The IED busting business is a tough one. On one hand you have insurgents using garden variety explosives to cause death and injuries on soldiers of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. And not only that, they have also made such IEDs against armored vehicles. The cost for them? Almost negligible as they can use various materials that can be found in their areas of operation and perhaps some expert assistance from other countries. On the other hand those at the receiving end of these IEDs are tied down spending billions of dollars just to defeat these almost simple devices.

This Wired Magazine article gives us the ironies of war. The insurgents and terrorists using simple methods that can be developed almost overnight to defeat whatever countermeasures the Coalition Forces can throw against their concoctions with the latter merely reacting to such improvisations that would require a lot of money that can be devoted to other purposes such as improving battlefield medicine. For all the technologies that were developed to destroy the planet many times over, they have just started developing technologies to go against such simple devices which should have been what you can call "piece of cake."

The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JEIDO) has spent more than US$17 Billion and utilizes more than 3,600 government workers and contractors working round the clock to defeat IEDs. That's a lot of resources being devoted against kitchen-made bombs. While they are able to compile and put together various countermeasures and train the troops with the new IED-defeating methods, the insurgents just move on to the next methods, creating another vicious cycle of action-reaction.

Photo: Canadian ISAF troops

IEDs, even if unexploded, achieve a certain purpose when detected and disarmed/destroyed  by the soldiers. They have already delayed the advances of troops and vehicles, and allow the escape of the perpetrators. They bog down men and material as the move from one point or another. These are dumb devices that can do a cost-effective purpose that some mighty militaries would spend billions just to achieve the same.

The question on how will this end will never be answered as long as there are conflicts like this around the world. And the JEIDO and their partners have their work cut out for them.

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