Agreed. Anyone seen digging along a road, especially at night, needs an immediate death sentence.
Someone set up them the bomb.
Sounds like the old ‘a good offense is the best defense.’
Wasn’t O.D.I.N. the original primary objective?
Just wow.
Now if they'd figure out how to have a platoon waiting to ambush the Taliban who systematically and with regularity ambush our platoons on their way back to their firebases after a patrol to the villages.
It is a set in stone pattern.
Platoon walks to village.
Taliban now knows the path and time they will be walking back
Taliban set up ambush.
Our troops have suffered the highest KIA and WIA’s due to the PREDICTABLE song and dance.
How about end-running them and setting up an ambush team along the route BEFORE the platoon goes to the village - and then ambush the ambushers?
Wouldn't take long to break that pattern.
Do the powers that be really want success?
Shhh... Don’t tell anybody.
They should start baiting them by using the same routes over and over and focusing all eyes on those routes. Then have QRF’s ready to roll when they take the bait.
If they are serious about stopping IED attacks, they will arrest the filthy little sawed off runt heading for meetings at the UN, place him in detention at Gitmo for 444 days, then assign 1 year of additional “service” for every IED attack from that date forward.
The fact that the leader of a nation that is responsible for as many deaths as the USA has endured, is able to freely enter and exit this country is beyond reason. Anyone remember a proclamation that “the war on terror has no borders”?
That's hard to believe. Even with government accounting methods.
Mike
I’ve long thought that a way to discover IEDs on important traffic corridors would be for a helicopter to do a little “crop dusting”.
That is, come up with a chemical that can be added to water, that when sprayed onto ground, will do the equivalent of fluoresce under a particular UV band. Even urine will do this. Use a crop dusting helicopter to spray the route.
At night, another helicopter can fly over the route, shining a UV light. When it looks at a road, it will see the road illuminated, with four stripes of blackness created by vehicle tires. However, if it sees a large “hole” in the glow, it likely means that the ground there has been disturbed, likely by the planting of an IED.
The scanning itself might even be done by computer, which might spot something missed by the flight crew.
Again, this is pretty much only for high traffic areas, but might be yet another tool in the anti-IED arsenal.
With graded roadways you can see when something has been buried and IR shows the disturbed soil as it is warmer.
We have made great progress with overwatch drones to monitor roadways. So big changes are coming.
One problem is that the Afghans move their herds at night over the roadways when it's cooler and that is used to mask diggers and the critters blend the disturbed soil.
Milk Factory ping! IED’s just accidently appeared one day..../s
Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said he was informed by the Pentagon in recent weeks that the command is building up a special task force to defeat improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Task Force ODIN (Observe, Detect, Identify, Neutralize) is designed to constantly watch troop and convoy routes to catch the enemy planting IEDs, which account for more than 50 percent of U.S. fatalities in Afghanistan. "I just found out they finally instituted ODIN in one province, Ghazni, in Regional Command East," Mr. Hunter, California Republican and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told The Washington Times. "IED attacks dropped by 70 percent. They have already killed 25 insurgents. That was after 20 days of being on line."