"Tribal-like organizational cultures and bureaucratic reluctance" are hobbling the Pentagon's fight against improvised explosive devices. And that's making success in battling the jury-rigged bombs "as elusive as victory in Iraq," according to an insider study, obtained by DANGER ROOM.
The report, written by Colonel William Adamson -- the former operations officer in the Defense Department's $4.4 billion-a-year Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO -- also heaps praise on the Pentagon for its "resilience, learning and adapting to the IED threat." It credits JIEDDO's chief, retired General Montgommery Meigs, with "vision [and] leadership." And the paper notes that "casualty rates per IED attack are down, indicating that the cumulative effort of training, better protective equipment, and improved intelligence [have] had a positive effect."
However, what the paper concludes, ultimately, is that the American effort against improvised bombs has been an "unsatisfactory performance [with] an incomplete strategy." What's more, the JIEDDO-led struggle against the hand-made explosives has a "strategic flaw" that may keep the U.S. from ever gaining the upper hand on the bombers, Adamson notes: The lack of authority to knock bureaucratic heads. He recommends instead establishing a separate, Executive Branch agency with a "laser-like concentration on the hostile use of
IEDs."
Ideally, every element of the U.S. government would be teaming up to fight IEDs, Adamson writes. Spies would be uncovering rings of bombers; FBI investigators would be helping examine forensic evidence; diplomats would be applying political pressure to catch bombers; other countries could even be chipping in, offering their own experience with improvised explosives.
In practice, however, such coordination has been uneven, at best.
The "IA [interagency] process lacks a comprehensive strategy for defeating the global IED threat." Outside of the military, few agencies have viewed bomb-beating "as essential to their collective or unilateral missions." So they have given the problem short shrift. For example, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms decided that, "due to resource constraints, [it] could not support greater involvement with DOD’s [the Department of Defense's] IED effort," Adamson notes. Same goes for the nation's spies. "Internal reform and mission overload in the IC [intelligence community] cripple[d] its capacity for additional effort."
Adamson's paper isn't the only military academic study to find fault with JIEDDO, and the way in which the Organization is set up. As *Inside Defense *first reported, a March report for the Joint Forces Staff College said that
JIEDDO "possesses neither the structure nor the authority to effectively prosecute the war against IEDs. As a large, bureaucratic organization rooted in the technological approach to defeating IEDs,
JIEDDO lacks the agility to quickly react to a changing enemy and has no legal authority to compel other DoD [Department of Defense] entities to act."
The paper, entitled "Joint Improvised
Explosive Device Defeat Organization: Tactical
Successes Mired in Organizational Chaos; Roadblock in the Counter-IED Fight," recommended that JIEDDO be placed under U.S. Joint Forces Command, instead.
A JIEDDO spokesperson said that "We appreciate the efforts of those outside of JIEDDO
in finding ways that the organization can improve its abilities to find and implement solutions that protect our troops in harm's way from the effects of IEDs." However, the spokesperson added,"we do not respond to specific student academic projects.
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