[NYTr] Afghan IED problem is getting out of control - Pt.1

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Washington Post - Sep 30, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/29/AR2007092901743_pf.html

'The IED problem is getting out of control. 
We've got to stop the bleeding.'

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- By the late summer of 2002, as the
first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington
approached, an American victory in Afghanistan appeared all but assured.

A pro-Western government had convened in Kabul. Reconstruction teams
fanned out through the provinces. U.S. and coalition troops hunted
Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in the mountains along the Pakistani
border.

Among the few shadows on this sunny Central Asian tableau -- besides
the escape of Osama bin Laden -- was the first appearance of roadside
bombs triggered by radio waves.

There were not many. U.S. forces would report fewer than two dozen
improvised explosive devices of all sorts in Afghanistan in 2002. But
the occasional RC -- radio-controlled -- bombs were much more
sophisticated than the booby traps with trip wires typically seen by
American troops.

A triggerman with a radio transmitter could send a signal several
hundred yards to a hidden bomb built with a receiver linked to an
electrical firing circuit, which in turn detonated an attached
artillery shell or a scavenged land mine.

That receiver included a slender box about three inches square housing
a modified circuit board resembling a long-legged spider. The Spider
Mod 1, as the device was dubbed, would remain a weapon of Afghan
bombmakers in various iterations for more than five years -- and an
emblem of defiance against the world's only military superpower.

Captured Spider devices were shipped to the United States for forensic
examination. Maj. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the U.S. task force
in Afghanistan, had a sense of what his troops were up against. "What
can we do to protect our forces?" he asked his subordinates. "I'll take
a 30 percent solution. That's better than zero."

Even that modest request seemed daunting. U.S. soldiers and Marines had
no mobile electronic countermeasures capable of disrupting RC triggers
by blocking the radio signal.

Bomb squads -- known in the military as EOD teams, for explosive
ordnance disposal -- carried a feeble jammer called the Citadel, which
created a stationary protective "bubble" around technicians defusing a
device. But the few Citadels in service could not be mounted on
vehicles to protect patrols and convoys, and they were too weak to
provide protection beyond a few yards.

Special Operations units employed electronic countermeasures, and the
Secret Service used powerful mobile jammers to shield presidential
motorcades and other prominent targets. Yet such gadgets were few in
number, much in demand and highly classified.

That left the Navy as a solution. For decades, electronic
countermeasures had been a vital part of airborne combat for Navy
fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission," as did surface
ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me,"
said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center
in Washington.

After a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck stuffed with explosives killed 241
U.S. troops in Beirut in October 1983, the Navy began investing in a
top-secret program in counter-RC technology. That led to a family of
jammers, known as the Channel series, intended to protect ships
arriving at foreign ports where RC bombs could be hidden in the docks.

By 2002, some of these devices were considered obsolete and had been
consigned to a warehouse shelf. But Navy specialists in Indian Head,
Md., 30 miles south of Washington, reconfigured a jammer they called
Acorn, which neatly matched the frequencies used by the Spider Mod 1 in
Afghanistan. In November 2002, 45 days after the first plea for help
from Afghanistan, several dozen Acorns began arriving at Bagram Air
Base.

Army EOD experts distributed each device, mounting the gray box and
antenna on Humvees and Special Forces sport-utility vehicles.
Instructing soldiers in the nuances of wave propagation and other
electronic mysteries proved challenging; one device reportedly was
installed on a water truck that never left the base. Successful jamming
meant troops had no way of recognizing that they were even under attack
by a radio-controlled IED. Acorns could also interfere with radios and
other electronics.

Still, Vines's "30 percent solution" was more than fulfilled. As one
retired Navy captain later recalled of Acorn: "We expected it to last
six months before the bad guys figured it out." Instead, more than
2,000 Acorns eventually outfitted the force in Afghanistan where, like
the Spider, it would remain a fixture on the battlefield for the next
five years.

While U.S. forces parried the fledgling IED threat in Afghanistan,
secret planning for the invasion of Iraq had accelerated. Little
thought was given to roadside bombs as a serious obstacle to the
American juggernaut. But U.S. strategists feared that Saddam Hussein
would destroy his own oil production facilities rather than let them be
captured. Scorched-earth tactics by retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 had
turned Kuwait's oil fields into an inferno.

U.S. intelligence in early 2003 reported that wellheads in southern
Iraq had been wired for detonation, and that Iraqi forces probably had
the ability to use radio-controlled triggers to detonate those
demolition charges. Jammers would be needed to secure the fields.

Even as the Navy converted Acorn into a battlefield countermeasure,
Army engineers at Fort Monmouth, N.J., were working on their own mobile
jammers. First in a laboratory and then in field tests, they modified
an old system called Shortstop, originally built in 1990 as a
footlocker-size gadget to confound the proximity fuses in incoming
artillery and mortar shells.

By intercepting and modifying the radio signals emitted by such fuses,
Shortstop tricked the shells into believing they were approaching the
ground, causing them to detonate prematurely. Shortstop had been
completed too late for use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and it was
deployed to Bosnia only briefly. A Pentagon inventory showed that the
Army had almost 300 systems in storage.

With different computer chips and a cleverly modified ham radio
antenna, Shortstop made an admirable jammer. The wife of one Fort
Monmouth engineer collected miniature kitchen witches that inspired a
new name for the device: Warlock Green. After final fixes in
California, five Warlocks were shipped to Kuwait in time to accompany
the invasion forces plunging into Iraq in March 2003, according to a
senior officer involved in the effort.

The countermeasure proved unnecessary. Not a single oil well was rigged
for radio-controlled detonation. Some oil facilities were sabotaged,
but the damage was less grievous than feared.

Yet the Army jammer had found a home on the battlefield. As Shortstops
were transformed into Warlock Greens -- each device cost about
$100,000, according to a contractor involved in the program -- they
were shipped in large Rubbermaid storage cases to Afghanistan, where a
technician laminated his business card onto the devices so soldiers
knew whom to call for help. Others would be packed up, driven to the
Baltimore-Washington international airport in a rented van and flown to
Iraq.

By late summer 2003, almost 100 Warlocks had been deployed, according
to an Army document that said IEDs were "increasing in number and
complexity at an alarming rate." Another Navy jammer, originally
designed to protect four-star flag officers, also began arriving in the
theater -- first six, then 30 and eventually 300.

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of
all sorts would be in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had
started. "We're going to need a lot more jammers," Col. Bruce Jette,
who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, told a
Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to
need a jammer on every vehicle."

Bombmaking by definition required explosives, and in that commodity, as
in oil, Iraq was richly endowed. "The entire country was one big ammo
dump," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would observe this past March.
"It's just a huge, huge problem."

The problem was also huge in 2003. Yet U.S. strategists, who before the
invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no
comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now
estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1
million tons of explosives. "There's more ammunition in Iraq than any
place I've ever been in my life, and it's not securable," Gen. John P.
Abizaid told the Senate Appropriations Committee shortly after taking
over U.S. Central Command in July 2003. "I wish I could tell you that
we had it all under control. We don't."

To forestall looting, U.S. forces tried spreading putrid substances
across the dumps, as well as cementing artillery rounds together or
burying large caches. "We're now finding people tunneling 30 feet down
and carting the stuff away," an analyst noted earlier this year.
Sloshing diesel fuel across the dumps and lighting it, among several
haphazard "blow and go" techniques, often simply scattered the rounds.
More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war
munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional
Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government
analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive
can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue
long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also
vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage
facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation
cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers
of IEDs. Main Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys
driving between Baghdad and Kuwait, became a common target. Three
artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji, discovered on July 29,
reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were soon
found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car
key fobs or wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common
brand -- with a range of 200 meters or less. Radio controls from toy
cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor attached to a bomb
detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and
triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious
signals could cause premature detonations, sometimes killing the
emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install safety switches in the
contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind
highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of
guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly,
returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early
in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about
one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large FOBs -- forward
operating bases -- with few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the
initiative on these common routes," according to a 2007 account of the
counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority of
IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys
routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents
planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated
explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull
over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month,
according to a House Armed Services Committee document. Most were a
nuisance; some proved stunning and murderous. A large explosion along a
roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams
tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two
crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19
that demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the
U.N. special representative and 22 others.

Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of
battle, vanished" in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

IEDs had quickly moved to the top of Abizaid's anxieties at Central
Command. A Lebanese American who spoke Arabic and who had studied as an
Olmsted scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman, the four-star
general had seen for himself the aggravation that roadside bombs caused
Israeli forces in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks,
Abizaid publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical
guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt appraisal that reportedly irked the
Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of unsecured ammunition
in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the
realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and
disgruntled after the national army was disbanded in late May --
possessed extensive skill in handling explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that
could detect bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or
something," as he put it. "We thought the problem would spread,"
Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly sophisticated."
Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American
ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long
after the capture of Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq,
told Pentagon strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's
"footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an occupation force that was
two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I don't want
is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior
Army commander.

That meant mounting most troops on Humvees, few of which were built to
withstand bombs or even small-arms fire. Soldiers had begun fashioning
crude "hillbilly armor" for their vehicles from scrap metal. Even
factory-built armored vehicles had been designed to resist projectiles
fired at a distance, according to a senior Army scientist, and not
against point-blank explosions in which steel fragments and blast
overpressure -- from gases hotter than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit forming
in 1/10,000th of a second -- struck simultaneously.

Production of the stout "uparmored" Humvee started in 1996, but as a
specialty vehicle for military police and Special Forces; an average of
one per day had been built before the war, according to congressional
documents. The entire fleet of uparmored Humvees in the theater in 2003
totaled 235, the Army chief of staff would later report.

With no master list of where uparmored Humvees were deployed,
logisticians searched U.S. motor pools around the world. Seventy were
found in Air Force missile fields in North Dakota and elsewhere,
according to a former senior officer on the joint staff, but it took a
four-star order to pry them away for duty in the Middle East.

Protecting individual soldiers was a bit simpler. In June 2003, the
Pentagon decided to outfit every trooper in theater with tough
interceptor body armor. By December, eight vendors would produce 25,000
sets a month, according to congressional documents, and by April 2004
all U.S. military personnel in Iraq had received high-quality
protection. The documents show that Congress has appropriated more than
$4 billion for body armor so far.

But as summer yielded to fall in 2003, the final defense against
roadside bombs often fell to a few hundred EOD technicians, whose
informal motto -- "Initial success or total failure" -- suggested the
hazards in what was known as "the long walk."

Summoned to neutralize a suspected bomb, a tech donned a cumbersome,
blast-resistant outfit that resembled a deep-sea diving suit, with a
transparent face shield and extra padding to protect femoral arteries,
genitals and the spinal column. The robots then available to
"interrogate" a device were crude and few in number, forcing the tech
to conduct the examination himself.

"All you can hear is the fan in your helmet, your heart beating and
your breathing," recalled Sgt. First Class Troy Parker, who served in
Iraq in 2003. "And you're wondering if this is the last walk you're
ever going to take."

Sometimes it was. On Sept. 10, 2003, in Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Joseph E.
Robsky Jr. was trying to disarm an IED when an apparent RC-trigger
detonated a mortar shell packed with C-4 plastic explosive. Robsky, 31,
would be among more than 50 EOD technicians killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan by the late summer of this year.

Within hours of his death, a call went out to assemble all EOD robots
in Baghdad at the international airport for an inventory, according to
a senior Navy EOD officer in Iraq at the time. They found 18 robots,
and only six of them worked.

By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations
chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who
included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to
U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of
control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've
got to stop the bleeding."

A Lebanese American West Point graduate like Abizaid, Cody was the son
of a Chevrolet dealer in Montpelier, Vt. Stocky and intense, with thick
hair the color of gunmetal, he had fired the first shots of the Gulf
War in January 1991 while attacking an Iraqi radar site as commander of
an Apache helicopter battalion. His appetites ran to hard work, New
York Times crossword puzzles, Red Man chewing tobacco, Diet Coke and
two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms, which he could eat in one sitting.

Hughes drafted a sheaf of PowerPoint slides labeled "IED Task Force: A
Way," which proposed forming a small unit with a Washington director
and two field teams "designed to respond to incidents." To recruit
active-duty Special Operations troops would take at least nine months,
so with Cody's approval and a chit for $20 million, Hughes hired
Wexford Group International, a security consultant in Vienna, Va. Two
retired Delta Force soldiers soon arrived in room 2D468 of the Pentagon
to begin assembling the field teams from a "black Rolodex" of former
special operators.

To run his task force, Cody chose one of the Army's most charismatic
young officers, Joseph L. Votel, then 45, who had just been selected
for promotion to brigadier general. A tall, good-humored Minnesotan,
Votel had commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan in 2001 and
2002. More recently, in Iraq, three of his Rangers had been killed near
Haditha with a suicide bomb detonated by a pregnant woman; two other
Rangers had died in a roadside bombing on Route Irish, near the Baghdad
airport.

Votel expected the job of controlling IEDs to take six months, maybe
eight. "And then we move on," he said. He moved his small staff into a
shabby, malodorous corner of the Army operations center in the Pentagon
basement and posted a sign on the wall: "STOP THE BLEEDING."

Even by Pentagon standards, the hours were brutal. Those who lived in
the Washington exurbs typically rose at 3:45 a.m. to be at their desks
by 5:30, where they remained until 9 p.m. or later. To avoid
bureaucratic friction with other agencies, Votel advised: "Stay small,
stay light, be agile, move quickly. . . . There's goodness in
smallness."

About a dozen former Delta Force operators were hired as contractors
for the nucleus of the field teams. Some would earn $1,000 a day while
deployed, according to two knowledgeable officers. Cody sent them to
Walter Reed Army Medical Center to interview soldiers wounded by IEDs,
to learn "what they wished they had done" before being blown up.

To arm the teams, the task force borrowed rifles from the Old Guard
ceremonial regiment at Fort Myer and drafted permission slips for the
contractors to carry weapons in Iraq. Instead of standard Army pistols,
the men requested the Glock 9mm. "Sir," Votel told Cody, "these guys
want Glocks." Cody gestured impatiently. "So get them Glocks."

In his diary on Nov. 17, 2003, Cody scribbled: "We have to make sure
our commanders and soldiers are not at the end of this process but are
engaged throughout the process." Toward that end, Votel and Hughes flew
to Baghdad to secure a small compound at Camp Victory and to explain
the task force to senior officers in Iraq.

The intent was to train troops to recognize and counter IEDs, Votel
said, and to "build an architecture between the theater and Big Army"
back in the States. IED incidents would be documented in detail at Fort
Leavenworth, Kan., and notably effective tactics and techniques would
be disseminated to units preparing to deploy.

Eventually, Votel added, the effort would move "left of boom" by
attacking bomber networks before devices could be placed and detonated.
In the IED battle, the task force was to help "protect, predict,
prevent, detect and neutralize" -- known as "tenets of assured
mobility" -- which Votel borrowed as his conceptual framework from the
Army Engineer School.

"Why are you bringing me a 7,000-mile screwdriver to fix this from
D.C.?" asked one skeptical general in Baghdad. "Nothing good ever comes
from Washington." Still, most commanders welcomed the assistance.

The first seven-man field team flew to Iraq on Dec. 12, 2003. Several
others were to follow, including one sent to Afghanistan. Working
initially with the 4th Infantry Division, and shuttling between bases
in unarmored Chevy Suburbans, the team members in Iraq advocated
infantry basics: "shoot, move, communicate, clear routes, don't set
patterns." Troops were advised to watch for wires and triggermen away
from the road, to be unpredictable, to use a "porcupine approach" in
patrols and convoys, with all guns bristling and flank guards deployed.

By February 2004, the number of IED attacks in Iraq approached 100 a
week. About half detonated, a proportion that would remain relatively
constant for the next three years. The bleeding had hardly stopped, but
to Central Command it seemed to have stabilized.

The casualty-per-blast ratio was dropping. Troops quickly learned
counter-IED survival skills. Some bombers were arrested or killed. On
good days the number of attacks dwindled to single digits, and U.S.
bomb fatalities in February totaled nine, fewer than half the number in
January.

"It looks to me like we're winning this thing," Air Force Lt. Gen.
Lance Smith, the Centcom deputy commander, told Abizaid at their
forward headquarters in Qatar. "We're kicking ass."

Abizaid gave a thin smile. "Stand by," he said. "They're just plotting."

On March 28, 2004, U.S. troops shut down the incendiary newspaper of
Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric with a volatile following in the
Baghdad slums. "All hell broke loose," a Centcom officer later noted.
By late spring, IED attacks had nearly doubled, with bombers apparently
drawn from the ranks of disaffected Shiites as well as Sunnis.

IEDs had become "the greatest casualty producer" in Iraq, Abizaid told
Congress, surpassing RPG-7s, a rocket-propelled grenade. Insurgents
increasingly promoted their deeds with videotapes released to
al-Jazeera and other Arab media outlets. Spectacular explosions of
Abrams tanks and other "icon vehicles," as U.S. officers called
high-value targets, soon filled airwaves and Web sites.

For Joe Votel and his task force in Washington, the IED fight had
become a complex exercise in phenomenology. How did blast and shrapnel
interact at close range? How did bomber cells thrive? Why did jammers
seem to work in some areas and not others? The six- to eight-month time
frame he foresaw for controlling IEDs would require an extension.

More than 500 mobile jammers had reached Iraq, but thousands more were
needed. By late spring 2004, the task force had finally established a
jammer strategy: get as many systems into theater as possible --
including Warlock Green, a sister device known as Warlock Red, and a
Navy jammer called Cottonwood, which was removed from the Suburban in
which it typically rode, installed in an armored vehicle and renamed
Ironwood. Meanwhile, engineers would develop a single powerful variant
that covered as much of the RC spectrum as possible.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a former paratrooper and Vietnam veteran
from San Diego who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, watched
the Army's response to IEDs with impatience. In February 2004, a
committee memo to the service noted that "arsenals, depots, industry,
and steel mills" were not at full capacity in making heavy plates for
uparmored Humvees. House staffers visited the steel plants, extracting
pledges to defer commercial work until almost 7,000 Humvee armor kits
were finished in May, six months ahead of the Army's original schedule.

Hunter was particularly incensed to find skittish troops bolting thin
steel and even plywood to military trucks traveling along Route Tampa
and other hazardous Iraqi roads. In January, he had asked Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to design an armored
gun truck similar to those used in the Vietnam War, the sole surviving
example of which he found in the Army's transportation museum at Fort
Eustis, Va.

In March, a five-ton prototype, with steel and ballistic fiberglass
protection added to the cab and truck bed, was shipped for testing to
Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

On June 4, Hunter appeared at the Pentagon's River Entrance with a
freshly painted gun truck and placards, mounted on easels, listing its
virtues. Cody and others from the top brass wandered out to kick the
tires. No one wanted to buck the powerful chairman, but several
paratroopers soon appeared to inform Hunter "how much they loved the
Humvee better than these big things, how nice and small and agile it
was," he later recalled.

Hunter was not dissuaded. Nearly 100 gun-truck kits would be sent to
Iraq, at $40,000 each, and 18 to Afghanistan. Some soldiers sang the
truck's praises, while others found it top-heavy and "something of a
grenade basket," according to a senior commander in the 10th Mountain
Division. Still, of more than 9,000 medium and heavy military transport
trucks rolling through Iraq in late 2004, only about one in 10 had
armor, according to GlobalSecurity.org. The convoys remained vulnerable.

A Vietnam-era relic would hardly solve the IED threat permanently.
Several influential voices in Washington now questioned the Pentagon's
approach. Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the president of the Institute
for Defense Analyses and a former U.S. commander in chief in the
Pacific, complained to the joint staff about the lack of systematic,
rigorous analysis of IED trends. "The Army is not dealing with the IED
problem well, because it's not in their nature," Blair said. "They're
used to taking off from the line of departure, capturing the enemy
capital and having a victory parade."

Moreover, the emphasis on defeating the device, Blair added, was "like
playing soccer and you're spending all your money and attention on the
goalie's gloves. At that point, not only is this the last line of
defense, but the ball is already in the air."

At Centcom, Smith also was frustrated by the lack of urgency. Four
months after concluding that "we're winning this thing," he now had
doubts about the national commitment to overcoming IEDs. "We have got
to get at this thing in a different way than we're addressing it right
now," he advised Abizaid in Qatar in June 2004. "We've got to have
something like the Manhattan Project."

The allusion to the crash program that had built the atomic bomb in
World War II -- an effort eventually employing 125,000 people and many
of the nation's finest scientific minds -- appealed to Abizaid's
imagination. Several days later he wrote a personal message to the
Pentagon leadership asking for a "Manhattan Project-like" approach to
IEDs.

"What the [expletive] does he think we're doing?" Cody snapped upon
learning of the request. But the Centcom commander's plea could hardly
be brushed aside. In a meeting with Cody and Votel, according to a
participant in the session, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked whether the Army could meet
Abizaid's request.

The Army believed it could, particularly if the service was made the
executive agent for an expanded effort that involved the entire Defense
Department. That meant getting the other services to relinquish money,
personnel and bureaucratic control, an encroachment that quickly
triggered alarms.

Meetings convened, exchanges grew stormy. The Navy and Marine Corps had
pursued their own counter-IED programs, and the Air Force particularly
resisted putting the Army in charge of a Pentagon-wide enterprise.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz believed change was
necessary. Why, he had asked his staff, did it take so long for armor,
jammers and other counter-IED materiel to reach Iraq and Afghanistan?
"Where is all this stuff?" he complained. "When is it going to get to
theater?"

The effort seemed fragmented and ad hoc -- "sucked into technology
rabbit holes," as Votel put it. A survey by the Joint Forces Command in
Norfolk that spring had found that at least 132 government agencies
were now involved in IED issues, from the FBI and CIA to the National
Security Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center in
Charlottesville, Va., according to an Army brigadier general.

The battle against IEDs exceeded the management capacity of a single
service, Wolfowitz concluded. On July 12, 2004, he signed a
one-paragraph order that transformed the Army task force into a joint
task force. Votel would remain director, with cramped offices in the
Army operations center. But he now reported to Wolfowitz rather than to
Cody, and the task force would draw expertise from all services.

Cody, who became the Army's four-star vice chief of staff in late June,
accepted the decision graciously, even as he told one senior Army
officer who now worked for Wolfowitz, "Don't forget where you came
from."

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S.
effort. A $100 million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3
billion in 2005. In subsequent meetings with industry executives and
the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz declared that there was
no higher priority.

Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to
exterminating Osama bin Laden.

"This is a major strategic effort," Wolfowitz told one group. "What can
you put into it?"

[Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report]

© 2007 The Washington Post