- When U.S. Army Capt. Christopher Sullivan was killed
last week by a handmade bomb, it was a tragedy for his family -- and a
tragically ordinary event for the American military. Improvised explosive
devices, or IEDs, have been responsible for hundreds of American casualties
in Iraq. And so far, there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of
stopping
them.
-
- The Pentagon, scrambling for answers, is in the middle
of a frantic search for high-tech methods to find and neutralize the
jury-rigged
weapons. Microwave blasts, radio-frequency jammers and chemical sensors
are among the methods being explored and deployed in this largely secret
effort.
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- But, because IEDs are cobbled together from
"whatever
the people that plant them can find," warned Cliff Anderson, a program
manager at the Office of Naval Research, "there is no magic
bullet"
that will suddenly end the IED threat.
-
- Almost anything that blows up can be turned into an IED,
from grenades to plastic explosives to leftover mines. The most everyday
of electronics -- a cell phone, a garage door opener, a child's
remote-control
toy -- can be recast as a trigger. And the hiding places for the handmade
bombs are everywhere: in the ground, aboard a truck, even inside an animal
carcass.
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- So far, the strongest push to silence the bombs has come
from the Army, which has ordered thousands of radio-frequency jammers from
Simi Valley, California, firm EDO Communications & Countermeasures.
The devices, called Warlock Green and Warlock Red, intercept "the
signal sent from a remote location to the IED instructing it to
detonate,"
an Army official told military newsletter Inside Defense. The signal
"cannot
make contact, therefore when it can't make contact it doesn't
detonate,"
he added. "(It's like) the cell phone never gets through, but (enemy
forces) think it goes through."
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- The Army won't say much about the machines. But last
week, service chiefs signed a contract with EDO for an additional 1,440
Warlock jammers, to be delivered in May at a cost of more than $56
million.
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- Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute,
a Washington-area think tank, cautions that the jammers may only be
partially
effective.
-
- "You need to find the right frequency in order to
stop it," he said. "And that's not easy, with all of these cell
phones and garage door openers being used to trigger the IEDs."
-
- Instead, Goure believes, the most effective IED
countermeasure
might be a pulse of electromagnetic energy that can "fry the circuits
of these bombs."
-
- Researchers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's
Dahlgren
Laboratory in Virginia are working on such a solution, called NIRF, short
for Neutralizing Improvised Explosive Devices with RF. The device,
according
to a source familiar with the project, "produces a very high-frequency
field, in the microwave range, at very short range" to take out an
IED's electronics. The Pentagon hopes to deploy NIRF in Iraq later this
year.
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- Another Pentagon microwave project, code-named PING,
is already in the country, and has been "very successful" at
finding insurgent weapons caches, said Billy Mullins, an associate director
of strategic security for the Air Force. The machine, which fits inside
a Humvee, sends out waves, looking for metal that will bounce the signals
back. Concrete won't stop the microwaves, so PING can examine a building's
interior.
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- "When you find a large amount of metal in a country
that doesn't use a lot of metal in its construction, you have an idea that
there's something there that there shouldn't be," Mullins told a
military
research conference last week.
-
- But, however well PING has been performing, it hasn't
been enough to save soldiers like Sullivan -- or hundreds of others killed
and wounded by the homemade bombs. Goure estimates that IEDs account for
more than half of the American casualties in Iraq. And that number could
grow in the months to come. U.S. troops may be finding 30 percent to 40
percent more improvised bombs than they did a year before, according to
Gen. Gregory "Speedy" Martin, who heads the Air Force Materiel
Command. But Iraqi insurgents "have gotten more effective in using
IEDs," Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy chief of U.S. Central Command,
told reporters during a December briefing.
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- For its counter-IED efforts, the Office of Naval
Research,
or ONR, has invested in a number of firms working on "change
detection"
-- the use of intelligent video-processing software to survey a scene and
"look for any new objects that weren't there yesterday," ONR's
Anderson explained.
-
- However, such an approach has built-in problems, he
admitted.
IEDs are planted, mostly, in cities. And "in any dense, urban
situation,
everything's changing all at once," Anderson said. It's hard to pick
out a bomb with so much clutter around.
-
- Anderson is also funding IED-hunting researchers who
hope to pick explosive particles out of the air. The sensors won't be
strong
enough to find a bomb buried beneath a pile of trash on a roadside. But
they may be able to figure out whether a certain mosque has been turned
into an IED factory -- or to see whether a particular person has been
working
on the assembly line.
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- Alachua, Florida's Nanotherapeutics, working for the
Navy, is looking for traces of peroxide-based explosives. Those are the
homemade, unstable compounds that are popular with guerillas (think shoe
bomber Richard Reid), but are normally ignored by most explosive detectors,
which watch out for TNT and other nitrogen-based explosives.
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- The company plans on looking for the peroxides by using
a surface wave acoustic sensor, a polymer-coated device that emits a
frequency
that changes in tone when one of these explosive compounds contacts the
surface. It's the same technology Nanotherapeutics uses in its line of
Nanobreath detectors, which sample a patient's exhalation to see if the
person has taken his or her medication. But adapting the product for the
military will take years to do -- if it works at all.
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- The long lead times are a problem the Pentagon continues
to encounter as it looks for a way to stop these handcrafted
killers.
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- "There's lots of money, interest and ambition,"
Anderson said. "But the technical challenge is difficult. And that's
what's slowing things down."
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