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JIEDDO: Research funds down along with IEDs

The Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization could soon be forced to turn away proposals to defeat makeshift bombs, said the outgoing chief of the lead agency combating the roadside bomb threat U.S. troops face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his final press conference before stepping down Nov. 30, JIEDDO chief Montgomery Meigs noted that lawmakers had slashed JIEDDO’s budget in a recently completed Pentagon spending bill. That means the agency will be unable to fund new IED-fighting initiatives or award new contracts unless more money is found by the end of this month.

The retired Army general also touted a sharp downward trend in bomb attacks, a steady increase in the discovery of weapons caches and a marked increase in tips from civilians as evidence of progress in the difficult effort.

In the recently completed 2008 defense spending bill, Congress only gave the organization $120 million for the current fiscal year. The Pentagon had asked for $500 million in 2008 funding.

On top of the $120 million amount, JIEDDO has access to $330 million left over from fiscal 2007. Overall, the organization has about $472 million to spend this fiscal year. Had Congress given it the full $500 million, it could have access to as much as $852 million.

Meigs has asked the Office of the Secretary of Defense to reprogram some funds to help remedy the lack of cash for new programs, “but that reprogramming won’t do much” other than alleviating the problem for about two weeks, he said.

The organization likely will get funding help at some point later this year when the Pentagon is expected to send lawmakers a 2008 war supplemental. And while Meigs said he has been told to plan to have those emergency dollars in April, history has shown it is more likely to come in the summer, meaning the impact of the recent cuts could last most of the fiscal year.

Until the supplemental help arrives, Meigs has decided JIEDDO can only afford to fund things like:

• Office and facility costs, such as power bills and leases.

• The salaries of contractors. No new funding could force JIEDDO to lay off “a couple hundred” contractors, Meigs said.

• Sustainment of current programs and contracts.

Attacks decline

While JIEDDO faces funding challenges in Washington, Meigs reported success on the operational end of its efforts.

The statistic he monitors most closely is the average for daily IED attacks, which he compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. One chart in his presentation, based on data from the U.S.-led Multinational Forces-Iraq, shows a 42 percent drop in that average since June. He credited the drop largely to the surge that put thousands more U.S. troops on the ground in Baghdad and across Iraq.

And the U.S. military has seized 5,364 caches of bomb materials in 2007, up from 2,667 in 2006 — before the surge, according to another slide. That uptick peaked at nearly 700 nabbed caches in April. Some 650 were seized in May, before a drop to 500 in June. In the next three months, that level remained constant at about 550, until climbing just above 600 last month. For the same time period in 2006, only two months saw U.S. troops find more than 200 caches, April and October, according to the chart.

Meigs told reporters that the incidence of all IED attacks — those that caused coalition casualties, those that did not and those that were found and cleared before detonation — are down 55 percent since June and July.

That roughly matches figures provided Nov. 1 from Baghdad that showed weekly attacks peaking at that time, when the administration’s full “surge” force of five brigade combat teams was in place, and falling from just under 1,600 in mid-June to about 650 in late October — a 59 percent decline.

The surge forces were deployed primarily to Baghdad and scattered about in combat outposts, an effort to blend in more with local populations and gain better intelligence on insurgent cells.

Meigs, director of the Arlington, Va.-based agency since December 2005, also said the daily rate of IED attacks that caused coalition casualties has remained “fairly constant” since about December 2004. Meigs provided no numbers, saying those are classified. But the enemy, he said, “is having to set a lot more IEDs to cause the same casualty rate.”

Meigs said that while every IED caused a casualty early in the war, it now takes an average of five to do so.

The Pentagon does not release the number of U.S. casualties caused by IEDs.

As of Nov. 19, 3,153 U.S. troops had been killed in action in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. According to icasualties.org, an independent Web site that tracks war fatalities, 1,583 of those deaths, or 50 percent, were due to IEDs — a figure it says may be on the low side.

Finally, Meigs said, tips on enemy activity from civilians, which had fallen from 24,178 in May to 16,934 in July — a decline he said he couldn’t explain — rose in August, the latest month for which he had figures, to 19,294.

“That is really good news,” Meigs said. “This is a function of more soldiers out on the ground being more aggressive.”

In Afghanistan, Meigs said, troops continue to find and clear about half of the IEDs emplaced — the other half detonate, but most do not cause casualties, he said. Lethality, however, is “up a little bit,” he said. He attributed that to fewer troops on the ground in Afghanistan conducting more dismounted operations.

“So it’s easier to get closer to the troops,” he said.

The Defense Department announced Oct. 30 that President Bush has nominated Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the current deputy commanding general and chief of staff for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., for reappointment to that rank and assignment as Meigs’ replacement. Meigs announced last summer that he would step down.