IEDs and the Failure to Adapt By Douglas Farah

The Washington Post has devoted an inordinate amount of space to get into the nitty-gritty of one of the largest structural difficulties facing the military in the new wars it will be fighting-ability to adapt quickly to low-tech enemies.

The two-part series looks at the effectiveness of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and the long, late, multi-billion dollar effort by the military-ultimately unsuccessful-to combat them. IEDs are responsible for the vast bulk of the U.S. casualties in Iraq, and are increasingly used in Afghanistan as well. It has become the weapon of choice, along with suicide bombings, of the Islamist insurgencies.

One of the problems is the huge reliance, both in the combat theater and the intelligence community, on technology. This is highly useful in some areas, but it others it is far less useful than human resources, particularly human intelligence gathering capabilities.

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