Deadly IEDs

Another article in this month's Atlantic by Robert Bryce discusses how mines and IEDs have grown more and more deadly for our troops in Iraq:

The number of mines being used in Iraq, and the share of casualties for which they are responsible, dwarf anything ever before seen by the American military. During World War II three percent of U.S. combat deaths were caused by mines or booby traps. In Korea that figure was four percent. By 1967, during the Vietnam War, it was nine percent, and the Pentagon began experimenting with armored boots. From June to November of 2005, IEDs were responsible for 65 percent of American combat deaths and roughly half of all nonfatal injuries.

As a result, the Pentagon has devoted ever more money and attention to strategies to counter the devastating effect of these weapons:

The Pentagon's counter-IED strategy is coordinated by the Joint IED Defeat Task Force, which was originally set up under the Army's jurisdiction in 2003. Until last month Joseph Votel, a one-star Army general, led the effort, but the Pentagon recently assigned command to a retired four-star general—a move Votel says he supports. The task force works with about eighty different contractors on roughly a hundred counter-IED initiatives. Last year the Department of Defense spent about $1.2 billion on those and other counter-IED efforts. This year it will spend about $3.5 billion. That sum does not include money spent adding armor to vehicles.

Of course the insurgents respond in kind, developing and refining their own techniques for attacking the troops. As a result these new strategies have only been somewhat effective:

Votel told me recently that some of the countermeasures have been effective, and that the number of casualties caused by each IED has declined. But he concedes that the overall casualty rate is still climbing, and that the insurgents are changing their tactics. "This is a very, very adaptive enemy," he says. "We clearly recognize that there's a very difficult road ahead of us."

To me it's just incredible to think that nearly 2/3 of our soldiers killed have died as a result of bombs or mines remotely detonated that give them little opportunity to hit back at the insurgents. In any engagement between the insurgents and American forces, the Americans are clearly superior, often killing and wounding insurgents all out of proportion to their own number of casualties. But the IED gives the insurgents the opportunity to kill soldiers in devastating numbers while risking little harm to themselves, and this fact alone has made the Iraq insurgency so much deadlier then any insurgency American troops have found themselves in before.