The insurgents "certainly appear to be surging right now," Brigadier General Joseph Votel, who leads the anti-IED task force, said in an interview at Fort Irwin. "Time will tell about their ability to sustain this."
US officials also worry that the increase in attacks threatens to further disrupt Iraq's fledgling government and could threaten the Bush administration's strategy for maintaining public support for the US presence in Iraq by holding down American casualties. Previous increases in attacks have coincided with major political events, but the motivation behind this surge is less obvious, military officials say.
"We're in a very, very dangerous period," said a senior military official at the Pentagon. "To be a successful insurgent you need to be able to create spectacular attacks, and they've certainly done that in the past several weeks."
In addition to technical improvements in their bombs, insurgents, especially in rural areas, are resorting to packing more explosives into the devices to disable armored vehicles, Army experts at the Fort Irwin conference said.
Hundreds of armored Humvees have been rushed to Iraq over the past year, and Pentagon officials say unarmored vehicles are now confined to bases. Still, five Marines were killed this week near Ramadi, about 125km west of Baghdad, when their vehicle hit an IED. Earlier this month, five Marines were killed after their vehicle struck a bomb in Haqlaniya, about 270km northwest of Baghdad.
A senior Marine officer with access to classified reports from the field said the military had had "a very bad couple of weeks, in Ramadi especially." The vehicles involved in the two fatal attacks on the Marines were armored Humvees but, the officer said, the bombs "were so big that there was little left of the Humvees that were hit."
Insurgents have long been able to build bombs powerful enough to penetrate some armored vehicles. But use of "shaped" charges could raise the threat considerably, military officials said. Since last month, at least three such bombs have been found, Lieutenant General James Conway, the director of operations for the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing this month.
The shaped charge explosion fires a projectile "at a very rapid rate, sufficient to penetrate certain levels of armor," Conway said, adding that armored Humvees are "susceptible if they're hit just right, with the shape charge at just the right angle." He added that the weapons employing shaped charges have caused US casualties in the last two months, but he did not give details.
A Pentagon official involved in combating the devices said shaped charges seen so far appeared crude but required considerable expertise, suggesting insurgents were able to draw on well-trained bombmakers, possibly even rocket scientists, from the former government. Shaped charges and rocket engines are similar, the official said.
Infrared detonators are an advance over the more common method of rigging bombs to explode after an insurgent nearby presses a button on a cellphone, a garage door opener or other device that gives off an electric signal. That approach is vulnerable to jammers, however, and a shift to infrared detonators, which rely on light waves, underscores the insurgents' resourcefulness.
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