Pentagon Bomb Squad Under Fire (Updated)

After six billion dollars and over three years, the Pentagon is finally going to examine the office that is supposed to help solve the improvised bomb problem. More telling, one of the people tapped to head the review was a vocal war critic early on. Congress was already casting a suspicious eye towards the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). Now, it seems, some in the Defense Department have grown frustrated, too. As the Boston Globe reports:

Alarmed by a spike in deadly roadside bombings in Iraq, the Pentagon has enlisted an early critic of the US war strategy to reevaluate the controversial office that has spent billions of dollars but failed to curb the biggest killer of American troops, according to Defense Department officials and documents.

Late last month, Undersecretary of Defense Kenneth Krieg ordered the creation of a special task force to analyze the effectiveness of the struggling Joint Improvised Explosive Devices Defeat Organization, hailed as a "mini-Manhattan Project" when it was established more than three years ago.

The review is designed to serve as an "independent sounding board," according to a Defense Department memo, and will be co chaired by Eric Evans, an electrical engineer and director of Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Paul E. Funk, a retired three-star Army general who publicly doubted that Iraq could be easily stabilized by military force.

Before US troops toppled Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Funk derided top Bush administration officials in several media interviews as thinking "all wars are small and will be over quickly." He also warned that US forces could be in Iraq "for years," believing that the United States did not have sufficient forces to pacify the country and would probably face years of resistance from home-grown forces.

It's about time. Nobody outside the Pentagon seemed to know much about JIEDDO, due to secrecy. And a lot of folks inside the military's explosives-fighting community had a pretty low opinion of the group. (The aimless wandering about bomb sites and critiques of the very units that were defusing the deadly weapons didn't help.) Looks like its time for a reevaluation.

UPDATE: One positive effect from all this scrutiny is that JIEDDO is finally starting to open up about what the group has been doing. Here's retired General Montgommery Meigs, the organization's chief, in a Marine Corps Times opinion piece:

But to say JIEDDO and the troops in the field to whom we provide new capabilities and techniques have not made progress does a disservice to soldiers and Marines in harm’s way and to hardworking service members and civilians in our organization, many of them veterans of combat.

Ask the troops about the training they now receive in the maneuver exercises at the Marine
Corps Air Ground Combat Center at
Twentynine Palms, Calif., and the Army’s
Combat Training Centers, where the IED
threat is now portrayed violently and realistically.
JIEDDO provided the funds and a good deal of the concepts.

Ask troops downrange who have had former
Special Forces personnel from our Training
Advisory Teams go on patrol to help them improve their combat skills under fire whether
JIEDDO’s trainers made a difference.
In the past year, JIEDDO has funded almost
14,000 jammers for Marine and Army units;
the total buy will reach more than 30,000 by year’s end. [16,000 jammers in a year?!?!? -- ed.]* This gear saves lives every day. We funded 8,100 Frag Kit V armor sets for Army and Marine M1114s and M1151s.*

We fielded robots for explosive ordnance disposal teams, Cougar vehicles for route clearance teams, and Guardian, a man-portable jammer for dismounted operations. JIEDDO
worked with the Army to accelerate from delivery in fiscal 2008 and 2009 the Warrior-A
unmanned aerial vehicles and Constant Hawk and Highlighter aircraft now operating in support of II Marine Expeditionary Force, 1st
Cavalry Division, and the 25th Infantry Division in Iraq, an unprecedented intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability.

Additionally, by focusing the efforts of elements of the national intelligence community,
JIEDDO organizes products that go to units daily to support their efforts to destroy the networks that do the senseless bloody work of attacking civilians and coalition troops. We’ve seen hits on the pages of our intelligence Web site rocket to more than 200,000 in just a couple of weeks.