In the fall of 2003, the American military realized it had a problem: Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were killing and maiming more and more U.S. troops. Something had to be done.
So the Pentagon set up a smallish, $150 million anti-IED task force, to coordinate explosives-fighting research and best practices. There were concerns, from the start, that the group would be more about re-arranging bureaucratic deck chairs than about actually beating bombs. Experiences in the field, and in meetings rooms, seem to bear those worries out. "We were hamstrung from the beginning by an inability to actually do anything," one task force member told Newsweek; others wandered about bomb sites aimlessly, picking stuff up at random; a third group went out of its way to criticize the very units that were defusing the deadly weapons.
Today, that task force, renamed the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), has grown into a 300-person, $4.4 billion behemoth. And concerns about the group have only multiplied -- especially in Congress. Rep. James Moran recently told the Christian Science Monitor that the organization has spent only about 25 percent of the money it's been given.
As Inside Defense notes, the Senate Appropriations Committee is just as antsy.
In its markup of the bill to fund the war, the Committee noted:
That's not to say that the military hasn't had its share of successes in combating improvised bombs; it clearly has. U.S. forces are now "finding about half of the IEDs before detonation," JIEDDO science adviser Army Col. Barry Shoop said at the Naval Expeditionary Forces Symposium, according to Inside Defense. If memory serves, that's up from about 40 percent. The problem is, the number of IEDs in Iraq has doubled, the Washington Times notes, So "the increase means the billions of dollars spent to date to defeat the roadside and vehicle-borne bombs have only managed to keep U.S.
casualties steady."
