The Columbia Daily Tribune March 12, 2006
Buried secrets, sudden death
Centers at Missouri military base train troops to safely defuse hidden threats.
By Josh Flory
FORT LEONARD WOOD — With workers huddled behind cubicle walls, baby pictures proudly displayed, Fort Leonard Wood’s Counter Explosive Hazards Center in many ways looks like any office in America.
The artwork on the walls outside the cubicles, though, belies the benign interior. The main hallway of the CEHC is a kaleidoscope of menace, with posters that depict various features of homemade bombs: tripwires that connect to a grenade pin, an old tire with wires sticking out of it, a chunk of concrete that hides explosives.
The posters serve as a reminder of the stakes faced by the fledgling center, which is dedicated to countering the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that have maimed or killed hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Backed by $10.4 million in federal money secured by U.S. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., the counterexplosives center will eventually move into a new complex that will include facilities for training troops in how to deal safely with the deadly roadside bombs and find the people who make them.
Before that project began, officials at Fort Leonard Wood had carved a crucial niche in the military’s counterexplosives work. The post has been working for years on tactics and procedures to counter IEDs, and soldiers from across the country come to Fort Leonard Wood for training on a hulking new counterexplosives vehicle that patrols the highways of Iraq.
To understand the urgency of the center’s mission, one need only look at the body count in the Iraq war.
According to a study published in January by the Brookings Institution, 687 U.S. troops had been killed by IEDs since the war began. That’s nearly 31 percent of all U.S. troop deaths, but the numbers have been much higher in recent months. According to the same study, IEDs accounted for nearly 58 percent of all deaths in the second half of 2005.
As the home of the U.S. Army Engineer School, Fort Leonard Wood is particularly concerned with the challenges of mobility in wartime, and land mines and IEDs are among the most pressing obstacles. Though the military has dealt with land mines in recent conflicts, the center’s technical director, Dorian D’Aria, said the effort to counter such explosives picked up steam after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
By the time the Department of Defense created a joint task force aimed at countering IEDs in the summer of 2004, Fort Leonard Wood had been working on the problem for months.
“So we really helped … the Army carve out its strategy — and actually the Department of Defense’s strategy — on how to deal with IEDs,” D’Aria said.
As casualties in Iraq continued to mount, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last December appointed a retired four-star general to lead a joint task force devoted to the issue.
That effort will include a training center at California’s Fort Irwin, a site large enough for brigade-level maneuvers. D’Aria said the idea is that Fort Irwin will bring together a variety of agencies that specialize in different facets of the fight against IEDs. Fort Leonard Wood’s specialty, at this point anyway, centers on military search operations and a procedure known as “route reconnaissance and area clearance”: in other words, clearing a path.
D’Aria said one lesson the U.S. military has learned from allies such as the British — who faced a similar problem in Northern Ireland — is that the best way to defeat a bomb is to find the bomb-maker. To that end, the military is ramping up specialized search training for tasks such as finding false compartments in a wall or false bottoms in furniture that could hide ammunition, timers or cash. D’Aria said the CEHC has on staff a British officer and an Australian officer experienced with search operations.
As part of the counterexplosives center at Fort Leonard Wood, officials hope to build a full-fledged training village where soldiers will learn how to conduct those searches in a variety of architectural and geographic settings, from homes or businesses in the Middle East to marketplaces in Africa. Fort Leonard Wood is also home to a program that trains soldiers to use dogs for detecting land mines, weapons and other tools of the bomb-making trade.
The idea is to develop a training system that not only will be useful during the war in Iraq but also will be effective for years.
“That’s the big contribution,” D’Aria said. “Not just this fight, but it’s the fights yet to come. … This is what we’re going to do for a living, and it’s not going to be the flavor of the month.”
Despite that long view, Fort Leonard Wood also is working hard on the demands of the moment, and one of the soldiers assigned to that effort is Staff Sgt. Lekendrick Stallworth.
An Arizona native who has been in the Army for 5½ years, Stallworth has done two tours each in Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, he has been assigned to Fort Leonard Wood, where he trains soldiers on the Buffalo, a 23-ton armored vehicle that’s designed to withstand two anti-tank blasts.
On a recent morning, Stallworth showed off the Buffalo’s features. A V-shaped undercarriage diffuses the heat of an IED blast, preventing metal projectiles from bursting through a floor weakened by the high temperature. L-shaped grating is aimed at neutralizing a rocket-propelled grenade’s shape charge, and the glass windows are thick enough to stop the 7.62 mm round of an AK-47.
The vehicle is equipped with a remote-controlled arm that allows passengers to examine potential IEDs and includes a camera that relays information via a video screen mounted on the dashboard.
The Buffalo is designed to travel as part of a six-vehicle patrol that sweeps the roads every day in advance of military convoys. During his two stints in Iraq, Stallworth said, it was available for only two months. For a soldier, he said, the vehicle’s weight and ability to withstand an explosion or artillery round “builds some confidence.”
“Once they told me that,” he said, “I was pretty much fine.”
Stallworth, a beefy, no-nonsense soldier, flashed a smile when asked whether the 23-ton vehicle is capable of moving quickly.
“You’d be surprised,” he said.
Fort Leonard Wood, the only post in the country where the vehicles are used for training, has two Buffaloes. One of them is on loan to Fort Irwin, where a unit trained on it is participating in a pre-deployment exercise.
Both Stallworth and D’Aria said that although insurgents have hit the Buffalo, none of its passengers has ever been killed. But Stallworth also said the vehicle is a top target, with cash offered to Iraqis to even blow up the robotic arm.
Jim Avery was in Iraq during 2004 and 2005 as part of the Missouri National Guard’s 1140th Engineer Battalion. His unit used the Buffalo and disposed of more than 300 IEDs.
Avery, a state representative from Crestwood, said the advantage offered by the vehicle was that “you didn’t have to get out there yourself and check out the bomb.”
When the soldiers were patrolling, Avery said, they became familiar enough with a particular roadway to recognize, for example, whether a cloth bag had been left there overnight.
“The Buffalo could lift that bag up and kind of bump out whatever was inside of it,” he said.
Francois Boo, a research associate at GlobalSecurity.org — a Web site that specializes in national security information — said IEDs are popular with the Iraqi insurgency because they’re relatively easy to make and fairly effective. Plus, he added, “they don’t involve” the insurgents “getting shot while trying to cause casualties” among “armed coalition troops.”
Boo said simple booby traps and tripwires have given way to a variety of more lethal and sophisticated IEDs, which can use anything from garage door openers to cell phones as triggering mechanisms.
A key question, of course, is whether the training pays a dividend, and opinions are mixed.
Boo said there has “definitely been a learning curve on the U.S. side. Unfortunately, there’s also been a learning curve on the insurgents’ side. ... As one side has learned to counter the IEDs, the other side has learned how to improve them, either their lethality or how to place them and how to make them more powerful.”
Some critics, in fact, have argued that the United States is not keeping up. In a Washington Post story last fall, a former Iraqi army officer who was identified as a member of al-Qaida in Iraq said the insurgency now has access to far more powerful TNT from Iran and also can use leftover Austrian missiles as components in bombs.
In that story, Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings analyst, cited the toll of casualties caused by IEDs.
“Clearly we are not winning the competition over tactics and counter-tactics,” the Post quoted O’Hanlon as saying.
But D’Aria took issue with that assessment, saying the number of IEDs found and destroyed by the military is much higher than the number of IEDs that actually injure or kill troops.
“If we were not making an impact, then we would not be forcing the enemy to continually change his method of operation, and we would not be forcing him to change the type of devices he has to fabricate,” D’Aria said.
© Copyright 2006, The Columbia Daily Tribune
