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Army: IED attacks up, but not casualties

Iraqi insurgents are launching four times as many attacks with improvised explosive devices than in 2003, but U.S. casualties from the roadside bombs have not risen — due in part to devices that jam the radio signals that trigger the weapons, Pentagon officials say.

“We have defeated some of their ways of detonating IEDs,” said Christine Devries, spokeswoman for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Office. “We are working on protecting every vehicle with that leaves a forward base with jammers.”

Only one in five IED attacks kills or injures U.S. troops, said Devries. She defined an “IED attack” as the emplacement of a roadside bomb, whether it explodes or is prevented from doing so by electronic jamming or physical means.

She declined to provide exact casualty figures.

Statistics compiled by Defense News show that 224 U.S. soldiers died in IED attacks in Iraq from August 2003 to August 2004, while more than 425 have been killed in the past 12 months. Comparable figures for other service branches were not available.

Devries said her IED casualty figures, which include wounded as well as killed, show little total increase between 2003 and 2006.

She did say that about one in nine troops injured by an IED dies. That would suggest, for one thing, that more than 3,800 soldiers were hurt by roadside bombs in the past year.

IEDs have grown more powerful as the war has gone on, with daisy-chained charges and explosively formed penetrators adding to their effectiveness.

Devries said jamming is just part of the effort to protect troops from IEDs.

“Jamming is one solution. There is no silver bullet. The best approach is an offensive that goes after the bomb-maker network,” said Devries. “The enemy is adaptive, as we get good at defeating one of his tactics he moves to something else. But he does not leave anything behind, so we try to anticipate his next move and develop a countermeasure beforehand.”

One jammer manufacturer said demand has soared in the past year.

“We are seeing lot of customized applications where customers want them specially configured to vehicles,” said Elan Jamil, marketing manager with Homeland Security Strategies, a New Rochelle, N.Y.-based firm that has supplied such jammers to the Pentagon and U.S. government contractors since 1979.

“People want to be able to control which frequencies they jam,” especially because they “might want to communicate using the same type of technology that they may be jamming,” Jamil said.