By Greg Grant
Government Executive June 15, 2007
The Pentagon is throwing everything it's got against improvised explosive devices but missing the real targets.
Iraqi insurgents have turned their country's roads into every shifting minefields. They move their roadside bombs daily, even hourly, stalking U.S. troops. The U.S. Army is vehicle-dependent in Iraq. In the lattice of the canals and farmland of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, off-road movement is nearly impossible. Because heavily armored Army vehicles are forced onto predictable routes, the insurgents know where to place their homemade munitions to cause the greatest carnage.
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Why are IEDs such an intractable problem? First, a market dynamic is at work in Iraq - a well-financed insurgency pays enterprising guerrilla fighters to conduct attacks. Second, the simplicity of the bombs makes them almost impossible to counter by technological means. Using roadside bombs, insurgents easily can kill U.S. troops with little danger to themselves. Third, because insurgent bomb-making cells are neither organized nor persistent, they are an ever changing, highly adaptable and therefore hard to engage enemy. The U.S. military has focused on defeating the bomb, but it's the bomb-makers that pose the real challenge.
More at http://www.govexec.com/features/0607-15/0607-15s3.htm
