IEDs and the Failure to Adapt on the Battlefield
By Douglas Farah
The Washington Post has devoted an inordinate amount of space to get into the nitty-gritty of one of the largest structural difficulties facing the military in the new wars it will be fighting-ability to adapt quickly to low-tech enemies.
The two-part series looks at the effectiveness of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and the long, late, multi-billion dollar effort by the military-ultimately unsuccessful-to combat them. IEDs are responsible for the vast bulk of the U.S. casualties in Iraq, and are increasingly used in Afghanistan as well. It has become the weapon of choice, along with suicide bombings, of the Islamist insurgencies.
One of the problems is the huge reliance, both in the combat theater and the intelligence community, on technology. This is highly useful in some areas, but it others it is far less useful than human resources, particularly human intelligence gathering capabilities.
The growing reliance on technology, or the inability to look for non-technological solutions to problems was highlighted by the 9/11 commission and other reports. It is still not being addressed in a significant manner.
The key paragraphs of the series, to me, are the following:
"Insurgents have shown a cycle of adaptation that is short relative to the ability of U.S. forces to develop and field IED countermeasures," a National Academy of Sciences paper concluded earlier this year. An American electrical engineer who has worked in Baghdad for more than two years was blunter: "I never really feel like I'm ahead of the game."
The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. "If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.