DoDBuzz: Afghan IEDs Hammered Soviets

[unhappycamper]

Afghan IEDs Hammered Soviets
By Greg Grant Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 12:17 pm
Posted in International, Land, Policy

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced cre­ation of yet another counter-​​IED Pentagon task force, he was clearly frus­trated with the inabil­ity of the mil­i­tary, the intel­li­gence agen­cies and indus­try to come up with answers to the sim­ple yet dev­as­tat­ingly effec­tive road­side bomb as the IED war shifts from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The num­ber of IED “inci­dents” in Afghanistan, defined as IEDs either found before det­o­nat­ing or actual IED attacks, have jumped from around 100 a month dur­ing 2006 to over 800 a month this past sum­mer; in August IED inci­dents topped 1,000. In 2006, 41 U.S. and NATO troops were killed by IEDs. So far this year, 260 coali­tion troops have been killed by IEDs, accord­ing to the web site ica​s​u​al​ties​.com that tracks troop casu­al­ties. IED casu­al­ties in Afghanistan don’t approach those of Iraq dur­ing the height of the fight­ing there when some days saw 100 IED inci­dents, but the trend lines are headed in the wrong direc­tion. As more troops arrive, casu­al­ties are sure to increase.

Gates said one of the IED group’s first tasks was to scour records from the Soviet-​​Afghan war dur­ing the 1980s for poten­tial lessons on the Mujaheddin’s use and the Soviet response to IEDs and mines. That war was marked by extreme bru­tal­ity on the part of all com­bat­ants and both sides used land mines lib­er­ally. The Soviets ringed their strong­points with thick mine belts that de-​​mining teams con­tinue to clear to this day.

The Mujaheddin used mines and IEDs prin­ci­pally as an offen­sive weapon to bleed the Soviet occu­piers, rather than to seize and defend ter­ri­tory. And bleed them they did: the Soviets lost 1,995 sol­diers killed and 1,191 vehi­cles to mines and IEDs dur­ing their eight year long war. That’s just killed, cer­tainly there were many thou­sands more wounded, as IEDs tend to maim more than they kill (the Soviets never pro­duced a true account­ing of their losses in Afghanistan, thought to be much higher than pub­licly avail­able num­bers). Those sta­tis­tics come from the Army War College’s Lester Grau whose trans­la­tions of Soviet gen­eral staff stud­ies of the Afghan war, as well as Mujaheddin accounts of the fight­ing, are invaluable.

Like the U.S. mil­i­tary, the Soviet army in Afghanistan was road bound, rely­ing on the country’s few roads to resup­ply scat­tered com­bat out­posts. Much of the fight­ing was for con­trol over these lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The roads link­ing the major Afghan towns such as Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Khost and Jalalabad were the scene of count­less bloody battles.


Rest of article and a pretty good discussion at: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/12/15/afghan-ieds-hammered-soviets/?wh=wh

[MercutioATC]

1. Rule #1: Don't fuck with people who have little or nothing to lose.

...especially when they're used to living on, even in the best of times, some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.