By Ann Roosevelt
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.–Improvised Explosive Devices [IED] are devastating on the battlefield and must be countered by an all-out effort, the commander of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) said.
“It must be a combined arms fight,” Army Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, JIEDDO director, said yesterday at the 2010 Joint Warfighting Conference here, cosponsored by the Armed Forces Communications Electronics Association and the U.S. Naval Institute in coordination with U.S. Joint Forces Command.
In Oates’ opinion, defeating IEDs is “not an engineering problem, not an intelligence problem, it’s a combined arms problem.”
Work on IEDs needs to be institutionalized, he said, so everyone speaks with one voice on the counter-IED fight. There are still questions how to organize to conduct the counter IED fight. For example, in a battalion, the intelligence section had six personnel when the war started. Through necessity, others were added, such as biometrics personnel and interpreters.
But, after eight years of observing, “I still see very little change in warfighting formations,” he said.
For example, there is little mention of IEDs in the Quadrennial Defense Review, and the Army Posture Statement makes no mention of them at all, so there’s very little mention of IEDs driving the military planning and organization.
Yet today’s conventional wisdom in planning assumptions sees the United States facing hybrid threats in an era of persistent conflict.
The IED is a “condition of our workplace,” Oates said, and “needs all of our assistance and all of our focus.”
The future could bring a growth in IEDs with higher net explosive weight than in Afghanistan, he said as just one of the possibilities for the future.
Thus, “if we, in fact, believe the IED will be a weapon we will deal with in the immediate future, we have to ensure we organize, train and equip ourselves to ensure we meet the threat,” he said.
Commanders must consider counter-IED training, such things as how to organize for it, what enablers are available and what processes leverage those enablers, how units prepare and train for the current fight and how to prepare for the next fight.
Among those things that need to be done is to look at what is enabling forces in theater and find ways to put them into permanent formations, he said.
Biometrics and forensics are “absolutely essential” in the ability to attack the network of people and equipment making the devices. However, there’s a “severe need for improvement,” in those areas and are a focus area for JIEDDO over the next year.
There are science and technology challenges, he said, for example, information fusion and analysis, hard- and soft-fusion, and multi-source fusion.
New techniques for training are needed, as well as new training with better simulation and gaming.
Oates said he was “underwhelmed by the level of effort in simulation for the current need.” Support in this area to warfighters is “insignificant to the need.”
A long pole in the tent is putting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to work in defeating the IED network.
For example, there’s no shortage of hours of full motion video, but there is a shortage in analysis and in “hunting” the information that will help attack the network.
For the future, Oates said the military must improve information fusion on multiple databases and implement timely information sharing. There’s no shortage of data, he said, but ” dearth of analysis.”
Another are that must improve is to reduce the timeline between receiving demands from theater to returning a product.
“My timeline at JIEDDO is 0-24 months…we need to do better,” he said. The sense of urgency in the military has to be the same as in industry.
Despite the difficulty of the counter-IED task, Oates said, “I do believe this is winnable.”