Behind the scenes, however, there were signs of improvement. The
Navy sent to Iraq hundreds of electronic warfare specialists, to
bring the cacophony produced by 14 kinds of jammers into some sort
of harmony. Protocols were established, to allow one device to send
its signal and then go silent for a few milliseconds, so another
gadget could broadcast; that allowed Warlock Red and Warlock Green
to be packaged into a single, combination unit. The 'deadly
embrace' between the jammers began to loosen. The Pentagon's IED
task force became the Joint IED Defeat Organisation, or JIEDDO,
with a $3.6 billion annual budget to tame the homemade bomb threat.
Mongtomery Meigs, the retired four-star general in charge of the
organisation, worked to unravel the bureaucratic tangle that tied
up bomb trigger analysis. The intelligence specialists at
the Combined Explosive Exploitation Cells got faster and
faster at analysing which frequencies the insurgents were using.
That, in turn, allowed the jammers to be updated more quickly, so
they could counter emerging threats.
Most importantly, perhaps, a new generation of jammers entered
the battlefield, thanks to JIEDDO's billions. Some, like the
Marines' Chameleon countermeasure, could cover a broad range
of frequencies, from low-powered triggers (like key fobs) to
high-powered ones (like walkie-talkies). In February of '06, the
Corps announced they were buying 4,000 of the 125-pound (56 kilo),
Warlock Duke used a technique called "set-on" jamming to
overcome the more advanced digital triggers. Like Green, Duke would
listen for a malicious signal. But rather than confuse a receiver
with a modified version of its own signal, Duke had a series of
built-in jamming responses, designed to fool very specific devices.
If Duke heard a particular FM walkie-talkie, Duke would send out a
specific FM spoof. It was actually a cruder technique than Green's.
And it relied on very detailed knowledge about exactly which
threats were in which area. But it worked. Tens of thousands were
eventually fielded. And slowly, slowly, the percentage of
radio-controlled bombs as a whole began to fall. Then they began to
"Electronic warfare defensive systems were instrumental in
saving thousands of Soldiers and Marines from being casualties in
Iraq," emails retired Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, who led the 10th
Mountain Division during its tour in Iraq at the time, and then
became director of JIEDDO. "The high use of remote controlled
detonation capability… was a significant and effective threat until
the jammers were developed."
By the time I returned to Iraq, in the summer of 2007, IEDs had
become relics in broad swaths of the country. The insurgents had
largely abandoned their tool of choice.
It was not altogether good news.
North of Baghdad, insurgents took insulated copper threads, some
not much thicker than a hair, and buried them in the dust. Then
they strung them out for as long as a kilometer. At one end was an
insurgent triggerman. At the other, an explosively formed
projectile. It was a crude approach to killing -- even more
primitive than those first bombs planted in Afghanistan. But it was
These "command wire" bombs had a fatal flaw, however. Insurgents
had to stick around to set them off. That made them vulnerable to
American counter-attacks and preemption. And that brought the
number of bombs and bomb fatalities way down. In December of 2007,
only nine US troops were killed by IEDs, and another 166 were
wounded. It was still an awful toll. But it was a tiny fraction of
the 69 slain and 473 injured in December of 2006.