Aspirin

There are some smart Bad Guys. That should come as no surprise, though that is not the popular image of the terrorist. We tend to think of the fundamentalist fanatic, focused, to be sure, but not very bright.

That is not useful shorthand, though it is convenient. One of the baddest of the Bad Guys, Kalid Shiekh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina . The place of his matriculation is not so much a commentary on the excellence of the Tarheel educational system as it is an indictment of the idea that the insurgents are unsophisticated monsters.

Monsters, maybe, but they are much more than that. The 9/11 hijackers were all college graduates, not an illiterate among them. The lead on that operation, Mohammed Atta, had his certificate in Urban Conservation, of all things.

So it is to be expected that this has been a complicated struggle. I won’t harp on the fact that we tried to get Iraq on the cheap as far as the number of troops goes. There are honest differences of opinion on how things were going to turn out, but a more conservative view turns out not to have been quite so spectacularly deadly in its consequences.

The looting that followed the decisive defeat of Saddam was the early warning that trouble was coming. The failure to secure the weapons caches of the former regime meant that vast reserves of explosive material was available for alterative uses.

The term of art was “improvised explosive device,” or IED. That is the polite, if somewhat inaccurate description of non-convention explosives. It is far too benign a term for an artillery shell wired to detonate on command. But that is what we are stuck with, now, and the longer acronym that describes IEDs packed to the roof of a car or truck. Those are called vehicle-borne IEDs, or VBIEDs for short.

I first ran into the concept a dozen years ago as it was used in Bahrain . There, the Shiite majority used little incendiary devices with fuzes made of things like books of matches. They were harassment devices more than anything else, but several of them might be reported in a single day. They were a palpable reminder of simmering dissatisfaction against the regime, which in turn was managed by a particularly effective practitioner of the art or interrogation who worked for the Sheik.

He was a Brit, and he learned his trade against the Irish. There were fewer rules about interrogation in Bahrain , and it was a troubling specter of what was to come, since conflict with a determined adversary means that things are constantly evolving.

Technology is like that. When the aerial bombing of World War Two began, the parties had a lot to learn about the slaughter of civilian populations. The Germans were the pioneers. The weather was often cloudy over London , making bombing problematic for the capabilities of the day. The clever Nazis enlisted technology to make the process more efficient.

The Luftwaffe constructed radio transmitters that send directional beams toward England , crossing somewhere over Piccadilly Circus . The pilots would listen to the tones in the headphones, and when they merged, they pulled the levers and dropped the ordnance on the City below.

The Brits were at least as clever. They figured out a way to mimic the German signal, and produced one which drew the bombers out over open farmland, where the bombs usually fell harmlessly.

The German radio signal was called “Headache.”

The British response was called “Aspirin.”

Technology moves ahead.

What with all the ordnance in private hands in Iraq , it is to be expected that clever people would come up with creative ways to make it go off. Most of the American dead were killed by IEDs, and the daily slaughter of the civilians is caused by them as well.

We are struggling to come up with our version of Aspirin to defeat them. Unfortunately, there are clever people and hence to no single approach to defeating IEDs. At one end of the detonation spectrum lie sophisticated wireless devices and at the other, a young man or woman pulling the pin on a suicide vest.

The conflict is forcing evolution in the tactics and techniques of the bomb-makers, a sort of survival of the fittest in a troubling way. I have been surprised that the campaign has not yet come to American shores.

I think the body of the evidence suggests that it will at some point, and the effort to save the lives of America ‘s kids in combat will someday be a struggle to save the lives of our families going to the supermarket.

To defeat the IEDs we are collecting information on the current state of the art of the bomb-makers. We have small units- not unlike the WWII British Unexploded Bomb (UXB) Teams- that are conducting forensic examination on the sites of the bombings. The British found that the Germans were delivering weapons which were intended to go off not when they hit the ground, but delayed, so they could kill the first responders who were trying to fight the fire and rescue the wounded. Some were even designed to kill the technicians who examined them.

There are six three-person Army Weapons Intelligence Teams (WITs) deployed to Iraq by the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Ft. Belvoir to conduct CSIS-like examinations of the sites of recently exploded IEDs, including emplaced and vehicle-borne versions. They look for things as small as the bits of radio receiver that detonated the bomb on Pan Am 007 over Lockerbie , Scotland , or the Vehicle Identification Number on the engine block of a smoldering car to identify the ownership chain for clues.

A variety of counter-measures to the IEDs have been deployed to Iraq , and Humvees and other vehicles have been up-armored to better defend against the scourge.

But they are hideously clever, and the means to detonate them are diverse. Remote means to trigger the devices include cell phones, walkie-talkies, garage door openers, and television channel-changers.

Using forensic techniques, the WITs can sometimes identify the “fingerprints” or “signatures” associated with specific bomb-makers. The intelligence estimate is that a handful of experts are responsible for the majority of the better quality of IEDs.

Additional complicating factors include concealment techniques (sometimes in the carcasses of animals), boobie traps (a la the German delayed-action aerial bombs) and other inert lures designed to attract interest and slow convoys for attack by snipers or ambush.

The tradecraft of the bomb-builder is likewise a valuable export. Terrorist bomb makers also teach other novice bomb makers. Palestinian Yehiya Ayyash as known as “the Engineer” for his expertise. He not only built bombs and sent suicide bombers to attack buses in Israel , but was a mentor and teacher. He taught a cadre of Palestinian bomb makers how to build bombs in the 1990s, and Israeli Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams still find devices that have the Engineer’s signature, though he was killed in 1996.

Links have been made from devices designed or produced in one country to those made by bomb makers in another. By collecting evidence of the hundreds of bombings in Iraq , better situational awareness and counter-measures will be achieved. But as the British and the Israelis have discovered, the “best of breed” is always evolving.

At one point, the German Luftwaffe began to drop gigantic underwater mines with parachutes and delayed timers into the heart of London to confound the UXB teams. Imagine arriving for work to be confronted by a one-ton acoustic terror!

The FBI has had evidence collection teams in Iraq since the first American was killed by IED. The Bureau has also been collecting evidence and conducting forensic analyses of many of the attacks.

Taken with the information provided by the WITs, the data will provide the basis for new counter-measures, which in turn, will prompt new tactics by the bomb-makers. The key to the struggle of IED-versus-Countermeasure is constant technical development, like “Headache” and “Aspirin.”

It is not a situation where time stands still, or “one size fits all.” Sometimes, a series of ten or twenty percent solutions may be required to attain a simple majority.

Part of the reason for the FBI presence in Iraq is that the trained bomb maker will export his talents and designs to the American homeland next.

I’m surprised it has not begun to happen here already. But then, I may have a case of the same situational amnesia that seems to plague the government.

After all, it was a VBIED that exploded in the garage of the World Trade Center in 1993, and one that brought down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in 1995.

It makes my head hurt a little, thinking about it.

I think I will take an aspirin before I go to work.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window