Entries Tagged 'IEDs' ↓

Paul Rega at Project Disaster has posted a primer on IEDs - anyone and everyone involved in emergency response - especially those who are not in law enforcement or the military - if you know nothing about explosives, know this much:

Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, are booby traps–disguised or hidden devices–activated by victims or detonated remotely or on command. IEDs have been used since World War II and more recently in Chechnya, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

IEDs are intended to incapacitate or kill and to create intimidation and terror. They are used in unconventional warfare and by definition can be made with almost any type of material and initiator. These “homemade” devices employ pyrotechnic or incendiary chemicals and can be made in combination with toxic chemicals, biological toxins, or radiological material. Although IEDs can be found in varying sizes, functioning methods, containers, and delivery methods, they share a common set of components: some type of explosive fill, an initiation mechanism, a detonator, a power supply for the detonator, and a container. Although the press sometimes refers to them as roadside bombs, IEDs can be in packages, carried in vehicles (“car bombs”), or worn by suicide bombers.

Two or more IEDs may be detonated by coupling, linking one mine or explosive to another so that when one is detonated, the other goes off; rolling, setting off an unfuzed explosive after a mine-clearing roller has passed over it, by means of a second, fuzed device, which detonates the first one when it is underneath the clearing vehicle; boosting, stacking buried mines atop one another, with the deepest device being fuzed, helping reduce metal detection and increasing the force of the blast; sensitizing antitank mines, removing the pressure plate or spring to reduce the pressure required to set them off; and daisy chaining, linking mines to other explosives with trip wire or detonating cord.

IED configuration affects the velocity of explosion and the type of damage: low explosives must burn in a confined space so that the gas formed causes an explosion; high explosives generally must be detonated by a shock wave of considerable force, usually from a detonator or blasting cap.

To detect a victim-activated IED requires recognition of the initiating object as a booby trap. The enemy wants the unwary or distracted person to interfere with the object to set it off by touching or picking it up. IEDs have been found in tires, garbage bags, fire extinguishers, barrels, and dead animals.

Threat indicators include the theft of explosives or of chemicals used in making explosives; the rental of self-storage space to store explosive apparatus; deliveries of chemicals to residences; the purchase, rental, or theft of a large van or truck; or the addition of heavy-duty springs to a large vehicle to handle heavier loads. Continue reading →

It appears that in 2004, U.S. military officials evaluated an African-designed and manufactured MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles. The Corps of Engineers wanted it for its own personnel; David Axe of War Is Boring reports:

The urgency surrounding the multi-billion-dollar purchase of blast-resistant vehicles for the U.S. military is new, but the vehicles themselves are anything but. “They all hail back to southern African designs,” says Doug Coffey, spokesman for BAE., which builds the RG-33 armored truck. The roughly dozen “Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected” models, all with v-shaped hulls, have their roots in vehicles designed in the 1970s to counter road mines laid by black African guerillas during the Rhodesian “Bush War.”

Considering the provenance of today’s MRAPs, it’s perhaps surprising that one of the most successful African designs has been entirely absent from the U.S. program. The absence says more about politics and industrial considerations that it does about the virtues of particular designs. The Wolf, a 10-ton blast-resistant truck from Namibian state-owned manufacturer WMF, has served in the Danish, German and Namibian armies as well as with non-military agencies, the first of several hundred entering service in 1984. The latest model, the Wer’Wolf, debuted in 2000 and was quickly adopted by the Namibian army.

Clearly the Pentagon was aware of Wer’Wolf even before the belated launch of the MRAP program in late 2006. But when the Marine Corps began handing out production contracts for MRAP trucks in January 2007, small firms including Protected Vehicles and Force Protection, Inc, both based in South Carolina, were among the winners, but WMF was nowhere to be found. What happened?

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Noah Schactman on the cycles of innovation and counter-innovation between insurgent-placed IEDs and coalition forces, in Danger Room:

Radio-controlled bombs used to be the biggest killer of American troops in Iraq. Now, they’ve been rendered all-but-useless. Good news, right? Like so much else in Iraq, it’s not quite that simple.

Since the Iraq insurgency began, mobile phones, garage-door openers, and remotely-driven kids’ toys have all been used to trigger improvised explosive devices from afar. In response, the U.S. military has cobbled together an arsenal of radio-frequency jammers, to interrupt the deadly signals before they can set off the bombs. At first, the jammers had all kinds of troubles. Each type of jammer would only cover a relatively small slice of the spectrum. And they’d drive friendly radio and robots haywire.

But those problems have largely been fixed, troops across Iraq report.  The newer jammers have effectively killed off radio-controlled IEDs in major chunks of the country.

The explosive cat-and-mouse game continues, though. The American have built up high-tech bomb-stoppers. So the insurgents have gone ever lower-tech than before. They’ve largely turned towards so-called “command wire” IEDs to attack U.S. targets.

Pairs of insulated copper threads, some not much thicker than a hair, are buried under the Iraqi dust, and strung out for as long as a kilometer. At the end, an insurgent triggerman waits – sometimes in a buried bunker. It’s a more crude approach to killing, of course.  But, barring a lucky find of wires, “there’s no way for us to defeat it,” says one bomb technician.  And those wires are getting attached to bigger and bigger bombs.

[picture above, of a  cement-mixer-turned-shaped-charge. From Danger Room]

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Do away with one problem, and you now have to cope with the blowback from your success.
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Anyway, command-wire bombs aren’t the only IED threat over here. “Pressure plate” weapons, triggered by the smallest stress, are also in vogue here. Some are even shoved into brown ration packets, and left by the side of the road. Insurgents continue to use passive infrared sensors — like those used in burglar alarms – to sense changes in heat, and trigger a bomb accordingly. Many Humvees here are equipped with a flash-type device that can prematurely set the trigger off. But there will surely be a counter to our countermeasure.

Schachtman is on the money. The relative positions of the two forces don’t appear to make it likely that either side will have a distinct advantage with any longevity.

There is one way to deal with a problem of this sort: it’s to make a majority of the local population identify with soldiers, make them believe that the soldiers are acting out of a desire to protect them. That delicate opportunity slipped out of our hand in 2003, and it’s been moving away from us since.