BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military reports it has improved its capability to counter
insurgency bombings in Iraq.
Officials said the U.S. Army has perfected techniques to detect and
neutralize so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq. They said the
improved capability reflects enhanced equipment, technology and expertise by
soldiers.
Over the last year, U.S. casualties from IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan
have been reduced by 45 percent, officials said. They said that in 2005 the
number of bombing attempts has declined and the IEDs have become more crude
in their design, Middle East Newsline reported.
U.S. troops were said to have had their greatest success in the Baghdad
area. Officials said Task Force Baghdad has succeeded in finding half of all
IEDs. They said 70 percent of the IED attacks against troops in the Baghdad
area
failed to produce casualty.
"This can be attributed to the technological advances in equipment,
armor protection and the fact that we are capturing or killing experienced
anti-Iraqi forces." Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, a Task Force Baghdad spokesman,
said.
In early April, soldiers with the 1/69 Armor found an IED in a shoe box.
Soldiers with the 1/13 Armor reported an IED composed of a 130 mm shell and
placed along a military service route. In both cases, the bombs were
neutralized without injury.
"We are looking at just about any possible technology that will enable
us to either neutralize, defeat, predict, prevent, [or] mitigate the use of
IEDs," Richard Bridges, the spokesman for the Pentagon's Joint Task Force on
Improvised Explosive Devices, said.
Officials said the Pentagon has been analyzing 818 proposals from the
private sector as part of a $1.6 billion project. They said the solicitation
from defense firms differed from the traditional approach of issuing request
for proposals on specific requirements.
"If it's off-the-shelf [already manufactured], it will be in the field
in a matter of days, if not hours," Bridges said. "If we find something
that's really looking promising and that is currently available and we know
all the properties of it, and things like that, and we have somehow
overlooked it in the past, we have money available to buy it and ship it
immediately."
The United States has provided Iraqi forces with equipment to detect
bombs. On April 5, Iraqi police commandos used a Z-Backscatter van to
discover a vehicle packed with explosives near Ramadi. Z-Backscatter
technology, employed at Iraqi border crossings, is a mobile X-ray scanner
that enables
operators to view concealed explosives, drugs and people.
