National Defense > Blog > Posts > U.S. Military Still Lacks a Winning Strategy for Fighting Roadside Bombs

5/12/2010

U.S. Military Still Lacks a Winning Strategy for Fighting Roadside Bombs
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — The top leadership of the Defense Department has called for new and better ways to defeat roadside bombs. Nonetheless, the process of acquiring and delivering technologies to counter this threat is still too slow and cumbersome, said Army Lt. Gen. Michael Oates.
 
Oates is the director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, which was created six years ago to help expedite the fielding of technologies to counter roadside bombs. Although the organization has the authority to bypass traditional acquisition routes, the process is still not moving fast enough, Oates said yesterday in remarks at an industry conference sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute.
 
“My timeline in JIEDDO is zero to 24 months, and I think we are failing,” he said. “We need capabilities much faster. Days are like years for combat commanders. Their sense of urgency has got to be replicated within the industrial portion of the United States of America and her allies.” Part of the problem is that counter-IED programs are not emphasized enough within the military services’ budgets and plans for future weapons procurement, said Oates. Though senior defense leaders talk about IEDs being a scourge, evidence of that is lacking in key guiding documents. In the 2010 quadrennial defense review, for example, there is little mention of improvised explosive devices. The Army’s latest posture statement does not discuss the threat at all, Oates pointed out. “You see very little mentioned of it in driving industry in our future planning organizations,” he said.
 
But the IED threat will persist, he added. “We certainly will see them in a combat theater for many years to come, and we’re going to see the technology of these devices become more difficult to defeat.” The devices that troops are encountering in Afghanistan are largely fertilizer-based explosives with rudimentary detonation capability. In future wars, IEDs will be more sophisticated, he said. The services will have to organize, train, equip, and structure themselves around the problem and align it with the acquisition processes, said Oates.
 
At the tactical level, there are still questions about how to organize to conduct counter-IED operations. An Army maneuver battalion still doesn’t have enough intelligence officers assigned to deal with IEDs. “After eight years of observing this problem, we still see very little change in the actual war fighting structure of our tactical formations,” said Oates. “If you visit a tactical unit and you ask the commander, who on his staff is helping him with the counter-IED fight, and he points at his engineer, that unit will attend a lot of memorial services within the next six months,” he said. “This is not an engineering problem. It is not an intelligence problem. It is a combined arms problem, and it is the commander’s problem.”
 
Training is another challenge. Skills to helps troops survive in IED-infested areas must be incorporated into all training programs just as the nuclear, chemical and biological threat has been institutionalized in standard military training, Oates said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently launched an effort to assist coalition partners particularly in Europe to get at the basics of counter-IED training.
 
A fan of virtual simulations, Oates expressed disappointment in the scarcity of videogame-based training systems that are available to troops. “I am very underwhelmed by the level of effort in simulation for this current fight,” he said. “We have soldiers everyday out there facing IEDs, and the relative support available to them in simulation and training is absolutely insignificant to the need. We have got to find a way to do this better and cheaper, and to get it out to all of the force.
 
For Army Maj. Bruce Gannaway, the issue is personal. He was serving a second tour in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division as cavalry troop commander when he lost his leg after stepping on an IED in December 2007. During a presentation, he slipped off his prosthetic and placed it on the table in front of him. “We need to find a way to stop the flow of munitions and money that fund these,” he said with a quaver in his voice. “We need to increase detection and stop emplacements.”
One way to tackle this is to identify the individuals who place IEDs and employ them in productive jobs, he added.
 
There is a need for better biometrics and forensics to help identify bombers, said Oates. “The evidence that we collect off of the battlefield is absolutely essential to attacking the network that’s emplacing the device. And yet most of this capability is provided by contractors in an ad hoc arrangement,” he said. Better intelligence tools also are needed. “We have to look at how we’re doing information fusion and analysis so that we can rapidly go through multiple databases and provide real-time effective information to our commanders,” said Oates.
 
The long pole in the tent is the ability to integrate information and to put all of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data to work in defeating the IED network, he said. “There’s no shortage of available hours of full-motion video. … The shortage is in understanding how to employ it. As we say in south Texas, there’s a difference between hunting and walking in the woods hoping to find a deer … We have got to develop a battle staff that understands how to hunt using ISR.” The problem is well known in intelligence circles and is expected to get worse. “There is no shortage of data. There is a dearth of analysis,” said Oates. Information not only has to be shared among U.S. military units, but it also has to be provided to coalition partners as well. “We have got to knock down barriers that deny the free flow of information and technology with our coalition partners,” said Oates.
 
With a budget of more than $3 billion, JIEDDO has been under pressure to deliver results, while IED attacks and casualties have been rising in Afghanistan. At a hearing of the seapower and expeditionary forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, Oates told lawmakers that the greatest return on JIEDDO dollars has been in the area of training. The enemy, he said, is shrewd and cannot be defeated with conventional tactics. In Afghanistan, the government outlawed ammonium nitrate — the primary ingredient in IEDs — but the ban has not made an immediate impact, Oates said at the hearing. “They are adaptive. Were we to take away all of the ammonium nitrate, they would shift somewhere else,” he said. “We also have a challenge with potassium chlorate, which is used to make matches. It comes out of facilities in Pakistan, as well, for perfectly legitimate reasons, but can be converted to explosive capability.”
Posted at 2:47 PM by Grace Jean | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Comments

There are no comments yet for this post.
Items on this list require content approval. Your submission will not appear in public views until approved by someone with proper rights. More information on content approval.

Name: *

eMail *

Comment *

Title

Attachments

Name: *


eMail *


Comment *


 

Refresh
Please enter the text displayed in the image.
The picture contains 6 characters.

Characters *

  

Legal Notice *

NDIA is not responsible for screening, policing, editing, or monitoring your or another user's postings and encourages all of its users to use reasonable discretion and caution in evaluating or reviewing any posting. Moreover, and except as provided below with respect to NDIA's right and ability to delete or remove a posting (or any part thereof), NDIA does not endorse, oppose, or edit any opinion or information provided by you or another user and does not make any representation with respect to, nor does it endorse the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or reliability of any advice, opinion, statement, or other material displayed, uploaded, or distributed by you or any other user. Nevertheless, NDIA reserves the right to delete or take other action with respect to postings (or parts thereof) that NDIA believes in good faith violate this Legal Notice and/or are potentially harmful or unlawful. If you violate this Legal Notice, NDIA may, in its sole discretion, delete the unacceptable content from your posting, remove or delete the posting in its entirety, issue you a warning, and/or terminate your use of the NDIA site. Moreover, it is a policy of NDIA to take appropriate actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other applicable intellectual property laws. If you become aware of postings that violate these rules regarding acceptable behavior or content, you may contact NDIA at 703.522.1820.

 

 

Bookmark and Share