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North County Times November 17, 2010

MILITARY: Congressman calls for roadside bomb point man in Afghanistan

By Mark Walker

The Pentagon is falling short in its efforts to combat roadside bombs in Afghanistan by failing to appoint a single authority to put resources where they're needed most, Rep. Duncan Hunter said Wednesday.

The El Cajon Republican, a Marine Corps reservist, said reducing the number of bombs and the carnage they're inflicting in the southern Helmand province should be a top priority of military commanders.

"There is no organization in theater whose primary mission is to counter the (bomb-making) networks," said Hunter, who served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan before being elected to Congress in 2008.

Hunter's remarks came shortly after a briefing he sought with Pentagon officials to press for a coordinated response to eliminate improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, the weapon responsible for about 60 percent of all troop deaths and injuries.

"It's the biggest threat in this war," Hunter said during a conference call with a handful of reporters. "The only metric that I can go by is that we are taking more and more casualties from IEDs."

Of the 57 Camp Pendleton troops killed in Afghanistan this year, close to two-thirds died in bomb blasts, according to records kept by the North County Times.

Hunter continues to push for an Iraq-style campaign to "take back the roads" from insurgents.

In 2006, a U.S. Army aviation battalion dubbed Task Force ODIN ---- for Observe, Detect, Identify and Neutralize ---- focused on areas where insurgents were planting the most roadside bombs and traced them back to manufacturing sites, which ground forces then destroyed.

Hunter has complained since shortly after taking office that a similar effort has not been a priority in Helmand province, the site of the most intense fighting in Afghanistan and where 10,000 local Marines are stationed. He repeatedly has asked the Pentagon for more unmanned drones, cameras and other initiatives to spot insurgents planting bombs.

"In (the) south, that kind of organization does not exist," said Hunter, whose 49th Congressional District includes portions of Poway and Ramona.

Hunter said he recently took a map of Helmand and plotted where all the roadside bombs were being reported. That exercise readily shows the areas where a task force should focus its efforts, he said.

"Why not provide persistent surveillance where we know they are, to take back the roads like we did in Iraq?" he said.

On Tuesday, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. George Flynn told reporters in Washington that new equipment is being sent to the troops ---- a handheld, ground-penetrating radar device. They should help Marines find the bombs, which often are manufactured with hard-to-detect fertilizer and small amounts of metal, said Flynn, who heads Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

The Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, established during the Iraq war, has spent about $20 billion developing tools to combat roadside bombs. But that task is harder in Afghanistan, analysts say, because bomb makers often rely on pressure plates rather than cell phone signals to detonate them, so countermeasures used in Iraq aren't as reliable.

For squads conducting foot patrols in Helmand, the Marine Corps is increasingly relying on bomb-sniffing Labrador retrievers to find the explosives. The Marine Corps is so convinced of the success of dogs that it has launched an effort to raise their number from about 300 to 647.

One explanation for a rise in casualties this year is the 30,000-troop surge ordered by President Barack Obama last year. Most of those additional troops arrived in the spring and began pressing the fight against the insurgency in areas not previously patrolled.

John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org in Washington, which closely monitors military affairs, said the key challenge confronting the military in Afghanistan is its larger size in comparison with Iraq, its often difficult terrain and increasingly larger fertilizer bombs coming from multiple manufacturing sites.

"ODIN was successful because ... there was a relative small number of workshops where (bombs) were being made and they could trace the vehicle that was used to transport bombs to their place of origin, and there you found the bomb maker. Once they got the hang of that, they were able to roll it up pretty quickly."

Hunter said that when the next Congress convenes under GOP leadership in January, he expects the Armed Services Committee on which he sits to become more of a "war committee" that will put pressure on the Pentagon to address areas where it believes there are shortcomings.