Cheap, simple to use and effective, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have been the weapon of choice for insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan – and their use is increasingly reported in the civil war in Syria. Sometimes called ‘the artillery of the twenty-first century’, these home-made bombs have been responsible for the majority (nearly 70%) of foreign military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the same way that most battlefield casualties in the twentieth century were inflicted by artillery.
Tens of billions of dollars have been spent in trying to neutralise the major threat IEDs pose. Yet, they remain likely to create further problems in future. For less than $30 in raw materials each, roadside bombs and other IEDs can wreak disproportionate damage and disruption. They can be strategic, not just tactical, weapons, by sowing fear, lowering troop morale, limiting freedom of movement and undermining public support for combat operations.
‘No other widely available terror weapon has more potential for mass media attention and strategic influence,’
the Joint IED Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO), a dedicated Pentagon agency established in 2006. As the operation in Afghanistan winds down, the US and its allies may find it a challenge to retain hard-won expertise in countering IEDs. However, IEDs’ role in civilian deaths and increasing use off the battlefield means counter-IED measures will remain vital. In the past decade, insurgents have used a weapon once overlooked by many military planners to blunt advanced armies’ superior firepower and technological advantage; in the process the IED has fundamentally changed contemporary conflict.
Response in Iraq
Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 large amounts of ammunition abandoned by the disbanded Iraqi Army – and not secured by over-stretched coalition troops – made it easy for insurgents to manufacture IEDs. Their capabilities improved rapidly and by August 2003 US casualties from IEDs overtook those from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. By the end of the year, IEDs were producing two-thirds of US fatalities.
As casualties grew, UK forces in southern Iraq applied the tactical approaches that they had used to counter IEDs during the long conflict in Northern Ireland. This was generally successful, even though some intelligence skills and capabilities that had been used with great effect against IRA bombers had been allowed to atrophy and had to be relearned. The British Army was slow to recognise the vulnerability of its lightly armoured ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers in Iraq, with resulting British casualties undermining popular support for the war.
The United States did not have the benefit of this experience, but the problem was quickly recognised. In December 2003 General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to commission a major response to the threat. The initial Pentagon response had been both ad-hoc and insufficiently resourced. But by 2006, a 12-strong Joint IED Defeat Task Force with a budget of $20 million had evolved into JIEDDO. That organisation has since acquired several thousand dedicated government, military and contract personnel – and spent more than $18bn.
Countering the new threats not only required an array of armoured vehicles, high-tech surveillance kit, electronic jammers and remote-controlled robots; it also required close cooperation between intelligence and operations staff, scientists and industry, placing great demands on the flexibility and agility of military procurement bodies and defence ministries of all the coalition nations.
A major part of the early US response was increasing physical protection. Improved personal body armour was provided, though its weight reduced the agility and endurance of infantry. Increased protection was added to existing Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Stryker armoured personnel carriers. But support and logistics troops had few armoured vehicles. In the first two years of the war they struggled, with troops resorting to desperate expedients, such as adding makeshift ‘hillbilly’ armour, made from scrap metal, to soft-skinned vehicles. Although many armoured high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles(HMMWVs) were fielded in 2004–05, they were in turn quickly overmatched by insurgent IEDs and it was not until November 2006 that the requirement was identified for the more heavily armoured mine-resistant protected armoured vehicle (MRAP).
This programme benefited from the energetic involvement of new Defense Secretary Robert Gates and US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan received 15,000 MRAPs by 2010. By the time of the security transition in Afghanistan at the end of 2014, US forces will have procured about 28,000 MRAPs and similar vehicles, some of which will have been gifted to US allies. This is estimated to cost $47bn.
But despite the application of sophisticated intelligence, scientific, industrial and military resources to the problem, the battle to defeat IEDs remained one of cat and mouse between military and insurgents. The many ways of configuring bombs and the complex, cutting-edge technologies required to counter them meant that it could often take six to 12 months between emergence of a new type of IED and the fielding of a sufficient technical countermeasure by trained troops.
Shifting ‘left of boom’
Eventually in Iraq, the military began – as Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson has described it – widening the focus from ‘right of boom’ (ie. mitigating the blast with better armour and medical care) to ‘left of boom’ (preventing insurgent networks from building and laying IEDs). A counter-IED approach, developed by UK and US forces but adopted by all coalition troops, was applied across Iraq, and later in Afghanistan. This had three planks: ‘defeat the device’, ‘attack the network’ and ‘train the force’. All three needed to be integrated by rapid information exchange across forces, so that counter-IED action could quickly be initiated.
- Defeat the device: Great effort was put into detecting devices. Methods included hand-held detectors, sniffer dogs and sophisticated searching techniques and equipment. There was intense technological and tactical struggle between insurgent bombers and coalition troops, scientists and engineers. In Iraq many roadside bombs were remotely detonated by electrical signals passed over specially laid wires. Other devices were triggered over a radio link, which could be detected and then jammed electronically. So electronic jammers were fitted to vehicles and carried by troops on the ground.These measures were complemented by attempts to disrupt the laying of IEDs, principally by patrols. Other tactics included rigorous controls over road movement. These had some effect, but unless there were sufficient troops on the ground to continuously dominate an area and prevent emplacement of IEDs, the initiative remained with the insurgents. This presence was not achieved in Iraq until the peak of the US surge in 2007. Moving troops and supplies by air partially circumvented the threat, although some helicopters and transport aircraft struck IEDs placed on field landing sites. Many countries bought more helicopters and isolated units were supplied by parachute, but not even the US had enough helicopters to move large numbers of troops and high quantities of supplies by air. So previously soft-skinned trucks also had armour and jammers added. Considerable effort was also devoted to neutralising devices that were detected before detonation. Although they could often be simply destroyedwith explosives, recovering them instead for forensic analysis improved intelligence. Effort was also put into developing the specialist equipment used by explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) experts.
- Attack the network: ‘Most of the press we get is what we are doing about the devices’, said JIEDDO commander Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, speaking at the IISS in London this year, ‘but really the decisive effort is attacking the network and going after the network, because otherwise you’re playing what we call ‘whack-a-mole’, playing defence.’ In Iraq, many extra intelligence resources were deployed to identify insurgents involved in IED construction and supply, as well as those planning bomb attacks and planting and operating the devices. Airborne surveillance, particularly long endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), proved particularly useful in identifying insurgent teams planting devices, which could then be attacked, or in following those suspected of making or moving bombs. Although precision weapons were often used to attack insurgent networks, coalition forces preferred to detain insurgents and seize bomb-making material and other evidence for forensic and technical analysis and the development of further intelligence. Such operations were often, but not exclusively, conducted by special forces. From 2008 onwards the US fielding of biometric technology across Iraq greatly improved their ability to link bomb components to bomb makers.
- Train the force: No less important was training and preparing troops before they arrived in theatre. Ideally, troops were able to train with the specialist counter IED equipment they would employ on the battlefield. However, there was often insufficient equipment for pre-operational training, and troops had to learn on the job. In the case of British forces in Iraq, casualties tended to be suffered during the first weeks of tours of duty as troops learned on operations, though adequate equipment was later provided for pre-deployment training.
The signature weapon in Iraq was the powerful explosively formed penetrator; the typical IED in Afghanistan has been a home-made fertiliser bomb with a so-called ‘victim-operated’ pressure plate. But despite their less sophisticated nature, IEDs have been laid even more widely in Afghanistan, with their use increasing dramatically in recent years. In 2009 9,304 IED explosions were recorded, but this rose to 15,225 in 2010 and 16,554 in 2011.
Countering IEDs is a key activity for all troops deployed as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). All infantry units are supplied with hand-held metal detectors. In the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar the density of IEDs has approached that of minefields previously laid in state-on-state warfare. At the height ofOperation Moshtarak in 2010, US and British forces used heavy-armoured engineer tanks to clear routes through dense belts of IEDs by firing rocket-propelled explosive hoses that destroyed or damaged the devices.
US and UK forces have formed specialist units to clear routes at high risk from roadside bombs. The British ‘Talisman’ capability is a specially equipped team of armoured vehicles and expert personnel with powerful surveillance systems, small unmanned aerial vehicles, ground robots and a specially designed armoured vehicle, the Buffalo, with a long remotely operated arm. The US has similar ‘route-opening detachments’. Both teams also include high mobility armoured excavators to repair damage caused by IED blasts.
Techniques used to attack IED networks in Iraq have also been refined. Dedicated surveillance systems have been fielded, including specially modified surveillance aircraft. However, NATO pays an operational price for the measures taken to protect soldiers: they have to carry very heavy weights – body armour, jamming equipment and mine detectors – and their mobility is correspondingly reduced. In addition, the large numbers and types of protected vehicles create logistical challenges and reduce operational flexibility. In addition, the need for protection limits the opportunities that NATO soldiers have to interact with the Afghan people. Increased protection has therefore saved lives, but has reduced the effectiveness of NATO forces.
Beyond Afghanistan
If IEDs are the artillery of the twenty-first century, Western militaries have discovered that twenty-first-century technology can help in the battle, but does not offer a definitive solution. With UAV-borne sensors to detect IEDs, JIEDDO claims that the number of bombs found before they explode has increased to 64%, after stubbornly hovering around 50% for years. However, experts repeatedly say that the best tools remain sniffer dogs with handlers, a well-trained soldier’s eye and local informants. Using such tools, teams on foot patrol have an average 80% detection rate.
While counter-measures mean that fewer troops are now killed or injured by roadside bombs, IEDs remain the single largest source of civilian deaths. In 2011, according to United Nations figures, ‘anti-personnel landmine-like IEDs’ killed nearly 1,000 civilians, almost one-third of all civilian fatalities. Most of these deaths were caused by civilians accidentally triggering devices that the insurgents had planted to attack NATO troops.
JIEDDO’s Lt-Gen Barbero admits there is no silver bullet for combating the IED threat. ‘We are not going to be able to armour our way out of this, with better protected, heavier vehicles,’ he says. He argues that the threat is an ‘enduring and global’ one, which will require a ‘whole-of-government’ response, as part of wider counter-insurgency efforts.
In 2011, almost 600 IED incidents per month occurred outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria, Thailand, Iran, India and Pakistan. Anti-government forces have made increasing use of them in Syria in roadside bombs and suicide car bombs, and in assassination attempts. The Syrian government claimed that there were over 700 IED incidents in May 2012 alone. By August 2012, it was clear that Syrian rebels were successfully destroying Syrian government tanks and armoured vehicles with IEDs.
To counter this widening threat, greater national and international co-operation will be required among intelligence agencies, police and security forces, scientists and the defence and security industries. However, funding for such efforts could be under pressure as NATO combat troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan. In addition, at least 30 armies nowhave stocks of MRAPs and other protected vehicles, which are useful in countering IED but of limited utility otherwise because of a lack of off-road mobility. Keeping inventories will be expensive, but some armies may well retain a pool of such vehicles in anticipation of future counter-insurgency operations.
Countering IEDs will remain a core requirement for land forces. Any force – whether state or irregular – seeking to combat Western forces will have observed the advantages that IED have given to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. As IED are often similar in capability and employment to conventional land mines, armies may merge counter-IED efforts with broader counter-mine capabilities. It will be important for them to institutionalise approaches to countering IEDs, keeping knowledge and expertise current even in the absence of major operations.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies
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