America’s Joint Improvised
Explosive Device Organization
| by John Stanton
( September 25, 2012, Virginia, Sri Lanka Guardian) “Improvised explosive devices, and the networks that use these
asymmetric weapons, will remain an enduring threat to U.S. forces and the
nation for decades to come, the Defense Department’s top counter-IED official
told lawmakers Sept. 20. The IED is the weapon of choice for threat networks
because they are cheap, made from readily available off-the-shelf components,
easy to construct, lethal and accurate, said Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Barbero,
Joint IED Defeat Organization director, during testimony to the House
Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Defense.” JIEDDO Press
Release, September 2012
And these guys get paid the
big-bucks for this type of insight? Incredible!
American Congressman C.W. Bill
Young (Republican-Florida) has said he has had enough of the war in
Afghanistan. The death of one of his soldier constituents
by an improvised explosive device (IED) was the last straw for Young. More’s
the pity the soldier, in a letter to Young, had predicted his own demise at the
hands of a commander’s ludicrous orders and an IED.
Young has stated that it is time
to remove from Afghanistan. That is to be applauded. Unfortunately, the US
march to war with Iran is on. Should that become a reality, many more US
casualties on the ground in that region of the world will invariably come as a
result of more advanced IED’s developed by the Iranian military.
Young is rightly incensed by the
lack of progress made by the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Organization
(JIEDDO), a group that has spent nearly $20 billion (US) to find ways and means
to limit the destruction of US forces by the adversary’s use of improvised
explosive devices (IED’s), a crude system that is in essence a typically vicious
landmine. Landmines have been used by fighting forces for hundreds of years and
attempting to rid them from being constructed and surreptitiously placed is a
fool’s errand. The Center for Public Integrity summed up JIEDDO’s woes in a
well-put article titled JIEDDO, The Manhattan Project that Bombed.
A little known factoid about
JIEDDO is that one of the errant children that JIEDDO gave birth to was the US
Army Human Terrain System, a program that has failed to produce any significant
quantifiable results to “attack the network.”
It certainly did not live up to
the hype that JIEDDO heaped upon it back in 2007.
“The Human Terrain System (HTS),
a comprehensive, proof-of-concept civil affairs initiative sponsored by the
Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), completed its preliminary testing in
Afghanistan this summer with overwhelmingly positive results…The outcome of
this assessment is particularly promising to JIEDDO and its efforts to attack
IED networks. By actively engaging and interacting with the indigenous
populations of Afghanistan, the report notes that American forces substantially
improve their IED-related intelligence collection capabilities and increase
support for the respective host nation governments…Human Terrain Teams help the
commanders in theater promote regional stability while simultaneously providing
them and JIEDDO critical cultural and situational awareness of the local
population. This provides tremendous benefit in defeating IED networks within
those areas…”
Some employees within the US Army
Human Terrain System, and military personnel escorting them, were killed/wounded
by IED’s.
Nearly six years later in 2012, the
program continues its tortuous
existence
with CGI Federal (Quebec, Canada) at the helm. Trade
publications in Washington, DC announced in mid-September 2012 that CGI Federal
of Manassas had been awarded $42 million to keep the US Army Human Terrain
System alive.
The news was met with incredulity
by sources within the program.
“Apparently, CGI is actively
recruiting for an October class. This is a stunning development, considering
that HTS still has at least two classes that either have not graduated,
completed training at Fort Polk, or been sworn in. The program and personnel were
horribly mismanaged under [former program manager] Sharon Hamilton. It is no
longer amazing that this program costs so much. The cost of recruiting and
training 50-60 personnel, only to have them released, brought back, retrained,
and released again, is so bizarre that only an audit on expenditures over the
last two years will reveal how badly this program is being mismanaged.
Additionally, even though HTS is
trained to work as a team, they are often deployed as individuals, for as long
as one month, with little or no contact with each other. As a result, and this
can be verified by reading open source reports on the Internet, the teams are
generating little more than ride-along reports, that are generally anecdotal,
unscientific, and totally useless to the supported commander. Reducing training
by four weeks will not save HTS any money, in fact, the total costs will
continue to climb, as these new people accumulate overtime, plus their HTS
salaries, and other allowances.”
Perhaps Congressman Young should look
into getting back that $42 million from the Pentagon that has been directed to
the US Army Human Terrain System. He might re-direct the money to care for
those American soldiers and families wounded in so many ways by the senseless
continuance of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Congressman Young might also
revisit his pro-war stance on Iran. Should war take place between the USA and
Iran, Young will lose many more Floridians in the ensuing madness.
John Stanton is a Virginia based
writer specializing in national security matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com.
