Analytical methods that quantitatively assess the effectiveness of IED countermeasures are needed. There are various points in the chain of events leading up to an IED attack at which improved detection and disruption technologies might be usefully applied.
For each detection opportunity, there are basic-research issues regarding the particular signatures, methods, and limits of detection. With respect to disruption, technical opportunities exist to improve current approaches or to make them more readily fielded in theater. Available resources—energetic material, initiators, triggering devices, knowledge, finances, and facilities—are critical in determining the type, number, and effectiveness of IED attacks and directly influence the potential for detection and countermeasures.
New capabilities and associated basic research are needed to exploit the dependence of the IED threat on those resources. A major portion of the current IED activities presented to the committee appears to be focused on the operational aspects of the IED threat, the aspects most readily addressed by conventional military means.
The recommendations reported here are intended to supplement ongoing work and to provide a broader focus on disrupting the entire IED threat chain. The following recommendations represent research challenges in the five areas discussed above that are compelling based on their potential impact, the potential timeline for their payoff, and the relative level of current effort in these areas. Research should include identifying and analyzing key elements of the threat chain, such as recruitment, availability of technical expertise, diffusion of knowledge, popular support, and the networks and relationships among players.
Research should develop a general understanding of how decisions especially those related to innovations, methods, targets, and timing are made and how information is communicated in underground organizations, and should examine adversary attitudes toward risk.
Due to the role public support, tolerance, or aversion can play in an IED campaign, research should seek to develop better ways of gauging public opinion in different cultural, social, and political contexts and should develop a better understanding of the role of emotion, interpretation, understanding, values, images, and symbols in the IED threat.
Such research should draw on the fields of political science, political economy, sociology, religion, psychology, media and communication, criminology, terrorism studies, anthropology, history, operations research, and international studies.
Decision theory, risk, cultural anthropology, and appropriate regional expertise are particularly relevant. Analysis of the IED problem should not focus exclusively on current conflicts but should anticipate other potential conflict zones by using the social sciences.
Systematic attention should be paid to lessons learned and to their future application. Research can elucidate where and when the threat may migrate and what form it is likely to take. The role of the Internet as a source of information for constructing IEDs and for promoting the cross-national diffusion of ideas and tactics is a particularly important issue that should be examined. Researchers in political science, sociology, psychology, criminology, anthropology, history, media and communication, and international studies can all make valuable contributions.
Research should address the continued development of theory and data to map patterns of social networks, especially during times of conflict and stress. Social-network research can be engaged to understand the conditions and characteristics that could encourage the formation of new networks that support security and stabilization rather than disruption and violence.
Research can explore how identities are formed in and sustained by networks, how ethnicity or religion becomes a determinant of identity and may become a catalyst of violence, and how ethnic and sectarian divisions can be overcome. Research should aim to understand the dynamics of societies in the face of rapid and fundamental change. Studies should examine how to undermine terrorism or move to democracy for societies that have a variety of cleavages, values, and cultures.
Researchers need to develop a deep understanding of varied cultures and societies and not focus only on those prone to violence; regionally focused. The disciplines of cultural anthropology, religion, sociology, history, political science, criminology, and international studies can contribute. Automated data-collection produces massive amounts of data that may be incomplete and noisy. The timely, accurate use of the data will require the ability to automate data integration and analysis.
Research should answer:. How to produce reliable, actionable information from noisy, temporal, and partial data. Research should include development of methods to integrate data from diverse sources into a single inference structure; of open-architecture inference engines that can support new plug-in sensor packages and data sources; and of prototypes for massively scalable data storage and processing architectures. Computer and computational scientists and researchers in data acquisition and analysis, data representation and statistical inference, image interpretation, and sensors can make valuable contributions.
The ability to identify different types of IED threats in different contexts requires understanding the signatures associated with the threats and the types of data and intelligence information needed to detect those signatures.
Such an understanding would provide a basis for developing data collection requirements. This understanding is needed for known classes of IED threats and potential new classes. Research should include developing models of the relationships between threat events and actionable information and defining the requirements for sensor types and ancillary data.
Specifying those relationships and requirements will further the development of sensors to acquire the data needed to generate actionable information for a given set of threat events. Computational and behavioral social, cultural, and geopolitical scientists and the military,. Metrics and analytical methods for assessing IED countermeasures would allow identification of what works, what does not work, and why.
Specifically, research should seek to determine trends in overall counter-IED operational effectiveness; determine the relative effectiveness of different counter-IED systems and tactics; discern differences and trends in adversary systems and tactics in different areas; design, test, and evaluate new systems, tactics, and operational concepts; anticipate and pre-empt adversary countermeasures against new systems and tactics; and provide realistic and dynamic simulations.
Improved analytical tools would support program planning, operational planning, tactical development, and counter-IED training. Research in statistics, game theory, operations research, military research, and social, cognitive, and economic sciences can make valuable contributions. Improvements in persistent surveillance can provide capabilities throughout the IED threat chain. The key research questions can be divided among platform development, sensor development, and image-and data-processing.
Another area for study is the control, coordination, and communication of a large number of assets. In a protracted fight in IED-laden ground, the initiative remains with the bomb builder. As an explosive ordnance disposal EOD officer charged with executing on counter-IED objectives, and after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have tried to examine what might be learned from this fight and to consider: How successful was the U. What worked and what did not? It slowed dismounted troops forced to sweep with metal detectors and divert around empty intersections.
It partitioned Baghdad with foot high concrete walls and caused a fertilizer shortage for farmers in Afghanistan. It was the only insurgent weapon that could cause mass civilian casualties, undermining local governance, the credibility of counter-insurgent efforts, and ensuring a steady stream of atrocities — of the horrors of intervention — could be broadcast globally.
Whether you measure in blood or treasure, the IED also proved the costliest feature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for American forces. The same proportion holds for Americans who were wounded, totaling more than 30, service members.
When history looks back on these wars, the dominant images will be of the aftermath of these improvised bombs, of their devastating effects on a Baghdad market or of veteran and Afghan amputees. The IED, after all, is a weapon that waits. It does not require the insurgent to expose himself to employ it, balancing risk in favor of the bomber. Unlike with a firefight, when troops take on a roadside bomb, the best possible outcome is to return to the status quo ante.
There is no opportunity to gain the initiative and take the fight to the enemy. Even a high rate of success in finding and clearing roadside bombs leaves the counter-insurgent at a cost and risk disadvantage over time. This imbalance makes the IED, once emplaced, an asymmetric weapon — a non-standard method where a weaker opponent gains considerable advantage.
The IED enabled the insurgent to target U. It mitigated U. Thomas Metz. Second, did IED casualty rates drop more quickly for U. Third, how might changes to U. Each question can be examined in the context of the three counter-IED lines of operation in U. Efforts to find, clear, and defend against IEDs showed modest gains over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Iraq, improved force protection measures, including armor and electronic jammers for radio-controlled IEDs, also quadrupled the number of IED attacks required to cause a casualty, from five to Total IED attacks also fell precipitously beginning in June , six months into a 15 percent increase in U.
As a result, IED casualties dropped dramatically even before coalition troop numbers fell similarly. In Iraq, key technical innovations made gains against the IED, but the tide turned only when gains were made against the insurgency itself. Gains in Afghanistan came much later, however, and in a different form.
Through , the IED was winning — the number of attacks required to cause a casualty actually fell from 14 to Total IED casualties spiked thereafter, as a surge of U. As the surge wound down and Afghan forces were placed in the lead in , coalition IED casualties dropped from 60 to 40 percent of total casualties. Their impact on the security and stability of affected States is profound: IED attacks not only hinder the political, social and economic development of a country, they also block life-saving humanitarian aid.
In recent years, IEDs have become the primary weapon for non-state armed groups across many conflicts. IED incidents have occurred in 66 countries and territories in the last three years, including in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Eight countries saw over 1, civilian casualties of IEDs. Cheap and relatively easy to construct, IEDs can be made anywhere from a wide range of materials — from everyday tools to commercial explosives used in construction and mining.
The lack of proper stockpile security of military and commercial explosives — making them susceptible to diversion into illicit hands — also presents a significant security risk.
IEDs now kill 10 times more civilians than landmines do in Afghanistan. Cheap and easy to construct, IEDs allow lightly armed and barely trained militants to engage far better equipped security forces. They help tip the balance in an asymmetric conflict by enabling insurgents to inflict casualties without exposing themselves.
The unpredictable, combat-avoiding nature of IED attacks can effectively sap the morale of security forces. IEDs significantly limit the mobility of troops as time-consuming sweeps for concealed devices need to be conducted. Forces are weighed down with equipment — metal detectors, electronic counter-measure systems, and robots.
0コメント