There’s a reason why it’s called asymmetric warfare:
Jieddo was formally signed into existence by the Department of Defense just four years ago, in February 2006. But it has its origins in a personal request written by the chief of US Central Command, John Abizaid, to his superiors at the Pentagon in mid-2004. As the number of casualties caused by IEDs in Iraq mushroomed, he insisted that the only solution was a “Manhattan Project-like” marshaling of scientific and military resources. Since then, Jieddo has gathered a staff of more than 3,600 government employees and contractors, established projects with all four military services and every intelligence agency, and spent more than $17 billion.
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But not only will the insurgents keep inventing new bombs and techniques, they’re also free to fall back on any one they’ve already used: “They can move up and down this spectrum, from complex to easy,” Maginess says. Jieddo, on the other hand, must always deploy every countermeasure in its arsenal, adding more as each new device appears. “It’s only ever going to get worse for us.” And the way the Department of Defense works, a new IED need appear only once to require a corresponding, costly antidote. “I can take $600, go into a bazaar, and make a device,” says one senior Jieddo officer. “And I can tie up $1.2 billion to $2 billion of US money by doing it.”
Here’s how the IED arms race has played out:
The first IEDs were often simple radio-controlled bombs, made from two or three 155-millimeter artillery shells set off by a signal from a cheap household gadget, like a key fob car alarm switch or a wireless doorbell buzzer. US troops, traveling in unarmored Humvees, were defenseless against them until each of the services hastily bought hundreds of radio-frequency jammers — with codenames like Cottonwood, Ironwood, MICE, ICE, Warlock Red, Warlock Green, Jukebox, and Symphony — capable of generating an invisible hemisphere of electromagnetic energy that could drown out those trigger signals. Eventually, Jieddo would oversee the deployment of more than 40,000 jammers in Iraq.
The bombers quickly learned how to circumvent the electronic countermeasures. They used handheld radio-frequency meters and bombs with dummy trial-and-error firing circuits to figure out what part of the spectrum the jammers blotted out and how big the jamming field was. Then they simply switched to new remote controls that used bandwidths beyond the jammers’ range. When US technicians introduced electronic countermeasures to jam low-power radio-control devices like garage door openers and car alarms, insurgents moved to high-power devices, including two-way radios and extended-range cordless phones. Then they moved on to mobile phones in every local cell network, from 1G to 3G.
While this race had been run before, it had never taken place at such speed. With one of the most intensive and ingenious programs of homegrown bombmaking R&D in history, Northern Ireland’s Provisional IRA worked its way through every available bandwidth from model airplane controllers to cell phones. It took them 30 years. But Iraqi insurgents innovated on Internet time. By February 2005, they’d managed the same evolution in just 18 months.
Yet radio-control devices, however sophisticated, only represented the middle of the IED technical spectrum. It wasn’t until the summer of 2004 that Iraqi bombsmiths reached into the high end with the explosively formed penetrator, or EFP. Using technology developed during World War II, today’s EFPs are made from a short length of steel or PVC pipe packed with explosives, sealed and capped with a concave copper disk. When the explosives detonate, the blast energy inverts the copper plate into a ragged slug traveling more than a mile per second and capable of punching through tank armor 300 feet away. Iranians used EFPs during their eight-year war with Saddam Hussein and later supplied the technology to Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Bomb-builders there added passive infrared triggers, sensors that detect motion by responding to changes in temperature — like that created by the engine of a passing truck. Because they don’t use radio frequencies as triggers, they’re invulnerable to electronic jamming.
In Iraq, the effectiveness and frequency of EFP attacks soon proved so devastating that individual soldiers began improvising their own countermeasures. One simply bought a toaster in a bazaar and hung it from a pole welded to the front of his Humvee — a heat decoy. According to The Washington Post, this and similar ideas led, in May 2006, to one of Jieddo’s first innovations: the Rhino. The Rhino used a glow plug — an electric heating element for warming diesel engines before ignition — housed in a steel box on the end of a 10-foot boom. It worked so well that it could not only trigger an EFP and take the impact of the high-velocity metal slug but, on at least one occasion, continue working afterward.
It took only six weeks for the insurgents to respond. They adjusted the firing angle of their EFPs so that the slug struck 10 feet behind the decoy. Jieddo countered with the Rhino II, fitted on an adjustable-length boom. Along with electronic jammers, the Rhino II became standard on US vehicles in Iraq. More than 16,000 of the gadgets had been deployed to the Army and Marines by the end of 2008.
But at the beginning of this year, US forces in Iraq reported a new version of the passive infrared trigger, nicknamed the Black Cat. It looked exactly like a regular passive infrared sensor, but the motion detector was altered to be triggered instead by radio frequencies. Shielded to prevent it from being set off by household radios and with reduced reception range, the new device is one of the most devious yet. Designed to detect the passing bubble of a coalition jamming system’s powerful radio field, the Black Cat has brought Jieddo full circle: It is an IED that will detonate only when it detects an IED countermeasure.