The Pentagon is tripling its spending, to about US$3.5 billion this year, on a newly expanded effort to combat the rising number of increasingly powerful and sophisticated homemade bombs that are the No. 1 killer of US troops in Iraq, military officials say.
The move is a tacit acknowledgment that despite years of rising death tolls from the devices, the response has not been sufficiently focused or coordinated at the highest levels. And it comes in addition to recent spending to get more and better armor for troops and their vehicles, spurred by concerns expressed by Congress and the American public.
Interviews with a dozen officials in Washington and Iraq detailed an intensive effort on the overall project, which at one time was led by a one-star general but recently a retired four-star Army general, Montgomery Meigs, was put in charge.
In the next few months, the Defense Department plans to double the number of technical, forensic and intelligence specialists assigned to the problem, to about 360 military personnel and contractors in the US and Iraq. Hundreds of other experts are being called in, including more than are currently involved from the FBI and the CIA. New technology and training techniques are also quickly being pushed into service.
The increased response comes after the number of makeshift bombings against allied and Iraqi forces and Iraqi civilians nearly doubled from 5,607 in 2004 to 10,593 last year. The military says it is able to discover and defuse only about 40 percent of the bombs, and the result is deadly: Last year, 407 of the 846 Americans killed in Iraq were victims of the bombs, which are called improvised explosive devices.
Army officials say new tactics and equipment, like more heavily armored vehicles, are reducing the lethality of the bombs. But Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England said at a forum of more than 800 industry and military experts last month that nearly 90 percent of the Army's casualties were caused by the devices.
"The insurgents' use of increasingly lethal improvised explosive devices, and the IED-makers' adaptiveness to coalition countermeasures, remain the most significant day-to-day threat to coalition forces, and a complex challenge for the intelligence community," National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told the Senate Intelligence Committee last Thursday.
Some independent specialists and influential members of Congress say the military has failed to harness more effectively the expertise of all federal agencies, international allies and industries to battle the threat in an all-encompassing way.
"We're doing a lot, but we must do more," said Representative Duncan Hunter, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He just returned from a trip to Iraq.
Hunter said in a telephone interview that the committee would soon send to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, a proposal to dispatch more technology and operational assistance to combat zones, a move that has caused tension with some senior US officers.
"Not all the commanders agree with me," Hunter said.
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