Understanding the kind of war on which we are embarked, etc.

The enemy in Afghanistan is resorting to IED attacks and other tactics that endanger civilians with increasing frequency, says the UN. That means we're winning, says LTG Scaparotti.

Spencer wrote about this yesterday; he was the one who asked the general how to square increasing civilian casualties with claims of coalition pogress. Here was Scaparotti's curious reply:

Their – you know, what little bit [civilian casualty numbers are] up – I would tell you that across the battlefield, when you look at Afghanistan, for instance, there is a freedom of action that [enemy forces] have, and it's particular places. But the freedom of action they show today is increasingly in IEDs and suicide bombing.  They don't have the capability to take us on directly.  In fact, they've changed their TTP because they're unable to do that with either us or the ANSF.  So I don't know that I would say it's an increase freedom of action.  I think it's actually reduced, and it's pushed them into a certain TTP, which isn't ideal. 

Now, in doing that, they've increased the use of suicide bombers, for instance.  And if I recall right – correctly – it was about – it went up about 80 percent. 

And those caused civilian casualties.  One in three of their IEDs -- or one in three of the civilians injured, Afghan civilians, were caused by, you know, enemy IEDs.   

So, you know, what I would focus on is the fact that you've got an enemy who has stated that he is concerned about the people, that he doesn't want to harm the people in his actions, and yet over these years you've seen a steady increase in that happening.  On the other hand, we work very, very hard to drive down the – you know, the civilian casualties.  It did go down 4 percent this year.  And we'll continue to try and drive that down as well.

So far as I can tell, this is an answer that is based wholly in an effort to support information operations objectives—that is, to communicate to the Afghan people that the enemy is a liar and does not care about their welfare. (I find it difficult to believe, though, that any significant portion of the Afghan populace is basing its judgment about whether to support the government or the insurgency on such pronouncements from ISAF.) I can't detect any operational logic in this statement.

Proponents of the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan have consistently indicated that the level of civilian casualties inflicted by the enemy could serve as a useful metric for the performance of ISAF's mission. By their logic, the more effective coalition forces proved to be in keeping the enemy from killing civilians, the more likely those civilians would be to support the coalition's and the government's efforts to stamp out the insurgency. Even if protection of civilians is not an operational priority, there is an inescapable truth at the heart of this: if the enemy cannot operate, that constitutes some form of success.

LTG Scaparotti has turned this logic on its head by suggesting that the enemy's refusal to operate in ways that make him more prone to destruction by coalition forces constitutes progress for ISAF. This is exactly backwards. If coalition forces and the ANSF were proving capable of stanching IED attacks and suicide bombings, restricting the Taliban's opportunity and degrading his capability to terrorize individuals and plausibly challenge the government's claim to provide security to its people, then the enemy would be faced with a choice between two paths to continue his resistance: forego violence and enter the political process, or escalate violence and confront security forces directly. If the enemy cannot get at the people, he has to fight the army. That he chooses not to do so clearly demonstrates the very opposite of what LTG Scaparotti contends: the enemy is not desperate, he is not running out of options, he does not feel as though his freedom of action is reduced.

The general plainly recognizes this when he says that the enemy has been "pushed ... into a certain TTP, which isn't ideal." The enemy has adopted methods that render him less vulnerable to destruction by massed firepower, which isn't ideal. I completely agree.

Reliance on irregular tactics and terrorism allows the enemy to sustain his campaign against the Afghan government and its impermanent international enablers while reducing his exposure to their most effective weapons. It is inconceivable to me that there are people who still believe, at this late stage in the war, that the enemy's "refusal to come out and fight" constitutes success for the counterinsurgent.

The enemy doesn't need to fight us—he just needs to keep blowing people up.

"This piece of junk did, in fact, signficantly contribute to an unknown -- and pathetically large -- loss of innocent lives."

You might want to sit down for a minute, because I have some shocking news: the explosives-detection equipment that the Iraqi interior ministry spent up to $85 million purchasing via shady no-bid contract, and which one American officer described as "nothing more than an explosives divining rod" that "works on the same principle as a Ouji board"... well, it doesn't detect explosives at all. That's not really the story, though, because most people already knew that: Americans have been warning Iraqi police that the device was useless for over a year, and the British government has imprisoned the manufacturer and banned further exports. But the Iraqis have continued to insist that the wand works, at least those Iraqis charged with making public statements on the matter. (A number of not-for-attribution quotes suggest that Iraqi policemen are more circumspect.) That is, until the Special Inspector General for Iraq's October report to Congress, in which the inspector general of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, Aqeel Al Turaihi, "reports that many lives have been lost due to the wands' utter ineffectiveness."

One might imagine that such a revelation would cause a wave of recriminations throughout the Iraqi government, and that things surely wouldn't end well for the guy responsible. After all, that's why you have an IG in the first place, right? Well, the Interior Ministry "shelved the report and quietly granted immunity to the official who signed the no-bid contracts," the Times reports. All of which is even more horrifying if you look back to January of this year, when the leader of Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit announced that the device's procurement would be investigated, with specific focus on those officials who had previously insisted to auditors that the equipment was technically sound. Or when you see the comments of Iraqi MP Ammar Tuma, a member of the parliament's Security and Defense Committee:

“This company not only caused grave and massive losses of funds, but it has caused grave and massive losses of the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians, by the hundreds and thousands, from attacks that we thought we were immune to because we have this device.”

It now appears that such an investigation either never took place or was successfully concluded, then ignored. We can say that there's a culture of impunity and corruption, that this kind of thing happens in the developing world, that people will always find opportunities to steal and enrich themselves in time of conflict. And all of that may be true, but it doesn't make it less appalling or noteworthy. Surely the failure to form a government in Baghdad has impacted the effectiveness of legislative oversight on matters like this, too.

I hope you'll click through the links and read about this if you missed it the first time around or don't remember the details, because the story is almost literally unbelievable.

"Joint IED Mitigation Organization" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it

"I don't think you can defeat the IED as a weapon system. It is too easy to use."

So says LTG Michael Oates, director of JIEDDO. Yeah, that JIEDDO: the Joint IED Defeat Organization.

Oates said technological advances have enabled the military to save lives by providing better armor and other forms of protection for troops. But he said the high-tech approach -- despite billions of dollars in research -- has failed to produce an effective way to detect IEDs in the field. About four-fifths of the devices that are found before they explode are detected the old-fashioned way: by troops who notice telltale signs, such as a recently disturbed patch of dirt that might be covering up a bomb.

Despite the insurgents' crude approach, the explosive power of their IEDs is growing. Each bombing in Afghanistan, on average, causes 50 percent more casualties than it did three years ago, Oates said Wednesday at a House committee hearing. U.S. officials say even armored troop-transport vehicles that were designed to protect against roadside bombs are now vulnerable.

IED attacks in Iraq have plummeted, you surely won't be surprised to learn.

Oates credited U.S. countermeasures -- such as interrupting the flow of military-grade explosives and detonators from Iran -- for some of the decrease. Other military officials said a bigger factor was the overall reduction in the intensity of the insurgency; as sectarian fighting faded, people simply stopped planting bombs.

Chicken or egg? Seems to me that while the interdiction of high-end bomb materials from outside the country would certainly have helped stanch the violence, it's far more likely that the stabilization of the security situation in Iraq was accompanied by a decrease in basically all types of violent incidents, including IEDs. After all, the Post article cited above -- and the military officials quoted therein -- emphasizes the fact that IEDs don't need to be built from bits off the Radio Shack shelves or Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) from the IRGC.

Political considerations made the adoption of a vehicle like the MRAP an inevitability. MRAPs have also saved a whole bunch of lives, so I don't mean to disparage their utility. But once the current conflicts are done, we're going to be left with a fleet of heavy, highly-armored vehicles well suited for buttoned-up patrolling on hardened roads in urban areas -- hardly the optimal system for the sort of conflicts we're likely to be engaged in over the coming decades. We can unload a few on the Iraqis and the Afghans, sure, but the program is an expensive one and has entailed some trade-offs.

So what's the point? I guess I'd say that we're learning that high technology might not be the answer to the IED problem. While a country like the U.S. certainly doesn't want to cede its technological advantage and should bring to bear whatever scientific and industrial capabilities may help to mitigate casualties and increase operational effectiveness, the conclusion I've drawn from Gunslinger and other combat soldiers and Marines is that the best counter-IED system is the Mk 1, Mod 1 eyeball. We can talk about network analysis and all the things the intel folks are doing to target construction and emplacement networks (or maybe we can't: I have no idea how that stuff works, and the details are mostly classified), too, but I think the conclusion here -- if we hadn't already drawn it -- is that there's not going to be a push-button answer to protecting our troops from IEDs.

Booby traps, mines, and hidden bombs will always be a cheap, unsophisticated, and effective countermeasure against foot patrol-intensive operations, and counterinsurgencies are very often going to be dependent on that sort of method of operation. I'm not saying we ought to give up looking for the magic bullet, but maybe there's a better way to think about how we spend our money and allocate our other resources to this mission.

Remember the general and his "explosives divining rod"? (UPDATED)

You know, this guy? Some lady from BBC NewsNight went to the manufacturer's English country home and knocked on his door to call him out for selling pseudoscientific lucky charms to the Iraqis, but he didn't answer (shocker). Oh yeah, and she went to the Cambridge Computer Laboratory to find out what a third-grader could have told her: that a SIM card can't detect explosives.

Check out the video here.

h/t Faceless Bureaucrat at KOW.

UPDATE: the New York Times is reporting that the very same dude who got door-knocked has been arrested for fraud. (Maybe that's why he didn't answer.) The story has a lot more detail about the financial arrangement between the manufacturer and the Iraqi government, lending credence to my initial speculation that there's some sort of corruption involved.

“Tests have shown that the technology used in the ADE 651 and similar devices is not suitable for bomb detection,” the [British Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills] said. “We acted urgently to put in place export restrictions which will come into force next week.” The statement said the department could ban export to those countries because British troops there could be put at risk by the device’s use. ATSC claims to have sold the device to 20 countries, all in the developing world.

The Supreme Board of Audit in Iraq announced it would investigate the procurement of the ADE 651, according to the board’s leader, Abdul Basit Turki. The investigation will focus on officials who previously assured auditors the device was technically sound, he said.

Maj. Gen. Jihad al-Jabiri, who is in charge of procuring the devices for the Ministry
of Interior, could not be reached for comment.

In Baghdad on Saturday, the devices were still very much in use. “I didn’t believe in this device in the first place,” said a police officer at a checkpoint in central Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “I was forced to use it by my superiors and I am still forced to do so.”

Another checkpoint officer said he blamed corrupt officials for bringing the ADE 651 in. “Our government is to be blamed for all the thousands of innocent spirits who were lost since these devices have been used in Iraq,” he said.

An associate of ATSC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the devices were manufactured at a cost of $250 each by suppliers in Britain and Romania. “Everyone at ATSC knew there was nothing inside the ADE 651,” he said.

The Iraqi government, according to its auditors, paid $40,000 to $60,000 for each device, although it determined that ATSC was marketing the device for $16,000. The additional money was said to have been for training, spare parts and commissions.

Can we start using "literally"... literally?

The CBS Evening News is apparently doing a feature this week on "Where America Stands," in case you're interested in that sort of thing. I just read a transcript of last night's segment, introduced by Katie Couric and narrated by national security correspondent David Martin. In the opening for what seems otherwise to be a pretty solid feature -- Martin goes to Fort Monroe and talks to Mike Vane and H.R. McMaster, senior leaders at the U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) -- our intrepid correspondent said this:

If one moment could capture the unexpected trauma of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this would be it. American soldiers hit by a roadside bomb. [Apparently they were showing a clip of an IED attack.] Something as simple as a homemade booby trap literally blew up America’s plan for quick and easy victories.

Literally? Really? A homemade booby trap exploded and destroyed either the physical or conceptual war plan? Like, those dudes had a copy of "America's plan for quick and easy victories" in their vehicle and it was incinerated when the IED was detonated?

It literally makes my head explode when I see language used in this way. Wait, no it doesn't. "Makes my head explode" is just a colorful expression, a symbolic representation, a metaphor for my frustration.

(Before you say it, yes, I know that Joe Biden is literally the biggest abuser of this expression. As in, he is physically the largest person who says this. Literally.)

"Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs"

Apparently the Iraqi government is making extensive use of a device called the ADE 651, which at least one American military officer has described as "nothing more than an explosives divining rod." The same guy says that it "works on the same principle as a Ouija board," and the DoD testers at Sandia Labs have shown that devices of a similar type perform no better in detecting explosives than random chance.

This is a deadly serious subject, of course, but it's hard not to chuckle at some of the quotes from Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, who heads up the MoI's General Directorate for Combating Explosives. The title of the post is one of them. More:

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”

And this one's awesome:

“I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” General Jabiri said. “I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.”

But easily my favorite:

During an interview on Tuesday, General Jabiri challenged a Times reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Despite two attempts, the wand did not detect the weapons when used by the reporter but did so each time it was used by a policeman.

“You need more training,” the general said.

But again, this is a serious issue. Iraq has spent $85 million on these devices. Probably the most telling fact in this whole story: "no major country’s military or police force is a customer, according to the manufacturer." And yet the guy in charge of detecting and disarming explosives for the Iraqi Interior Ministry swears by them.

Hopefully Iraq's requirement for bomb detection decreases in the coming months and years, and I think it's reasonable to expect it will. But here's another example of the way that things change as U.S. presence diminishes, and as our leverage decreases. Not before time, many will say, and it's surely a good thing that fewer U.S. troops are vulnerable to attacks that could possibly be prevented if those troops' Iraqi partners weren't dependent on pseudo-science for protection.

And are we going to be surprised if we find out that Jabiri or someone else at MoI is getting rich off the purchase of these devices (for $60k a pop, incidentally, when they're apparently available for under $20k each)?