By Marina Malenic
Funding for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) will likely be requested entirely in the Defense Department’s base budget in fiscal year 2010, with responsibility for the organization’s electronic jamming programs slated to become the responsibility of the individual military services, the head of the organization said yesterday.
“As we offered input to the president’s budget…we wanted to build in the base budget what we felt would be our enduring and sustaining cost,” Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz told reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington.
Metz added that the goal is to fund only immediate requests from theater–known as urgent operational needs–in war supplemental budgets, which are requested outside the regular cycle. JIEDDO as an institution is seen as a permanent new Pentagon organization and will therefore be funded in the department’s regular budget.
This summer, Metz said the Pentagon planned to migrate about a third of JIEDDO’s funding into the base budget in fiscal year 2010 (Defense Daily, Aug. 8). But the department has been making a concerted effort to move more and more costs associated with ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into the base budget instead of continuing to rely on the supplemental money (Defense Daily, Nov. 21).
To that end, Metz said he wants to “turn the jamming business completely over to the services.”
“That’s a huge amount of money,” he explained. “The JIEDDO fund has supported rapidly getting us to where we are in the jamming business.”
JIEDDO supported the development of a next-generation jammer that began service last year. Some 10,000 of the CREW (counter radio-controlled IED electronic warfare) jammers have been delivered, primarily to Iraq. EDO Communications [EDO] manufactures the device whose precursor, the Warlock electronic jammer, had been the most common technology of its kind used by U.S. forces previously.
The organization’s base budget for FY ’08 and FY ’09 was $500 million per year. However, most of its funding has been allocated in response to supplemental requests. Its total budget was approximately $4.5 billion this year, and it has spent some $16 billion to date.
Metz previously said JIEDDO’s budget has very likely peaked this year; he expects an FY ’10 request of $3.5 billion (Defense Daily, Aug. 8).
The organization was established in 2005 to discover and develop technologies and tactics that protect soldiers from improvised explosive devices. IEDs are said to have accounted for as many as 70 percent of all combat casualties in Iraq at the height of the insurgency and are a rapidly increasing threat in Afghanistan.
Metz said he has begun to shift JIEDDO’s emphasis to the latter theater.
“I just made a trip for that purpose, to better understand how I can support Afghanistan,” he said.
There are many similarities in how all criminal networks are organized, according to the general. But at the same time “they’ve got a different culture, different communications.” While the communications systems used by the terrorist networks in Iraq are “far more sophisticated,” Metz said the technology available to their Afghan counterparts is “quickly catching up.”
But perhaps the single greatest distinguishing characteristic of the Afghan network is its ability to hide and train in a neighboring country.
“One of the major differences you’ve got is the safe haven the insurgents have in Pakistan,” Metz said. “That is a significant difference in the fight we will have against IEDs.”
The general also said that Iran has likely reined in Shi’ite militias that have been attacking U.S. forces in Iraq with explosively formed penetrators (EFPs). Use of the projectiles, which can destroy even heavy vehicle armor, has dropped from a high of 80 per month to as few as 20 per month this fall.
“I think you can draw that inference from the data,” he said when asked if Tehran has had a hand in the decrease. “That’s the conclusion I would draw.”