in transporting explosives and securing overflight
permission delayed the shipment for weeks.

At the IED task force, Votel again contacted the Israelis, who in June had sent several
counter-IED technologies to Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona for testing, which was
inconclusive. "I know you've got some systems on this," he told an Israeli officer. "Can
we get them?"

An Army lieutenant colonel again flew from Washington to Tel Aviv. Soon a pair of
vehicle-mounted microwave devices, called Dragon Spike, arrived in Iraq aboard an Air
Force jet, freshly painted and with all Hebrew markings removed. Field tests again
showed mixed results.

Meanwhile, soldiers in the field pursued their own solutions. Because a passive infrared
sensor reacted to heat signatures, one inventive trooper proposed mounting a giant hair
dryer on a bumper to blow hot air in front of the vehicle. Another took a toaster
purchased at a bazaar, plugged it into his Humvee and dangled the glowing appliance
from a long pole welded to the front of the vehicle.

A similar but more practical idea, also proposed by a soldier, became a countermeasure
called Rhino. A glow plug -- a pencil-shaped object with an electrical heating element,
often used in diesel engines -- was placed inside a metal ammunition can, which was then
attached to a metal pole 10 feet in front of a Humvee or truck. The red-hot can decoyed
the infrared sensor into triggering prematurely so that the copper EFP slug fired at the
Rhino rather than the vehicle.
Within four to six weeks, insurgents began countering the countermeasure by aiming the
EFP to fire at an angle so the slug struck 10 feet back from the Rhino. "Anything that's
effective becomes ineffective," an Army colonel observed, "because this enemy will
morph." The counter-countermeasure in turn provoked further measures in a variation
called Rhino II, including the use of a telescoping pole that let troops vary the distance
between glow plug and vehicle.

Rhino II would remain a standard feature on U.S. military vehicles in Iraq. At a cost of
$1,800 each, more than 13,000 have been built, mostly at Letterkenny Army Depot in
central Pennsylvania. The rectangular box on a long pole protrudes from nearly every
Humvee and truck sent into harm's way in Iraq.

"Psychologically," a former Army officer said, "it's huge."

***

On the morning of Monday, Dec. 12, 2005, a tall, shambling 60-year-old man with
thinning hair and the bearing of a former four-star general walked into the Pentagon
basement to take command of the nation's troubled counter-IED program.

Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had agreed to expand the task force: A 22-page
Pentagon directive would create the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, with
orders to attack "the entire IED system." Votel, a capable but junior brigadier general,
would soon join the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, to be replaced as director by
a more senior leader with greater stature and experience.

In an emotional farewell party at the Union Street Public House in Alexandria, Votel's
comrades for the past 2 1/2 years in the counter-IED struggle sent him off with sustained
applause. "This was the hardest job I've ever had," he told his colleagues. "And it's the
one for which I was least prepared."

His successor, Montgomery C. Meigs, seemed to have been preparing all his life for the
challenge. Descended from military men, including Abraham Lincoln's quartermaster
general of the same name and a father who was killed leading a tank battalion in France a
month before Meigs's birth, his combat experience included the Ashau Valley in the
Vietnam War and Medina Ridge in the Persian Gulf War.

Before retiring from active duty in 2003, Meigs had commanded the NATO
peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and the 57,000 U.S. Army soldiers in Europe. His
doctoral dissertation, written at the University of Wisconsin in 1982, scrutinized the
management of the Manhattan Project during construction of the atomic bomb. He had
also written a book on the elaborate -- and successful -- methods used to defeat German
submarines in the North Atlantic during World War II.

Despite his credentials, Meigs in other respects was an unlikely choice. Skeptical of the
war in Iraq, he had also publicly accused the Pentagon leadership of evincing an attitude
that "anybody who disagrees with us is a Luddite." At Syracuse University, where he had
held a chair in public policy, he taught a course titled "Why Presidents Go to War When
They Don't Have To."

But to Meigs, the roadside bomb was personal. Among his oldest friends was an Army
colonel, whose daughter, Laura M. Walker, had captained the West Point women's
handball team that won a national championship. On Aug. 18, 2005, after commissioning
as an Army engineer, 1st Lt. Laura Walker was killed in Afghanistan by an IED triggered
with a pressure plate. She was 24.

As the motto for his new organization, Meigs adapted a Latin inscription favored by the
English physicist and novelist C.P. Snow: "Aut viam inveniam aut faciam." I'll find a
way or make one.

Whether found or made, a way was needed. By New Year's Day 2006, the number of
U.S. troops killed in action by IEDs in Iraq approached 700. "Complex attacks" had
become more common, with roadside bombs used to stop or slow a convoy that
insurgents then attacked with small-arms and mortar fire.

One assessment calculated that an IED could be detonated 90 ways, but Meigs knew that
the number was almost infinite. Bombmakers used the world's vast consumer electronics
market as a research lab and test bed. "Microsoft pumps out enhancements of software
about every nine months," Meigs said. "You get a new generation of cellphones between
a year and 18 months. That's the rhythm we're on, and it's a totally different way of doing
business. . . . You can't just play defense in this game."

Most "low-hanging fruit" -- off-the-shelf technology that could be sent to the field
quickly -- had been harvested. "We should focus less on the bomb than on the
bombmaker," Votel had often said. But only 13 percent of the counter-IED budget for
fiscal 2006 was dedicated to "offensive operations." Little headway had been gained in
getting the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus into the fight by searching for the financiers,
bombmakers and cell leaders who formed the insurgent networks. JIEDDO's intelligence
cell totaled four people.

Simply sketching a coherent picture of IED trends was difficult. Much of the data were
"dirty," with the anomalies and errors inevitable in combat reports. Some analysts
believed that 20 percent or more of all IEDs were never reported. An infantry platoon,
bomb squad and medical team might report the same incident using three 10-digit grid
locations, which in a database could become three incidents. Was the "Kia" cited in
various reports a Korean-made vehicle or "killed in action?" Were soldiers using local
time or Zulu (Greenwich Mean Time)?

On Jan. 18, 2006, Meigs left on a two-week visit to both war zones. Flying first to
Afghanistan, he found troubling signs. The 782 IEDs in 2005 had more than doubled over
the previous year, and the number would double again in 2006. A single Army brigade
occupied a country larger and more populous than Iraq. Many commanders believed the
Taliban and al-Qaeda were resurgent, because the U.S. military, including bomb squads,
had been diverted to Iraq.

"The IED fight was not put in check," an Army colonel complained. At a Central
Command conference in Qatar in January 2006, another colonel showed a slide of vast
stacks of equipment in a huge assembly area. It was labeled "Counter IED in Iraq." The
next slide showed a man on a donkey holding a basketball. It was labeled "Counter IED
in Afghanistan."

Suicide attacks were approaching three each week, according to State Department and
United Nations figures, from three in all of 2004 and 17 in 2005. Often recruited in
Pakistani madrassas and frequently driving a Toyota Corolla painted to look like a taxi,
the typical bomber was male, 15 to 35 years old, "clean-shaven . . . nervous, restless, eyes
fixed, glazed, avoids eye contact," according to a U.S. military description. Hair samples
from dead bombers showed that many were drugged with sedatives.

The Spider Mod 1 radio-controlled bomb trigger first seen in 2002 continued to appear,
but evolutions had reached the Spider Mod 5. Those, too, came from Pakistan, U.S.
intelligence believed, often with the radio frequency and firing code written on the case
by the bombmaker for the emplacer's benefit. The Acorn jammer initially sent to
Afghanistan in 2002 still worked against the Spiders, but additional jammers would be
needed against other devices detonated by radio waves.

No EFPs had appeared in Afghanistan; instead, double-stacked anti-tank mines provided

the explosive punch in the most powerful IEDs. A unique "pressure-cooker bomb" -- a
lidded metal rice pot filled with explosives -- also proved increasingly lethal, especially
in the Pech River Valley to the northeast.

In Iraq, things were much worse. A sharp spike in attacks in late 2005 had pushed the
number above 1,500 a month, twice the annual figure in Afghanistan. Troops and
commanders alike had grown wary of help from Washington. "Stuff was coming in
without control," one colonel recalled. "It would just show up, and we'd say, 'How the
hell did that get here?' "

A review of 70 IED countermeasures found that only half had been tested in the United
States before being shipped overseas, and that fewer than one-third were evaluated after
arriving in the theater. Assessing what worked was exceptionally hard.

Under what circumstances did Rhino succeed? If it failed, was it because the Humvee
was going too fast? Too slow? Was the glow plug functioning properly? Where did
Warlock Green work best? Which was better, ICE or SSVJ? If a radio-controlled IED
failed to detonate, who could be sure it was because the jammer jammed? "That makes it
very difficult to determine where to put your money," one senior analyst said.
Meigs proselytized. IEDs were the insurgents' fires, their artillery, used for political effect
to erode American will, he said. The enemy attacked idiosyncratically, leveraging their
capabilities "against our structural weaknesses."

Three years into the Iraq war, the U.S. military remained too much on its heels. "We
spend a tremendous amount of money trying to defeat the device, because that's the
immediate way of preventing casualties," Meigs would later observe. "But we really need
to spend more on attacking the enemy's system, attacking the networks. . . . You can kill
emplacers all day and you're not going to slow this thing down."

In a heated four-hour meeting on Jan. 26, in a headquarters conference room at the Al

Faw Palace, west of Baghdad, Meigs complained that data from the field failed to reach
JIEDDO quickly, making it difficult to swiftly assess trends and take action. A new
counter-IED organization, Task Force Troy, which would grow to 1,000 people in Iraq,
joined EOD teams, the Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell and half a dozen newly
arrived weapons intelligence teams, designed to investigate bomb scenes. Meigs believed
CEXC and WIT should report directly to JIEDDO, which paid most of the costs.

This sat badly in Baghdad. "Sir, General Meigs wants everything you've got," Col. Kevin
D. Lutz, the Task Force Troy commander, told his corps commander, Lt. Gen. Peter
Chiarelli. "He says that if he bought it, he owns it."

This also sat badly at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, where Meigs flew to see
Abizaid after returning from Iraq in early February. "You need to tell Meigs he's not a
general anymore," a senior officer in Baghdad had advised Abizaid. "He's general
retired."

"Look, Monty, you're not helping the way you're going about doing this," Abizaid said.
Meigs demurred, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Better
integration was needed between the theater and Washington, he said, along with better
integration between intelligence and operations. Several IED networks led to Iran. "These
are a problem. These are hurting us."

Abizaid bristled. "I've been doing this for three years. What are you going to tell me
about it?" When Meigs persisted, Abizaid snapped, "Hey, look, this is not your
[expletive] war to fight."

The brief squall soon passed. Both men vowed to continue, in Abizaid's words, "as
brothers in battle." Later he would muse, "Meigs coming on the scene has been nothing
but good. . . . He's a brilliant guy."

***

Early on the morning of Saturday, March 11, 2006, Meigs walked into the White House
Roosevelt Room, across the hall from the Oval Office. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to
President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 stood on the fireplace mantle, beneath a portrait of
Roosevelt on horseback as a Rough Rider. Military service flags lined one wall,
bracketing an oil painting of Indians crossing the Platte River.

On a long, dark conference table, several IEDs with the explosives removed had been
arrayed. The "petting zoo," as it was known at JIEDDO, included a radio-controlled
device and an EFP with a passive infrared trigger. Around the table sat President Bush,
Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, Gen.
Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several other luminaries.

Meigs spoke for 10 minutes, using five briefing slides. He displayed a chart showing how
IED attacks continued to climb in Iraq while the number of bombs causing coalition
casualties remained flat. Another chart depicted the evolution of IED triggers, including
the sharp reduction in low-power, radio-controlled detonators, the recent appearance of
cellphones, and the persistence of passive infrared triggers. The latter were tied to EFPs,
which in turn had Iranian links.

Bush showed little interest in the petting zoo but listened attentively to Meigs. He noted
that JIEDDO's annual budget approached $4 billion. Why, he asked, does it have to be so
large? Meigs explained that the counter-IED strategy now followed three distinct paths:
defeat the device, attack the network, train the force. Simple, cheap gadgets, like those on
the table, were expensive to vanquish. JIEDDO's mission was not to thwart all roadside
bombs, but to "defeat IEDs as weapons of strategic influence." Since the invasion three
years earlier, 32,000 IED attacks had occurred in Iraq.

At 8:46 a.m., a door swung open to admit reporters. "The general has spent a lot of time
thinking about the enemy's tactics and techniques, and how our military can adjust to
them," Bush said. Before the session broke up, a reporter posed a final question about
IEDs "from foreign, neighboring countries."

Bush was ready. "If the Iranians are trying to influence the outcome of the political
process, or the outcome of the security situation there, we're letting them know of our
displeasure."

Two days later, on Monday, March 13, the president gave a speech at George
Washington University, where he described Meigs's recent visit to the White House.
IEDs allow "the terrorists . . . to attack us from a safe distance, without having to face our
forces in battle," the president said, and "some of the most powerful IEDs we're seeing in
Iraq today include components that came from Iran."

But the country had a plan. "We're on the hunt for the enemy -- and we're not going to
rest until they've been defeated," Bush added. "We are putting the best minds in America
to work on this effort."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

_______________________________________________________________________

GLOSSARY
Compiled by washingtonpost.com
Friday, September 28, 2007; 7:52 PM

"Left of boom" - U.S. military's effort to disrupt insurgent cells before they can build
and plant bombs

"Right of boom" - U.S. military's effort to mitigate effects of IED attacks with better
equipment, trauma care

CENTCOM - U.S. Central Command overseeing security in the Middle East, Central
Asia and Northern Africa. The command is headquartered at MacDill Airforce Base in
Tampa, Fla.

CEXC - Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell, a counter-IED forensic unit

CPE - Cupola protective ensemble, an armored suit worn by Humvee gunners

CREW - Counter Radio-Controlled IED Electronic Warfare, various jamming devices

employed to combat radio-controlled IEDs in Iraq; including the SSVJ (Self-Screen
Vehicle Jammer), ICE (IED Counter Electronic Device) and MICE (Modified ICE)

EFP - Explosively Formed Penetrator, an armor-piercing explosive

EME - Electromagnetic environment, or space and frequencies used by insurgents to

operate radio-controlled bombs

EOD Unit - Explosive ordnance disposal, or U.S. military bomb squad teams

FOB - Forward operating base

HME - Homemade explosive, usually made with urea nitrate

IED - Improvised explosive device

JERV - Joint EOD Response Vehicle, a 26-ton armored personnel carrier

JIN - Joint IED Neutralizer, need definition from that sidebar here

MRAP - "Mine Resistant Ambush Protected" U.S. military vehicles

PBIED - Person-borne IED, or suicide bomber

RC Bombs - Explosives detonated by remote control

RPG - Rocket-propelled grenade

SVBIED - Suicide vehicle-borne IED, or a suicide car bomb

UAV - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, drones operated by remote control or preprogrammed

flights

VBIED - Vehicle-borne IED, or an IED planted in a car

VO - Victim-operated triggers, such as trip wire or pressure plates

WIT - Weapons Intelligence Teams, tasked to U.S. military's counter-IED effort