I.E.D. DEFENSE — NO LUCK YET

It’s pri­or­ity A1 in America’s defense research labs: Coming up with tech­nolo­gies that can spot and defuse the road­side bombs which have proved so deadly to U.S. forces in Iraq.
But so far, Defense News reports, there hasn’t been a whole lot of progress made in fig­ur­ing out how to stop these impro­vised explo­sive devices, or IEDs. There’s no “sin­gle sil­ver bul­let out there that can stop this threat,” a mem­ber of a Pentagon task force on IEDs told the jour­nal. “As we find some solu­tions that may address a par­tic­u­lar type of weapon theyre using, a par­tic­u­lar tac­tic, they shift, find new ways to do things.“
Meanwhile, IEDs are doing some­thing ter­ri­ble to American troops. On Monday, an Oregon Army National Guardsman, Spc. David W. Johnson, was killed by an IED near Camp Taji, north­west of Baghdad. “Since the begin­ning of [Johnson’s] battalion’s Iraq deploy­ment in April, eight guards­men have been killed, all by IEDs planted on roads or in vehi­cles,” the AP notes.
One of the only effec­tive devices has been the Warlock Green elec­tronic coun­ter­mea­sure sys­tem, which “emits a radio fre­quency that jams com­mu­ni­ca­tions sig­nals that det­o­nate road­side bombs,” accord­ing to Federal Computer Week.
“The Defense Department, how­ever, has strug­gled to estab­lish the indus­trial base for these sys­tems,” Defense News notes. “EDO, a New York-​​based firm spe­cial­iz­ing in high-​​tech niche prod­ucts, was the only com­pany to bid on a $35 mil­lion con­tract to pro­duce 1,000 Warlock sys­tems. And until recently, it was the only com­pany capa­ble of such a task pre­vent­ing mass pro­duc­tion of the life-​​saving sys­tems.“

Also in the works are change detec­tor sen­sors for unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles (UAVs). UAV pro­gram offi­cials are seek­ing pay­loads and soft­ware that can be added to the ser­vices fleet of unmanned vehi­cles to mon­i­tor road­ways and report any changes back to sol­diers.
So far, the Army has tested sev­eral tech­nolo­gies but has not found one that works well enough to deploy, a top UAV offi­cial said this sum­mer. Most UAV tech­nolo­gies can sur­vey areas for changes, but typ­i­cally are effec­tive in deal­ing with objects far larger than IEDs. 

THERE’S MORE: The Washington Post’s Steve Fainaru was almost killed by a road­side bomb in Sadr City yes­ter­day — an explo­sion that killed four Iraqi National Guardsmen, but left their American coun­ter­parts with only sharp­nel wounds.
The blast “demon­strated the uneven vul­ner­a­bil­ity of U.S. forces, who are equipped with the most sophis­ti­cated weaponry and armor, and their Iraqi allies, who fight the same bat­tles using vastly infe­rior equip­ment,” Fainaru writes in a grip­ping, must-​​read account.

September 28th, 2004 | Bomb Squad | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.