IEEE Spectrum September, 2008 - 26

Monthly Global Terrorist Events
(minus Iraq and Afghanistan)
1000

IED events (explosions or rendered safe)
Other terrorist acts

800
600
400

2006

2007

MAY

APR

MAR

JAN

FEB

DEC

NOV

SEP

OCT

JUL

AUG

JUN

MAY

APR

MAR

JAN

FEB

DEC

NOV

SEP

OCT

JUL

AUG

JUN

APR

MAY

200

2008
Source: Triton Report

Iraq IED Incident Trends
IEDs found and cleared
Ineffective IED attacks

(IED incidents that fail to
produce coalition casualities)

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

FEB
MAR

DEC

OCT

JUN

AUG

FEB

APR

DEC

OCT

JUN

AUG

APR

FEB

DEC

OCT

AUG

JUN

APR

FEB

DEC

OCT

AUG

JUN

APR

FEB

DEC

OCT

JUN

AUG

IED attacks with coalition
force casualties

2008

IeD attaCKS are already common in some places outside of Afghanistan and Iraq [top]. The rate
of attacks in Iraq [bottom] declined in the first half of 2008, thanks to aggressive efforts to dismantle
the networks that build and deploy IEDs. (The number of incidents is not included in this chart
because the Joint IED Defeat Organization declined to release them.)

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 counterIED 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 hav32

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * SEptEmbEr 2008

ing 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."

ife and death on the roads
of Iraq and Afghanistan often
depend on the eyes and intuition of soldiers just a few
years out of high school. Most
IEDs are found today by a soldier peering
through a thick Lexan window of a massively armored truck and noticing something amiss.
"You won't find the IED itself," explains
a U.S. Army counter-IED trainer, in an
interview at Camp Speicher in Tikrit,
Iraq. "You look for other indicators. Trash
right after a route clearance. Disturbed
soil. An area strangely devoid of activity,
or a heavily laden vehicle with no occupants. A donkey cart by itself-it's somebody's livelihood, so why is it abandoned?
Why is no one there?"
Over the past year in Iraq, military
patrols guided by local people, often former insurgents, have uncovered countless thousands of IEDs. The locals are
paid to reveal where the bombs are.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2008