Why does an IED have to be disarmed manually?
Having spent my entire last deployment doing Counter IED and IED Defeat operations, I was also kind of shocjed by the manual disarming. It happens, and needs to sometimes, for collecting evidence and intelligence to use in finding the bad guys, but 64! I can think of maybe twenty disarmed in our by all EOD and WIT teams that worked with us. The
vast majority were approached with a robot or Buffalo (vehicle made for this type of thing), disarmed and blown in place.