IEDs in the news

Agence France-Presse came through with a pretty good story on the armor-vs.-ied arms race, albeit with more emphasis on the latter than the former.

PARIS (AFP) — On the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and southern Lebanon no weapon poses as big a threat to Western armies' armoured convoys as the simple roadside bomb.

For more than half a decade US and European forces have been locked in an arms race with insurgent engineers, who try to build ever more sophisticated booby-traps to defeat ever stronger armour and defensive tactics.

(AFP)

For me, the thing that sets this story above much that I see is the emphasis on the precision required to design a working EFP. Last year my local paper published a piece that made it sound as easy as running to a machine shop and spending a few minutes modifying an existing bomb with a screwdriver.

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Virtual training for IED removal

NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Daytona Beach, FL, United States, 01/15/2008 - In direct response to an urgent need from the Army’s engineer school in Ft. Hood, Texas, the first-ever Virtual Route Clearance Trainer (VRCT) to support soldiers who operate the U.S. Army’s newly introduced MRAP family of vehicles has been developed.

Raydon developed and delivered the first VRCT to the field 90 days from contract award. The U.S. military is currently utilizing fewer than 500 MRAP vehicles, but has placed orders for the production of an additional 10,000.

The only one of its kind, the VRCT is specifically designed to prepare soldiers who will operate the Mine Protected Clearance Vehicles (MPCV) Buffalo, Vehicle Mounted Mine Detectors (VMMD) Husky, and the Medium Mine Protected Vehicles (MMPV) RG-31, which interrogate, spot, mark and sweep for IEDs and hidden land mines in Iraq.
(Newswiretoday.com)

I'd imagine a training program like this one would benefit from frequent upgrades as new methods are used to conceal IEDs. In any case, it probably helps if a trainee has experience at identifying certain types of known threat. Dealing with the novel stuff comes with field experience, no doubt.

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IED hunting (Updated)

Ran across a story that describes IED hunting. The story put a name to a vehicle I've spotted in some of the MRAP YouTube videos I've posted: the Husky.

Watson, 23, has a particularly dangerous role in the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion based at al-Asad. By choice, he drives a vehicle called a Husky, which looks like an outsized, armor-plated dune buggy, as a member of a route-clearance team.

Watson's job is to drive slowly along the sides of roads and through visual abilities and highly sensitive and adjustable electronic sensors find and mark mines for neutralizing by other team members, who do so through the use of a larger MRAP (Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected) vehicle that has a huge hydraulic arm that digs mines out and snips their wires or destroys their detonators.

(Middle East Times, via UPI)

For those interested, here's a YouTube video showing a Husky enduring an IED attack. The content has been marked as offensive, so the link probably won't go directly to the video portion.

I should mention that the content is marked as offensive because it's an enemy propaganda video. The funny part is that the guy who posted it thinks it shows the destruction of an MRAP, whereas the Husky appears to perform as it was designed--protecting the driver while falling apart in a manner that permits relatively easy repair.

clipped from www.edmontonsun.com

One of the Canadian Force's new Husky deminers used in Afghanistan was blown up after driving over an IED on a narrow road west of Masum Ghar. No one was seriously hurt in the explosion. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Bill Graveland)

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I kind of dig the goofy formatting this time.

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Update: Supplied the hotlink to the Youtube video.