“Defeating the device” is how JIEDDO refers to the many things it does to deal with an IED already in place: searching for it, disposing of it, and if all else fails, surviving its blast. These tasks get a lot of attention because the score is easily tallied. Column A: lives saved; column B: lives lost, damaged, irrevocably changed. But defeating the device is actually a small piece of a much larger and evolving counter-IED strategy.
JIEDDO originally divided its projects among five functions: prediction, detection, prevention, neutralization (which includes defeating the device), and mitigation. Some of those technologies and most of the techniques, as deployed today in Iraq and Afghanistan, are classified. Still, what is known about those categories offers at least a partial view of evolving counter-IED strategies, as well as insights into the main issue: whether the strategic influence of IEDs can be subverted.
In this world, simply categorizing activities can be complicated. A few years ago, when it became clear that going after IEDs on the road wasn’t having the desired effect, the rallying cry became “attack the network”—in other words, destroy the infrastructures that build and deploy IEDs. Attacking the network, it turns out, spans prediction, prevention, and part of detection.
JIEDDO has been criticized for spending too little on attacking the network. But as a former JIEDDO official wrote in an e-mail, “a significant portion of the activities in Attack the Network are classified,” making it difficult for outsiders to know how big the effort actually is.
Attacking the network boils down in part to analyzing social networks, collecting and analyzing intelligence, and persistently surveilling places. It has been a difficult challenge, depending as it has on wildly incongruous data, tips, and reports from surveillance systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, and from local people suspicious of activity in their neighborhoods. “It’s a challenging new frontier,” says Shoop. “Combining an understanding of the psychology and sociology of terrorist networks with probabilistic modeling, complexity theory, forensic science, pattern recognition, and data mining to predict human behavior is new.”
JIEDDO has already acknowledged that it is using sophisticated database software in Iraq to help its analysts get a handle on that multifarious assortment of images, data, intelligence, and anecdote that bears on whether an IED has been emplaced. In his final press conference this past November as director of JIEDDO, retired U.S. Army Gen. Montgomery Meigs identified for the first time an organization called the Counter IED Operations Integration Center. Calling it a “very powerful intelligence fusion operation,” he added that “it makes a difference in that line of operations we call ’attack the network.’ Beyond that, I can’t say anything.”
Meigs’s successor at JIEDDO, Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, said in an interview this past May: “Say you know a particular part of your district gets a larger proportion of IEDs. You want to study it, layer in all the data: signals intelligence, significant events over a couple years, moving target indicators from JSTARS [an advanced military reconnaissance aircraft], humint [human intelligence] reports. You have to take it on faith from me that actionable patterns begin to form.”
