History of IEDs

Here is a bit from a Wired Magazine article that reviews the history of IED technology and counter-measures. It is nicely fact-filled, but it also touches on the human side of this war. For exampe:

At the outpost there, I met Staff Sgt. Johnnie Mason (pictured), who showed off the cordless phone than nearly killed him. It was wired to a series of artillery shells, and stuffed under a row of human corpses, rotting by a canal in the 118 degree heat.

When Mason — a lanky, 31 year-old Texan with big brown eyes and a goofy smile — came across the bomb, he wanted to puke into his Kevlar protective suit. The dead bodies, they smelled like catfish bait. But there was no time to heave. Mason knew the weapon was live, and that he was outside his Warlock’s protective bubble. He figured he only had a moment or two to act before a bomber remotely detonated his device. So Mason jumped behind a three-foot berm, and crouched into a fetal position before the shock wave hit him. “It was too fast for me to think, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna die,’” Mason said. “It was just instant fear.”

The bomb was less than twenty feet away when it went off. Dirt flew up. Shards of bomb zipped through the air. The shockwave knocked Mason over. But he was intact, somehow.

Mason’s partner, Pfc. Brian James, ran over. “Are you alright?” he yelled. “Where you at?”

“I’m in Iraq, Brook!” Mason shouted back. Brook was his wife’s name.

Mason sat down for fifteen minutes, drank some water. And then he went right back to the bodies. Before the explosion, he noticed a second shell, 20 meters away. So Mason took a couple pounds of C4 plastic explosive to demolish the thing. “I still had a job to do,” he told me.

Five months later, on the 19th of December, Mason found himself on another highway, responding to another suspicious package call. His team stumbled on another IED, practically beneath their feet. Insurgents were routinely luring bomb squads with one weapon in an attempt to kill them with the second. In this case, the tactic worked.

Mason told everyone to clear out of the way while he tried to disarm the device. Then the bomb went off.

Johnnie Mason was buried at Arlington Cemetery on January 10, 2006.

I find that bit about a life lost poignant. The poor guy was doing his job best he could but the deck was stacked against him and he paid the price. Sad.

Read the article to get a good understanding of how IED and counter-measure technology has evolved. The article fairly good in giving the reader a sense of how this struggle with push and pushback unfolded.

I'm amazed at how lethargic the military was in working on IED counter-measures. But when I remember the idiotic statement of Donald Rumsfeld ("you fight the war with what you have") I'm less surprised. But it is appalling. In my crazy idealized world you would galvanize your side to put a maximum effort into countering the tactics of your enemy. But in the "real" military world, this doesn' happen. Witness the American Civil War with open field charges against rifles machine guns. And, insanely enough, 50 years later, this out-dated "heroic" charge by infantry in formation across open fields was repeated in WWI. The military simply refused to learn, to understand weapons & tactics and come up with effective counter measures.

I took a hard look at the picture in the article of ITT lab that was coming up with counter-measures. I am not impressed. In my old job I remember the Canadian military asked us for ideas to deal with IEDs. We kicked some ideas around but it wasn't obvious how our company's technology was applicable. But that wasn't a serious effort. If money and time were invested, good ideas would have been forthcoming, but the fact that they solicited "ideas" as a freebie meant nothing serious was identified. Real ideas don't come off the top of your head. They require real work. But the military doesn't seem to understand that. Their soldiers pay the price for their short-sightedness.