News From the Cause
IED Casualties Up Despite Increased Vigilance (National Journal)
March 03, 2011
Shortly after taking command of the military’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization more than 14 months ago, Lt. Gen. Michael Oates and several of his top aides went to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington to visit troops who had been wounded by the makeshift bombs, the insurgent weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
As Oates and his staff made their way through the sprawling hospital, the mother of a soldier who had just lost a leg to an IED asked Oates what he did in the military. Oates responded that he was in charge of the military task force charged with reducing the number and effectiveness of the roadside bombs.
"And she said, ‘Well, you failed with my son,'" Oates recalled during a conversation with a small group of reporters on Wednesday.
For Oates, the encounter was a vivid illustration of the military’s halting progress against IEDs, the primary cause of American casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The general believes he and his team have significantly improved the military’s ability to dismantle insurgent bomb-making networks and find specific IEDs before they can be set off. But as he prepares to relinquish command this Friday, Oates acknowledged that the IED fight is far from won.
“Statistically, you can’t argue that things are getting better in terms of IED efficacy in Afghanistan,” Oates said, pointing to military data showing that the percentage of insurgent bombs causing coalition or Afghan casualties has fallen from 25 percent last August to just 16 percent in January. “But until the volume drops, we have to assess that the enemy is still actively trying to injure or kill us with IEDs, and he still has that capability.”
And there’s the rub: The lethality of Afghanistan’s bombs may be declining, but militants are planting so many IEDs—roughly 1,400 per month, according to military data—that U.S. casualties from the makeshift bombs are continuing to climb. IED casualties in Afghanistan soared by almost 2,400 between fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2009, an increase of 39 percent. The bombs killed 368 U.S. and NATO troops in 2010, according to the website icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths. So far this year, they have already killed 39 troops.
Oates is highly regarded within the military, in large measure for his candor. In his roundtable with reporters on Wednesday, Oates said the IED fight was going poorly in the southern Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, where tens of thousands of U.S. troops are trying to fight their way into several long-held Taliban strongholds. Oates said the quantity of makeshift bombs in Kandahar was higher than at any point in the past and noted that U.S. commanders there and in Helmand were seeing an alarming increase in the numbers of troops losing one or two legs to IEDs. The increase in amputations stemmed from the fact that troops are mounting more foot patrols in both provinces, Oates said.
From a distance, Afghanistan often looks monolithic, but Oates said there are significant regional differences to the country’s IED threat. In eastern Afghanistan, along the country’s porous border with Pakistan, insurgents build sophisticated bombs out of military-grade explosives that can be detonated remotely. IEDs in southern Afghanistan, by contrast, use homemade explosives made with ammonium nitrate-based fertilizer. The bombs in southern Afghanistan are set off by “pressure plates” that indeterminately detonate whenever a person or vehicle passes over them, causing large numbers of Afghan civilian casualties, Oates said.
The United States has sharply increased the amount of resources devoted to the counter-IED fight. A year ago, there were just 12 route-clearance teams in all of Afghanistan searching for and dismantling IEDs; today, there are more than 75. The Pentagon has 55 surveillance blimps hovering in the skies above Afghanistan and aims to double that by the end of 2011. The number of unmanned drones flying over Afghanistan has been steadily growing, and a new U.S. unit called Task Force Falcon Strike is the first to systematically use the aerial vehicles to kill militants planting roadside bombs.click here to view
