By Emelie Rutherford
As the Pentagon grapples with increasingly lethal improvised-explosive attacks in Afghanistan, it is looking to industry for help with everything from denying enemies’ access to culverts to detecting bombs’ wires.
Leaders of the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive (IED) Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) told reporters yesterday they adjusted their anti-IED efforts in Afghanistan after enemies modified tactics previously used in Iraq.
Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, JIEDDO’s retiring director, said U.S. officials are working to combat victim-operated explosives, triggered by command wires and pressure plates, which differ from radio-controlled explosives U.S. personnel can counter with jammers.
“The commanders in the field would love for us to figure out a way to see a command wire,” Metz said at Capitol. “So that’s a tough problem, to see a little tiny wire that runs from an IED and it can run across bare desert, it can run through an orchard, it can run through a vineyard, it can run down a canal.”
One potential way to do this, he said, would be to use change-detection technology.
“If we can get it refined enough and accurate enough, that may be a route toward finding the command wire,” he said.
JIEDDO yesterday wrapped up its bi-annual Technology Outreach Conference in Maryland, during which Pentagon and industry officials have classified talks about the elusive and morphing IED challenge.
“It’s hard to be creative and innovative about a problem that you don’t understand,” JIEDDO Deputy Director Robin Keesee said at yesterday’s Capitol Hill media roundtable. “So we’re trying to share with (industry officials) what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and what we see as our top priorities.”
Metz said one promising thing he heard about from the conference is technology to deny foes access to the thousands of culverts in Afghanistan.
“We found that the enemy likes the convenience of putting the explosives in the culvert and we need to deny him that, so there are some very interesting technologies that would deny the culvert,” the three-star general said, declining to elaborate further.
Keesee noted that route-clearance efforts are a significant part of operations in Afghanistan.
“I think what will come out of this conference is a better understanding on the part of industry of how critical the route-clearance teams are and how (industry officials) might think about orchestrating, integrating various (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) ISR systems, both air and ground, to help us with that challenge,” Keesee said.
At a hearing yesterday before the House Armed Services Oversight & Investigations subcommittee, Metz testified about IEDs in Afghanistan that are larger than those seen in Iraq and pose a threat to Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs).
“So now we’ve got to go to work in figuring out ways to protect soldiers and fight the networks that have added to that size of their IEDs that impact the MRAP,” the JIEDDO director told reporters.
Yet he said adding armor to MRAP-like vehicles is not the ultimate solution.
“A land submarine is not going to work,” he said. At the Technical Outreach Conference, he said, “one of the things we put out there to industry is (that) we’ve got to think differently and innovatively about how we can maintain mobility on the battlefield and do it as safely for the men and women of our armed forces as we possibly can.”
Looking to the future, Metz said he wants to see engagement with industry on social-dynamics tools that can help in the fight against IEDs as well as counterinsurgency.
“It’s more of the non-material,” he said. “It’s more of the thinking, folks, of how do you get at taking down a network and really understanding it and building the tools to do that with.”
The Oversight & Investigations subcommittee at yesterday’s hearing delved into a Government Accountability Office report that found JIEDDO needs to improve its visibility of all Pentagon counter-IED efforts and better coordinate with the military services.