'The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces'

[ProSense]

A member of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps holds an improvised explosive device, which has become a fixture on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. As early as 2003, Army officers talked of shifting the counter-IED effort "left of boom" by disrupting insurgent cells before the bombs were built and placed. (Brent Stirton / Getty Images)

'The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces'

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; Page A01

It began with a bang and "a huge white blast," in the description of one witness who outlived that Saturday morning, March 29, 2003. At a U.S. Army checkpoint straddling Highway 9, just north of Najaf, four soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division, part of the initial invasion of Iraq, had started to search an orange-and-white taxicab at 11:30 a.m. when more than 100 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive detonated in the trunk.

The explosion tossed the sedan 15 feet down the road, killing the soldiers, the cabdriver -- an apparent suicide bomber -- and a passerby on a bicycle. Lt. Col. Scott E. Rutter, a battalion commander who rushed to the scene from his command post half a mile away, saw in the smoking crater and broken bodies on Highway 9 "a recognition that now we were entering into an area of warfare that's going to be completely different."

Since that first fatal detonation of what is now known as an improvised explosive device, more than 81,000 IED attacks have occurred in Iraq, including 25,000 so far this year, according to U.S. military sources. The war has indeed metastasized into something "completely different," a conflict in which the roadside bomb in its many variants -- including "suicide, vehicle-borne" -- has become the signature weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan, as iconic as the machine gun in World War I or the laser-guided "smart bomb" in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

IEDs have caused nearly two-thirds of the 3,100 American combat deaths in Iraq, and an even higher proportion of battle wounds. This year alone, through mid-July, they have also resulted in an estimated 11,000 Iraqi civilian casualties and more than 600 deaths among Iraqi security forces. To the extent that the United States is not winning militarily in Iraq, the roadside bomb, which as of Sept. 22 had killed or wounded 21,200 Americans, is both a proximate cause and a metaphor for the miscalculation and improvisation that have characterized the war.

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I learned that lesson a long time ago, back in the war of the 1960s, in Vietnam. We learned what it was like to go into these villages where you don’t share the culture, the language, you don’t look like the people, the religion — any of it. You are carrying guns, and they think you are occupying their land. It is tough. It is tough on our folks.

What are they doing? They are going out and finding IEDs the hard way. I hear folks talking about these battles and the enemy. The enemy? The enemy are IEDs. Obviously the people who plant them, but they don’t see them very much. Most of the wounded are from IEDs. Most of the killed are from IEDs. This is not a set piece battle such as we have seen in a lot of other wars we have fought. It is not even the same kind of insurgency battle we have seen in a lot of other wars we have fought. It is very different. -- John Kerry

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[wisteria]

1. Absolutely great post! n/t

[ProSense]

2. IEDs

IEDs have caused nearly two-thirds of the 3,100 American combat deaths in Iraq, and an even higher proportion of battle wounds. This year alone, through mid-July, they have also resulted in an estimated 11,000 Iraqi civilian casualties and more than 600 deaths among Iraqi security forces. To the extent that the United States is not winning militarily in Iraq, the roadside bomb, which as of Sept. 22 had killed or wounded 21,200 Americans, is both a proximate cause and a metaphor for the miscalculation and improvisation that have characterized the war.

[ProSense]

3. Diary

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