Mr. Grant put together a great summation of the research done on IED’s. Bottom line, today’s booger eaters throughout the world are learning to make this stuff faster than their other booger eater predecessors. That is the down side of the internet and open source media. Everyone can play bomb maker these days.
There are some down sides to this for the enemy. It still takes skill and experience to safely make these things, and this statistic below does not show how many ‘oops’ deaths have been caused by this explosion of open source IED manufacturing. A prime example is the Frontline video on the Taliban, which showed this beautifully.
One thing that bothers me about this, is that contractors continue to be killed by this stuff and there really isn’t an effort focused on protecting them like there is with the military. Is this a case where it is every company for itself, or should there be an effort to coordinate the civilian operations or create a JIEDDO group for contractors so we can work to minimize our deaths as well? The irony is that contractors are used in this organization, but they really don’t do much to help out contractors. Has anyone from JIEDDO talked with any of the expat companies to go over IED survival or the latest counter measures? Or how about collect information from contractors, to add to the matrix being set up at your JKnIFE shops?
Personally, I know the answer to this question. The military could care less. So companies adapt and they have their own ways of learning how to deal with IEDs. Everyone talks with everyone out there, and after a few hits on your company, guys really start focusing on and refining countermeasures for IEDs. Some companies can afford all the cool gadgets to stop or detect this stuff, where others have to resort to other cheaper methods. Or you get some of the local national companies that just take the hits, and could care less about armor or gadgets–partly do to cost and partly do to a lack of any regulation for such a thing. With that said, it would still be cool to hear about JIEDDO or someone similar address the issues that contractors face on the road. (by the way, check out their FB page here) Contractors after all are bringing in the food, ammo, water, fuel, and everything else that the military needs to wage war, and with a little help we might actually get more of that stuff to the military in one piece. Not to mention save a few of those lowly contractor lives. –Matt
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Afghan IEDs Show Rapid Adaptation
By Greg Grant
Monday, April 12th, 2010
At a New America Foundation sponsored event today in Washington, researcher Alec Barker presented an impressive collection of data on IED attacks in southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan that show not only more attacks but an acceleration of bomb making skill and use.
Thoroughly schooled in Iraq, where techniques were refined over the years, the IED bomber guild has increased in size and skill and taken their know-how on the road, compressing the training cycle. The rapid pace of innovation in consumer electronics which are used in most triggering devices, has allowed bombers to jump from one triggering method to another as soon as countermeasures show up in the field. With plenty of targets in the form of foreign troops, Afghan insurgents, as with Iraqi insurgents, are able to continually refine and evolve their tactics.
As an example of the rapid pace of bomber innovation, Barker said it took the Irish Republican Army 30 years to progress from command wire bombs to remotely triggered devices. “By contrast, it took about six years for militants to make the same improvements in Chechnya, three year for fighters in Gaza, and about 12 months for insurgents in Iraq.”
The IED bazaar is found on the internet, said retired general and former commander of the Pentagon’s counter-IED task force, Montgomery Meigs, who also spoke at New America. How-to manuals and an extensive video catalog of attacks are readily available on the internet. The IED phenomenon has gone global, Meigs said, with drug cartels in northern Mexico now using the weapons.
While bomber knowledge from veterans of the Baghdad university urban battlefield has certainly found its way to Afghanistan, there is also significant evidence of cross-pollination between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban branches. Data mapping shows a heavily seeded “IED highway” running between Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and Quetta in western Pakistan. Most Taliban IEDs are detonated by remote radio frequency devices, despite the heavy use of radio frequency jammers there. Some have progressed to using low-metal switches that are difficult to detect with mine detectors.
Nearly 80 percent of all casualties in southern Afghanistan are caused by IEDs. The attacks in Afghanistan are deadlier than they were in Iraq because troops patrol on foot more in Afghanistan than Iraq. Even a small bomb can wreak bloody havoc on dismounted troops while it would have no effect against heavily armored MRAP vehicles, Meigs said.
Luckily for troops in Afghanistan, one of the deadliest insurgent weapons from Iraq, explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), a finely-machined, shaped-charge warhead able to penetrate the heaviest armor, have not shown up in significant numbers in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the U.S. military never saw Sunni insurgents using the lethal EFPs, Meigs said. It was an exclusively Shiite weapon.
Barker said the solution to IED attacks is not more spending on new technologies but better human intelligence on the bomber networks, finding a human solution to a human problem. Meigs disagreed somewhat, saying that investments in new high-tech sensors that could spot IEDs, have greatly aided troops in the field.
Meigs, who spent much of this time at JIEDDO battling perceptions that his task force was a waste of money, did say the training his teams provided troops in the field greatly decreased the number of lethal IED attacks in Iraq as they learned to better spot the devices. The various Sunni “awakenings” movements, where insurgents decided to quit attacking U.S. patrols with IEDs and chose to side with the U.S. military in order to survive the Sunni vs. Shia civil war in Iraq, was a big reason IED attacks dropped so dramatically in 2007.
Story here.
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Improvised Explosive Devices
In Southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, 2002-2009
By Alec Barker
April 5, 2010
To properly assess options for improving security along the troubled Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is crucial to empirically characterize what insecurity exists. The role, type, evolution, and migration of homemade bombs – known by the American military as improvised explosive devices or IEDs – have gone underexamined in attempts to understand instability throughout the Pashtun regions of southern Afghanistan and the western Pakistani province of Balochistan. This study presents, analyzes, and assesses data about the use of IEDs by Taliban or Taliban-affiliated Islamist extremists in the provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Nimroz, and Balochistan from 2002 to mid-2009. Applying the techniques of geospatial statistical analysis to public or semi-public event information will support the policy debate as U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) counterterrorism efforts in the region are under increasing public scrutiny.
Whereas prior analyses may have considered IEDs in the abstract, or assessed the impact of a particular IED type (such as suicide devices), this project examines all IED trends in detail sufficient to describe methods of construction and operation, lethality, frequency distribution, and geospatial disposition over time. To accomplish these ends, the study uses, merges, and analyzes four distinct data sets: two open-source terrorism databases, one government geospatial information database, and one private intelligence database accessed by special arrangement with the author. This effort also employs geospatial statistical techniques including kernel density estimation, resulting in a set of 42 maps illustrating IED trends.
We found a general and continual increase in the prevalence and effectiveness (in terms of casualties) of IED events across southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan from 2004 to 2009. At least two distinct bombing campaigns, one perpetrated by the Taliban in Afghanistan and parts of Balochistan and another by Baloch separatists in Pakistan, have consistently grown in momentum. Though these campaigns overlap in Quetta, Balochistan’s provincial capital, they differ by tactic, technique, and care to avoid loss of life: The Taliban prefer command-initiated attacks against military and government personnel in which collateral casualties are tolerated, while the Baloch separatists adhere to a pattern of time-initiated attacks against infrastructure in which casualties are avoided.
Kandahar province had been the location most prone to IED violence until early 2009, when it was overtaken by Helmand province in this regard, indicating a shift in the operational emphasis of the Taliban toward the U.S. and British forces operating there. Though northern Nimroz province has experienced fewer events, the area between the towns of Zaranj and Delaram has seen a spate of highly effective suicide attacks against government entities, despite the absence of troops from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Other patterns include attacks against Indian interests in Nimroz province and anti-Shiite attacks in Balochistan.
This study both acknowledges and scrutinizes the so-called “Iraq effect,” which posits a central role for veterans of the Iraq insurgency in the evolution of Taliban IED tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in Afghanistan. Without debunking the Iraq effect, we find additional causes and contributing factors – such as the influence of Kashmiri fighters – as well as instances in Afghanistan and Pakistan that predated or conflicted with those in Iraq. While acknowledging local reasons for bombings and bomb innovation, we also suggest a phenomenon of generalized and global TTP acceleration in which generations of terrorists and insurgents take progressively shorter periods of time to accomplish advances in IED TTPs, supported by information-sharing and training among fighters and improvements in available components.
Alec Barker is a national security analyst and consultant based in Washington, DC. He is a former U.S. Army officer and a graduate of Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. He is solely responsible for the content of this paper.
For a PDF of this executive summary, click here. For the policy paper, click here. For Appendix 1 of the maps analyzed, click here. For Appendices 2-5 of the data, methodology, acronyms used, and acknowledgments, click here. For a PDF of the executive summary, policy paper, and all appendices, please click here.