The Kansas City Star July 21, 2006
U.S. bomb hunters warily eye Iraq roads
By Scott Canon
The garage-door remote control has given way to direct wiring. The garbage piles are passé.
And Donald Sisk, who knows everything about garbage trucks back in Shawnee, is cruising the Sunni triangle in a cat-and-mouse game with Iraqi insurgents who blow many U.S. vehicles to junk with their roadside bombs, the leading killer of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Most everything seems foreign and always-changing. Before Staff Sgt. Fisk and his Army National Guard unit left for Iraq late last year, the military’s latest training for bomb hunters in combat engineering outfits like Sisk’s warned chiefly about trash.
Watch out for debris piles, the trainers said. Somebody might have planted explosives under a heap of garbage and jury-rigged it all to detonate with the push of a remote from a garage-door opener.
But today American convoys typically travel with electronic jamming equipment that foils such setups. Both sides know it. So instead, Sisk said, the enemy uses another common household supply to rig the detonation. The military doesn’t want to make public what it’s finding, because it doesn’t want its adversaries to know how quickly it is learning about new tricks.
And trash heaps, while still always potentially lethal, are old school, too. Instead, the most popular place to stash a roadside booby trap is an existing bomb crater. In Iraq such blast holes are nearly as common as the garbage.
“They’re always changing on us,” said Sisk, a 50-year-old mechanic who lives in Kansas City and, when not at war, rebuilds engines and transmissions for Deffenbaugh Disposal Services. Now he’s working out of Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. “We’re doing our best to keep up.”
So far, he said, his company has found 48 improvised explosive devices — IEDs, as the military calls them — before the insurgents could find a target.
But even as the U.S. military has found more success, the number of explosives being planted grows, along with resulting casualties. Indeed, throughout the military the dilemma has become an increasing priority. In Afghanistan, IEDs became a growing threat after Taliban forces there saw how deadly the homemade bombs proved in Iraq.
Civilians are casualties, too, although they more commonly are hit by car bombs and suicide bombers. Numbers on their deaths and injuries from IEDs are elusive.
In late 2003, the Army put together a task force specifically to combat the homemade bombs. By summer of 2004, it had grown to become the Joint IED Defeat Task Force. In 2004, about $150 million was spent to fight IEDs. Last year the funding rose to $1.35 billion. This year the government expects to spend $3.3 billion.
Some in Congress have complained that the military has put too much effort into looking for technological quick fixes and not enough into honing tactics and improving intelligence about the enemy — outwitting and hunting down the bomb makers.
The Pentagon concedes that buying hardware to protect troops can be expensive, but says that its approach puts much energy into training troops and understanding the threat.
“Nobody believes there’s a silver-bullet solution out there,” said Christine DeVries, a spokeswoman for what is now called the Joint IED Defeat Organization. “We’re taking a holistic approach.”
At Fort Irwin, Calif., troops headed to Iraq are hit with dummy IED blasts to prepare them and expose them to the Army’s latest know-how about insurgent techniques.
“You really see the effects in the faces of the veterans,” said Maj. John Clearwater, a base spokesman. “You can see it flip switches in their brains and they go back in their mind to those blasts in Iraq.”
To find ways to make those troops safer, the military has reached out to specialists like those at the University of Missouri-Rolla’s Rock Mechanics and Explosives Research Center.
For instance, with Defense Department grants issued since the Iraq war began, Rolla engineers have studied how well bulletproof windows can protect against bombs. They have learned such windows might not break, but if their frames aren’t sturdy enough the thick glass can break free in one piece and injure someone.
One factor in Iraq is the virtually endless supply of explosives. By far the most common heart of a roadside bomb is an artillery shell left from Saddam Hussein’s military.
“They’re not going to run out of those,” said John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. “The joke is that before the war Iraq was an ammo dump with a government. After the war, Iraq became an ammo dump without a government.”
In Balad, talking by telephone, Sisk said anxiety produced by the bombs is constant.
Most days he heads out in caravans of four or five armored vehicles scanning supply routes for potential bombs. A Humvee might lead the way, but it is accompanied by a tractorlike device with metal detectors attached to arms that scan the shoulder of roads. Another “buffalo” vehicle with mechanical arms rumbles along. It can pull debris off the top of a suspected bomb.
When the crew finds something suspicious, it blocks off the road and calls in an ordnance disposal team. In the meantime, Sisk said, the soldiers typically alert the landowner and see what they can find out about who might have laid the trap. Discoveries of bombs make for tense times.
“My voice will go up a few octaves. The other guys will think I’m hollering at them when I’m not. I’ll get a cold sweat,” he said. “It gets better with time.”
•The military estimates it finds half of all IEDs before they can hit U.S. forces.
•Less than 10 percent of IED detonations injure troops, half the rate of a year before.
•Of those troops injured by IEDs, more than 80 percent return to duty.
•The White House says the number of tips from Iraqis about roadside bombs grew from 400 in March 2005 to more than 4,000 in December.
•In January, the military counted 803 IED attacks on troops; in June, 1,481.
•In January, the military counted 520 cases where the bombs were neutralized; in June, 903.
•The Pentagon puts IEDs into three categories — “package,” like those left on the roadside; “vehicle-borne” car bombs; and suicide bombs.
© Copyright 2006, The Kansas City Star
