Bad Day For C-IED Guys in the 'Stan

David Axe reports on a significant theft in Afghanistan.

On Jan. 7, someone strolled into a supply room at Camp Eggers, a coalition base near the U.S. embassy in downtown Kabul, pocketed two sets of car keys and walked out undetected. Sometime over the next 24 hours, the thieves drove away with two black-painted, armored Toyota Land Cruisers belonging to the U.S. Army’s 26th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade, a unit that escorts coalition personnel around Kabul.

The loss of the Land Cruisers is bad enough. But what’s really got the Army worried is what was inside the vehicles: two sets of top-secret Duke radio frequency jammers used to block the signals that detonate remote-controlled improvised explosive devices. In a notice posted to the website of the Army’s Criminal Investigative Command (and first noted by Military Times), investigators plead for anyone with knowledge of the theft to contact CID offices in and around Kabul.

If the Army suspects who might be responsible, it’s not saying. Equally, it’s not clear if the bandits were after the Duke equipment specifically, or if the Land Cruisers were the sole target and the jammers were simply bonuses.

Best case scenario: the thieves have no ties to insurgents and no appreciation of the jammers’ value … and the high-tech devices wind up in a scrap heap somewhere.

Worst case: the jammers wind up in the hands of insurgents who then reverse-engineer them to create some kind of counter-counter-measure, thus making already-deadly IEDs even more dangerous.

By: Brant

UK In Action: PARA IED Overwatch

A Soldier from 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment (2 PARA), observes from a compound roof as soldiers from the Improvised Explosive Task Force, clear the streets of ghost town Char Coucha in Afghanistan. Char Coucha which once had a thriving market and was a place of religious pilgrimage is back on the road to peace and prosperity thanks to the combined efforts of 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment (2 PARA), members of the British Counter-IED Task Force, and their colleagues from the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. The effort - codenamed Operation KAPCHA KWANDIKALAY (or Cobra Safe Village) - has seen the largest-scale, high-risk IED clearance of an entire village to be carried out by British forces in Afghanistan. More than 40 families have now returned, with more set to follow as efforts to maintain the stable security situation continue. Throughout 2010, Char Coucha was the scene of intense fighting, as British and Afghan forces battled the insurgency for control of the village. But despite the insurgent fighters remaining under pressure throughout, it became clear that the benefits of military successes were not being felt by local people. This image was a runner-up for Sgt Rupert Frere in the Army's Photographic Competition 2011.

img from UK MoD

By: Widow 6-7

Monday Video: Rockin' an IED

If you're gonna start your week off with a BANG! make it a big one...



By: Brant

Surviving an IED Strike

David Axe's very sobering account of surviving an IED attack in an MRAP. Don't let the medium fool you, it's a very compelling little tale.

By: Brant

New Life for the MICLIC

It's being reinvented as an IED eraser.

"We are here to rebuild, but sometimes that takes destruction," said Capt. Matthew Peterson, a company commander whose Marines were tasked in late December with clearing a key part of southern Helmand province's Sangin district — the most dangerous place for coalition troops in Afghanistan last year.
The Marines have used a much more aggressive strategy in Sangin than British troops who were there for four years before the U.S. took over. The contrast has sparked debate both inside and outside Afghanistan.
One of the key goals in the December operation in an area called Wishtan was clearing bombs from the main road to allow the Marines to maneuver freely and locals to go to the central bazaar without fear of being blown up.
The Marines used a powerful weapon called a MICLIC — Mine Clearing Line Charge — that is essentially a flexible tube several hundred feet (meters) long containing more than 1,500 pounds (680 kilograms) of C-4 explosive that is shot out along the road using a rocket, then detonated.
At least 25 bombs were destroyed and the Marines were able to clear the 3,000-foot (900-meter) long road in three days, but the blasts from the charges blew out windows, toppled walls and collapsed ceilings in the densely packed mud compounds that fill the area.

The rest of the article details how the Marines are going out rebuilding...

By: Brant

Canadian Sniffer Dogs Protect Troops From IEDs

Canine units deployed to Aghanistan protect Canadian soldiers by detecting concealed IEDs.

The Canadian Army has been employing sniffer dogs to detect mines and improvised explosive devices (IED) not only along routes, but also in buildings and vehicles.

“We work with canine teams nearly every day, and the dogs form an integral part of our teams and sections,” explained Sergeant Alexandre Murgia, commander of a combat-engineer section of the 1st Battalion Royal 22e Régiment Battle Group (1 R22eR BG).

“The dogs provide us with an added measure of security during our operations, and it’s our role to protect them from the insurgents while they’re doing their job.”

The vast majority of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan have been killed by explosions. The Canadian Forces have therefore been progressively stepping up the employment of sniffer dogs in Afghanistan since 2005. Most of these dogs are German or Belgian shepherds.

The sniffer dogs represent an indispensable asset highly appreciated by the soldiers, given their ability to sense sources of danger well before humans.

“Humans are not infallible and can’t see or detect everything. When they’re with us, we feel better and we feel safer,” added Sgt Murgia.

By: Shelldrake

"Blast Boxers" Protect Family Jewels

These kevlar-based boxers are proving popular with UK troops and are now available in Canada.

A U.K. company has developed a product called “Blast Boxers” — protective military clothing the company claims can reduce severe and sometimes deadly groin injuries caused by mine blasts.

The boxers, which look a little like two-toned bike shorts, are made of a woven Kevlar fabric and are meant to protect the groin, upper leg and body-cavity from blast and fragment injuries from IEDs.

A pair costs about C$85 and BCB International said they’ve proven popular with both UK troops, their wives and their girlfriends.

Esprit de Corps publisher Scott Taylor, who served as a professional soldier and has spent time in war zones, said he could see the product taking off in Canada because soldiers fret about the genital injuries caused by land mines.

“That’s every guy’s worst nightmare and if they could find anything to (protect themselves) they would do it,” he said Friday in an interview from his Ottawa office.

Soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq will sit on their Kevlar vests to protect their genitals from explosions, Taylor said, noting soldiers in World War II would sometimes sit on their helmets when they knew there were landmines around.

“They were more afraid of losing their balls than of a head wound,” he said.

According to statistics provided by the Armed Forces, 7.5% of Canadian casualties showed trauma to the uro-genital system. As of 2009, 1,442 Canadian soldiers had been wounded in the Afghan mission.

U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have also struggled with injuries to the groin area and, last year, the U.S. Congress introduced legislation designed to address uro-trauma in its troops, which was deemed “a growing concern among active military personnel. “

A Canadian Forces spokesperson said Friday the army was aware of the product but wasn’t currently considering purchasing them for their soldiers.

Still, Taylor doesn’t think that will stop soldiers from ordering a pair before heading to war.

“The military might end up buying them but in the short term I think guys would see that as an investment,” he said.

By: Shelldrake

GrogNews Weekend Headlines

Man, the USAF just can't get the tanker deal right, can they? Now it looks like they sent details of the bids to the opposing competitors...

As Krazi Karzai meets with NATO to discuss exit strategy, NATO vows they won't abandon Afghanistan. This as the new bicycle-borne IED threat kills 4 and wounds 31 in Afghanistan. Hey Jason, what's the map symbol for a BMXBIED?


By: Brant

Assault Breacher Vehicle Provides Marine Engineers With A Safer Ride

Civilian mechanics have created a bomb-busting armored vehicle that Marines in Afghanistan now use to destroy roadside IEDs.

The civilian mechanics at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama usually only fix vehicles for the Army, not design them for the Marine Corps. But as Marines push into contested areas of Afghanistan, their engineers face a persistent threat from roadside bombs. The mechanics at Anniston saw they could build a safe ride for these military engineers by adding off-the-shelf equipment to an M1A1 Abrams battle tank. The result, called the Assault Breacher Vehicle (ABV), maximizes the depot staff’s experience at fixing the M1A1 and their ability to mount heavy engineering equipment, including a 12-foot plough, onto its hull. The Army donated excess tank parts from its inventory to create the ABV.

After about two years of trials and training, the Marine Corps delivered the first ABVs late last year to southern Afghanistan, where they quickly saw action clearing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from the roads leading to the Taliban stronghold of Now Zad in Helmand province.

The Breacher crew’s preferred method of clearing the roads involves shooting an MK155 linear charge—a nylon rope beaded with 1750 pounds of explosive C4—so that it lies across the unpaved roadway, and then detonating the line to create a safe path more than 300 feet long and 50 feet wide. The system was designed in the 1960s to defeat pressure-fused mines, but is finding a new use in clearing IED-infested roads. Intercepted enemy radio transmissions, quoted in a Marine Corps release, indicate that the enemy fled Now Zad as the explosive strings erupted, saying, “Get out, the big boom is coming!”

By: Shelldrake

US Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team Trains in Iraq

Have you ever wondered how military bomb disposal experts train? The Virginian-Pilot has an excellent description of a rehearsal exercise recently conducted by a US Navy counterexplosives team based in the Iraqi city of Tikrit. Read the entire article here.

"You guys ready to do this?" asks Lt. j.g. Bruce Batteson. He's just come from setting out an inert bomb at their training site up the road.

He explains the scenario: "OK, you just got a call from the Sons of Iraq," he says, referring to local militias that are paid by the Iraqi government to patrol neighborhoods across the country. "They're seeing some wire running across the road near one of their checkpoints. They're pretty sure it's an IED" - an improvised explosive device - "and they're requesting assistance."

Batteson, Byrne and Czaja are one of six teams operating in Iraq that are assigned to the Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 2, headquartered at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach. Typically called EOD technicians, they are trained to dismantle explosives anywhere they endanger U.S. troops, whether on land or under water.

In Iraq, almost all of their calls are for improvised bombs that insurgents have hidden in public places - along roadways, inside parked cars, under piles of trash near busy markets.

As soon as Batteson finishes laying out the situation, the petty officers are up from their desks, grabbing Gatorade, sunglasses and gear.

By: Shelldrake

Taliban Employ Children To Plant IEDs

Just when you think that the Taliban can't sink any lower, the insurgents resort to using children as young as five to plant deadly IEDs.

In the past five months the number child insurgents has increased almost fivefold in the town of Sangin, to a band of 40, who are used to run weapons, plant bombs and carry out tasks for the Taliban, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

According to military intelligence sources there are about 12 children being routinely used in the Sangin area just to plant bombs.

The Taliban have resorted to the tactic because they know that British troops are unlikely to fire on children planting IEDs (improvised explosive devices). They have also been forced into the change because sophisticated surveillance technology is able to pick up Taliban IED planting teams and take action against them.

On one occasion surveillance cameras picked up two children under 10 walking along the main road with one placing an IED in a hole followed by another covering it up with a bag of stone and earth.

"They know that we won't engage the kids," said an intelligence source with 40 Commando, Royal Marines, based in Sangin. "The kids are less aware of the risks and will to do anything for a quick buck.

"But it's really exploiting children. The parents are upset they do this but they are very, very intimidated by the Taliban."

There have been 44 roadside bombs in Sangin in the past months, a fifth were carried out by children.

By: Shelldrake

JFCOM Wants - Get This - JOINT(!) Data Sharing

And they're serious enough to hold a conference about it!

Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, head of the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, began the symposium with a complaint about the failure to analyze and share intelligence in a timely manner with allies in Afghanistan. “We disable ourselves by an inability to share information,” he said. “We’ve got to [find] a way ahead immediately to improve information fusion” and to develop databases for tactical commanders. “There is no shortage of data,” he added, “but there is a dearth of analysis . . . and it has to be provided to our coalition partners freely so they can enable their formations.” Crucial to this effort is the creation of “mobile databases [that] provide real-time effective information for tactical commanders.”

Seriously though, FusionNet was doing this 6 years ago, with links to CENTRIXS and publication to the PASS. CIDNE still won't open their data, because, well, they're CIDNE.

Good thing Wortmann pulled the plug on FusionNet in favor of CIDNE, eh? After all, we wouldn't want to shitcan a system THAT DOES EXACTLY WHAT WE SAY WE NEED, 5 YEARS LATER, right?

By: Brant

UK In Action: IED Hunt

Soldiers on the hunt for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) stop after a suspect device is located. Troops of 2nd Battalion The Rifles (2 Rifles) mounted a 20 hour operation to clear a safe route to Patrol Base (PB) Wishton in Sangin, Afghanistan. One of the main roads that leads to the PB is well known for having a large number of IEDs. With the aid of the Royal Engineers, 2 Rifles cleared the way and made a new route to the PB that can now be monitored 24 hours a day. This now allows vital supplies to get to the Patrol Base unhindered, whilst it is upgraded to a Forward Operating Base.

Image: UK MoD

By: Widow 6-7

Iraq Bombs Claim 69

The death toll rises in a series of bomb attacks in Iraq

The bloodiest day of the year in Iraq left at least 69 people dead in a series of bombings in mainly Shiite areas Friday — concerted attacks seen as demonstrating the resilience of the Sunni-led insurgency after the slaying of two al-Qaida leaders last weekend.
No one has taken responsibility for the blasts, but officials were quick to blame Sunni-led insurgent groups for attacking at a particularly fragile time as Iraq awaits formation of a new government and prepares for U.S. troops to go home by the end of next year.
The protracted political wrangling since contentious March 7 elections has raised fears of sectarian violence akin to that seen at the height of the war.

By: Brant

Kids as Attack Decoys in Iraq

Before you go banging on the helicopter pilots in the now-infamous Wikileaks video, you need to know that presence of kids has hardly been a deterrent in the insurgent fighting in Iraq. It is not unusual that kids end up being put in the middle of the action by the terrorists to implicate the US/Coalition and make them look heartless or lull them into complacency.

The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.

The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.

“I said no — no,” Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”

(snip - long discussion of cognition, pattern recognition, and intuition)

One thing did not quite fit on the morning of Sergeant Tierney’s patrol in Mosul. The nine soldiers left the police station around 9 a.m., but they did not get their usual greeting. No one shot at them or fired a rocket-propelled grenade. Minutes passed, and nothing.

The soldiers walked the road in an odd silence, scanning the landscape for evidence of I.E.D.’s and trying to stay alert for an attack from insurgents. In war, anxiety can run as high as the Iraqi heat, and neuroscientists say that the most perceptive, observant brain on earth will not pick up subtle clues if it is overwhelmed by stress.

In the Army study of I.E.D. detection, researchers found that troops who were good at spotting bombs in simulations tended to think of themselves as predators, not prey. That frame of mind by itself may work to reduce anxiety, experts say.

The brains of elite troops also appear to register perceived threats in a different way from the average enlistee, said Dr. Martin P. Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, and the V.A. San Diego Healthcare System. At the sight of angry faces, members of the Navy Seals show significantly higher activation in the insula than regular soldiers, according to a just-completed study.

“The big question is whether these differences perceiving threat are natural, or due to training,” Dr. Paulus said.

That morning in Mosul, Sergeant Tierney gave the command to fall back. The soldier who had asked to approach the car had just time enough to turn before the bomb exploded. Shrapnel clawed the side of his face; the shock wave threw the others to the ground. The two young boys were gone: killed in the blast, almost certainly, he said.

Since then, Sergeant Tierney has often run back the tape in his head, looking for the detail that tipped him off. Maybe it was the angle of the car, or the location; maybe the absence of an attack, the sleepiness in the market: perhaps the sum of all of the above.

“I can’t point to one thing,” he said. “I just had that feeling you have when you walk out of the house and know you forgot something — you got your keys, it’s not that — and need a few moments to figure out what it is.”

He added, “I feel very fortunate none of my men were killed or badly wounded.”

By: Brant

Afghan IEDs a Different Kind of Danger

IEDs in Afghanistan are cheaper, but still deadly.

The signature weapon of the Iraq war has established itself as the Taliban's weapon of choice in Afghanistan as well, where roadside bombs have proven to be rudimentary and cheap -- but deadly as ever.

The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has soared in Afghanistan since 2007 and numbers are expected to spike further as an offensive in Kandahar takes off, said the commander of one of two southern battalions that clear them from roads.

Apart from being the biggest killer of NATO troops in Afghanistan, roadside bombs also put soldiers on the defensive, making them wary of leaving their armored vehicles -- striking at the heart of U.S. efforts to meet locals and win their trust.

Unlike the sophisticated devices conjured by Iraqi bombmakers with access to a large supply of ammunition, IEDs in Afghanistan are rudimentary -- often just a yellow pine oil jug or pressure cooker packed with fertilizer or a homemade device crafted out of wood and batteries, stuck into a culvert in the road.

"I was surprised at how rudimentary the devices here are, but very effective," Lt. Col. Peter Andrysiak, commander of Taskforce Lumberjack, which operates slow-moving convoys of heavily armored vehicles to spot and remove IEDs. "In terms of making do with what they have available, they do a very good job."

By: Brant

"Hurt Locker" in Afghanistan?

The bomb tech of Hurt Locker made for a great flick, but would we see their ilk in Afghanistan? Not likely, according to JIEDDO, as the soaring numbers of IED attacks in Afghanistan are much more low-tech than the ones in Iraq.

Taliban fighters more than doubled the number of homemade bombs they used against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan last year, relying on explosives that are often far more primitive than the ones used in Iraq.

The embrace of a low-tech approach by Taliban-trained bombmakers -- they are building improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, out of fertilizer and diesel fuel -- has stymied a $17 billion U.S. counteroffensive against the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, military officials say. Electronic scanners or jammers, which were commonly deployed in Iraq, can detect only bombs with metal parts or circuitry.

"Technology is not going to solve this problem," said Army Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, director of the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. "I don't think you can defeat the IED as a weapon system. It is too easy to use."

U.S. military officials said they expected the number of IED attacks to climb further this year as 40,000 U.S. and NATO reinforcements pour into Afghanistan.

Oates said technological advances have enabled the military to save lives by providing better armor and other forms of protection for troops. But he said the high-tech approach -- despite billions of dollars in research -- has failed to produce an effective way to detect IEDs in the field. About four-fifths of the devices that are found before they explode are detected the old-fashioned way: by troops who notice telltale signs, such as a recently disturbed patch of dirt that might be covering up a bomb.

By: Brant

One Lucky Marine

Dodging death, one step at a time.

On a Marine foot patrol here through the predawn chill of Friday morning, he stepped on a pressure-plate rigged to roughly 25 pounds of explosives. The device, enough to destroy a pickup truck or tear apart several men, was buried beneath him in the dusty soil.

It did not explode.

Lance Corporal Mathison’s weight triggered the detonation of one of the booby trap’s two blasting caps. But upon giving an audible pop and tossing small stones into the air, the device failed to ignite its fuller charge — a powerful mix of Eastern Bloc mortar rounds and homemade explosives spiked with motorcycle parts, rusty spark plugs and jagged chunks of steel.

Go read the rest... wow. Just, wow.

By: Brant

E/1-15 Clearing Routes

There's a great story about the engineers of E/1-15 IN and their route-clearing mission in Afghanistan.

It was late. While most of the 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, at Forward Operating Base Echo were in bed the evening of Jan 2, Soldiers from "E" Company, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, were preparing for another day of work.

It was 1st Platoon's day to go out. After receiving their mission brief, the engineers made their way to the motor pool where their chariots awaited. Soldiers quickly prepped their Caiman armored vehicles, their Buffalo mine protected clearance vehicle, and their Husky engineering vehicle. They had a long night ahead of them.

Go read the rest of it.

By: Brant

UK In Action: IED Patrol in Afghanistan

A soldier tentatively brushes away the dust from a suspect object beneath the surface of a road near Garmsir, Afghanistan. Troops carry metal detectors to enable them to discover possible improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that lay hidden by the enemy.

Image: UK MoD

By: Widow 6-7