LAT: Red Tape Said to Delay Use of Bomb Buster

[Pirate Smile]

Red Tape Said to Delay Use of Bomb Buster
A remote-controlled device that blew up 90% of roadside explosives in tests has not yet gone to Iraq. Marines decide to bypass the bureaucracy.

By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A new high-tech vehicle that destroys roadside bombs has passed a series of U.S. military tests but has not yet been sent into battle, prompting charges that Pentagon bureaucracy is slowing the effort to protect American troops in Iraq.

Last April, Army Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of a Pentagon task force in charge of finding ways to combat the makeshift bombs known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs, endorsed development of the vehicle, called the Joint IED Neutralizer. The remote-controlled device blows up roadside bombs with a directed electrical charge, and based on Votel's assessment, then deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz recommended investing $30 million in research and sending prototypes to Iraq for testing.

But 10 months later — and after a prototype destroyed about 90% of the IEDs laid in its path during a battery of tests — not a single Joint IED Neutralizer, or JIN, has been shipped to Iraq.

To many in the military, the delay in deploying the vehicles, which resemble souped-up, armor-plated golf carts, is a case study of the Pentagon's inability to bypass cumbersome peacetime procedures to meet the urgent demands of troops in the field. More than half of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have been caused by roadside bombs, and the number of such attacks last year nearly doubled compared 2004.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-ied12feb12,0,288814.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[951-Riverside]

1. I have a much easier solution that actually works....

Leave.

Roadside bombs in iraq didnt exist until we came in and wiped out massive amounts of innocent people.

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. I'll bet that the tests were rigged and the thing doesn't work.

And that's the real reason why the aren't deploying it.

[daleo]

3. Or, the people setting the IEDs would quickly adapt

Which is what has happened so far.

[The_Casual_Observer]

4. I just need to see "souped up golf cart" & "directed electrical charge"

and I know I'm being sold a bullshit deal, so do they.


"bypass cumbersome peacetime procedures to meet the urgent demands of troops in the field"
In otherwords, instead, buy every crackpot bullshit gizmo that walks in off the street.

[oneighty]

5. Ever see "Turn off radio"

warnings in "Blasting areas"? This could be a device pulsing a powerful magnetic field (Or radio waves) inducing current flow in electric blasting cap wire.

Bet it works if one knows where to use it.

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