Posted on 03/29/2011 7:23:28 AM PDT by centurion316
In February 2006, with roadside bombs killing more and more American soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon created an agency to defeat the deadly threat and tasked a retired four-star general to run it.
Five years later, the agency has ballooned into a 1,900-employee behemoth and has spent nearly $17 billion on hundreds of initiatives.
Yet the technologies it has developed have failed to significantly improve U.S. soldiers’ ability to detect unexploded roadside bombs and have never been able to find them at long distances. Indeed, the best detectors remain the low-tech methods: trained dogs, local handlers and soldiers themselves.
A review by the Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers of government reports, and interviews with auditors, investigators and congressional staffers show that the agency — the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, also known as JIEDDO — also violated its own accounting rules and hasn’t properly evaluated its initiatives to keep mistakes from being repeated.
Meanwhile, roadside bombs remain the single worst killer of soldiers as more U.S. forces have been transferred out of Iraq and into Afghanistan. Known in military parlance as improvised explosive devices, the crude, often-homemade bombs killed 368 coalition troops in Afghanistan last year, by far the highest annual total since 2001, when the U.S.-led war there began, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military casualties in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
At best, it only tells half the story, the part about the inefficiencies of government bureaucracies, the corruption of politicians and government officials, and the irrational demands that America invent a way of war that inoculates us from casualties.
I'd like to tell the other half. I spent five years supporting the Joint IED Task Force and its successor organization, JIEDDO. Criticisms of waste and inefficiency are warranted, we are dealing with the government here. But, the waste curve has mirrored the growth curve. As JIEDDO grew from a small, but efficient organization of scientists and skilled operators to a typical Washington agency with bureaucrat supervisors, costs soared and delays ensued. No surprise here.
But, the biggest driver of waste and delay was help from elected officials. Industry came to JIEDDO like moths to the flame and they first stopped by to see their local elected official or political appointee. The article cites the case of Ionatron, a Tucson company who first came to JIEDDO's offices straight from the office of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. He asked us for a quick assessment of their idea. We flew a small team of operators and scientists to Tucson to see it in action. Our assessment was that it was a Rube Goldberg device that would never work. Not deterred, the Ionatron owners put on the political heat and JIEDDO was directed to fund their efforts. The JIEDDO leadership did manage to keep the damn thing out of theater and away from the troops for about two years, but were eventually forced to send it in. It failed. A classic case study of the dangers of political influence.
Six contractors for every government employee is a problem, but the ratio should be higher. Contractors actually had the skills to do the job, were young and motivated, and could be replaced if they weren't getting the job done. Many of the government employees were oxygen thieves and will attempt to turn a temporary organization into lifetime job security.
Force protection and intelligence are part of JIEDDO core mission despite our fearless journalists ignorance of that fact. The money that JIEDDO spent on intelligence is money well spent. One of their more successful efforts has been to find and kill the bomb makers. Bomb making has become a very poor choice of career fields. The work is temporary and the severance package is very severe.
The article gives no credit to many successes. IEDs were much more effect when they were remotely and wirelessly detonated. That capability was taken away from them by JIEDDO countermeasures and they are back to the old fashioned way: pressure plates and command wire. These still work, but it puts the IED team at risk of attack and many of them die trying. Protection systems like MRAPs and uparmored HMMWVs do save lives and have rendered small IED's mostly ineffective. The laws of physics still apply however, so a 500 lb explosive is always going to inflict serious damage.
I doubt Mr. Cary and Ms. Yousseff have any idea of what is really going on in the IED fight, both good and bad. But, they were certainly willing to do the bidding of the naysayers without bothering to find out what is really going on.
Ping; this is interesting.
Good post!
Thanks for the inside info.
In the mean time however, what did DOD do to ramp up the training of bomb detection dogs? They obviously work. What the Dutch did, and it makes sense, was to support local dog clubs and turn their development into a sport. People invest their own money to raise and train dogs for commercial sale. That produced an industry, which is why Southern Holland is crawling with American dog dealers.
Why can't we do that? There are outstanding trainers out there and now means to replicate superior trainers with fantastic online education.
William Sherman solved this problem almost 150 years ago.
JIEDDO and the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF) put a considerable effort into IED detecting dogs, who worked off lease in contrast to most other military working dogs. Their efforts were dogged (no pun intended) by delays and bureaucratic road blocks. Military working dogs, it turns out, are the responsibility of the Air Force and they run the only authorized schools. They don’t like others in DoD intruding on their turf and fought this effort. Army engineers and Navy EOD guys managed to get dogs trained and into the fight, but their efforts were eventually quashed by the bureaucrats in a turf war.
Yes he did. He also managed to drive the South away from the Republican Party for over 100 years.
17 billion?
Sherman put the lives of his own soldiers above the political palatability of his solution. For better or worse, he saw his job as the resolution of military problems, and left the political problems to the politicians.
Thanks for your views, but I don’t care to participate in a hijacking of my own thread.
Hey, they should just buy and train a bunch of pigs for the job. It would have the dual effect of psychological warefare. And pigs are large enough to trigger the pressure plate, so if they detonate a couple here and there, no big loss. Plus you could still use the pig scraps that are left over for BBQ.
Ha Ha, just a joke guys. There is no way a pig will ever be allowed in a Muslim county. My sister in law who is in Afganistan got in trouble for having a can of pork and beans in her footlocker.
The hell of Gates? From what I saw of MIL-Spec manufacturing, I would guess that nearly half of what we spend for the operations side of the military is totally wasted, mostly in paperwork and bogus specifications for procurement and needless bureaucracy. I can't tell you how much got flushed in our business because we were forced to produce obsolete products, by obsolete processes, on obsolete equipment to physical specifications that insured inferior performance, complete with mounds of paperwork. It's insane.
>>William Sherman solved this problem almost 150 years ago.
Interesting that you mention that. On 9/12/2001, I sent out an email blast that included these lines:
William Tecumseh Sherman summed up my feelings on this during his March to the Sea:
“We cannot change the hearts of those people, but we can make war so terrible...[and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”
Would that our leaders had seen things that way.
Concur. Not comprehensive, however.
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