The Multi-Billion Dollar IED Boondoggle Continues

There are many reasons why the U.S. has lost the war in Iraq: hubris, terrible post-invasion planning, lack of knowledge of Iraqi/Muslim culture, and the failure of the occupation forces to control Iraq's oil sector. But on the most basic tactical level, America has been defeated in Iraq because it cannot effectively counter the defining weapon of the Iraq War: the roadside bomb, which is also known by its now-familiar acronym, the IED, short for improvised explosive device.

The deadly effect of the IEDs can be easily seen by looking at the numbers, which show a steady increase in the percentage of U.S. casualties caused by the devices. From January through early August of this year, just over 52 percent of all the fatalities among U.S. soldiers in Iraq were due to IED attacks. Over the course of the war, more than 1,460 American soldiers have been killed by IEDs. Thousands more have been wounded by them, many of them seriously.

The U.S. military has already spent about $10 billion on IED countermeasures, including heavier armor for Humvees and trucks and a panoply of electronic jammers and other high-tech gizmos that promised to neutralize the explosives. But all that spending has had little discernible effect.

Despite the lack of progress, the Pentagon has launched yet another anti-IED effort, which will dwarf all prior spending programs. Over the next four years, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon plan to spend about $20 billion on a fleet of 23,000 heavily armored vehicles that go by the acronym of MRAPs, short for mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles. The first big order for 1,520 MRAPs at a cost of $5.3 billion, or $3.5 million per vehicle, was placed in August.

But like all of the previous anti-IED programs, the MRAP effort will only add more expense to the losing effort in Iraq. While the MRAPs will provide additional protection to American soldiers on the ground, they will not solve the IED problem. Indeed, the deployment of the MRAPs exposes three interconnected points that continue to frustrate U.S. efforts in Iraq:

1. The IEDs have put the U.S. military in Iraq in a defensive posture. And militaries who play defense all the time don't win wars.

2. The MRAPs will dramatically increase the size of the already gigantic logistics "tail" that sustains the U.S. military in Iraq. The larger the tail, the more vulnerable the military becomes.

3. The new fleet of MRAPs won't make any difference in the overall casualty rate for U.S. soldiers. That's the opinion of a Defense Department analyst who has worked on the IED problem for several years and was recently in Iraq.

Playing Defense

The push for MRAPs began in February 2005 when Marine Corps commanders requested the vehicles in order to provide better protection for their soldiers in Anbar Province. The Pentagon waited nearly two years before it agreed to scale up production of the vehicles. The delay has been blamed for the unnecessary deaths of dozens, or even hundreds, of American soldiers in Iraq.

There's no question that the MRAP vehicles, which have V-shaped hulls and thicker armor than Humvees, are better able than Humvees to resist roadside bombs. But the very need for a larger, heavier vehicle shows that U.S. forces in Iraq are on the defensive and that the insurgents are largely dictating the terms of the fight.

By using IEDs, the insurgents are increasing the "friction" — a term coined by the 19th-century Prussian military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz for forcing enemies to do things they don't want to d0 — that the U.S. military must overcome. Evidence of that friction abounds.

That friction became obvious in the first few months of the military occupation of Iraq. As IED attacks grew in number, the U.S. military began hurriedly to retrofit its existing fleet of "soft-sided," or unarmored, Humvees with armored ones. Throughout 2005 and 2006, the Pentagon gave regular updates on the progress of the "up-armoring" program. By late 2005, it claimed that two-thirds of the 22,000 Humvees in Iraq had been fitted with some type of armor. During my June 2006 visit to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, the first stop on my tour of the base was a large warehouse dedicated to adding yet heavier armor to the Humvees. Army officials showed me the latest edition of the "armor kit" being added to a dozen or so vehicles in the warehouse, a kit that included more steel on the doors and reinforced door hinges.