{EOP}Pentagon Spends Billions to Fight Roadside Bombs, With Little Success

WASHINGTON — In February 2006, with roadside bombs killing more and more American soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon created an agency to defeat the deadly threat and tasked a retired four-star general to run it.
Five years later, the agency has ballooned into a 1,900-employee behemoth and has spent nearly $17 billion on hundreds of initiatives. Yet the technologies it has developed have failed to significantly improve U.S. soldiers’ ability to detect unexploded roadside bombs and have never been able to find them at long distances.
Indeed, the best detectors remain the low-tech methods: trained dogs, local handlers and soldiers themselves.
A review by the Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers of government reports and interviews with auditors, investigators and congressional staffers show that the agency — the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization — also violated its own accounting rules and hasn’t properly evaluated its initiatives to keep mistakes from being repeated.
Meanwhile, roadside bombs remain the single worst killer of soldiers as more U.S. forces have been transferred out of Iraq and into Afghanistan.
Known in military parlance as improvised explosive devices, the crude, often-homemade bombs killed 368 coalition troops in Afghanistan last year, by far the highest annual total since 2001, when the U.S.-led war there began, according to icasualties .org, which tracks military casualties in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Among the serious questions about how well JIEDDO has spent its billions:
• The agency failed to collect data on its projects, leading a congressional investigative subcommittee to conclude in 2008: “The nation does not yet know if JIEDDO is winning the (counter-IED) fight.”
• Some of its spending went to programs that had little to do with its core mission, including $400 million for Army force protection in 2010 and $24.6 million to hire private contractors for intelligence operations in Afghanistan.
• Agency officials misreported about $795 million in costs, the Government Accountability Office said, circumventing its own rules requiring high-level Defense Department approval for projects with price tags greater than $25 million.
• JIEDDO’s staff comprises six contractors for every government employee, a ratio that its outgoing director acknowledged needs to be reduced.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a former Marine and an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, said the Pentagon and its anti-IED agencies, including JIEDDO, could do far better in preventing casualties from roadside bombs.
“So as long as the IED metric keeps going up, and as long as we keep taking the majority of our KIA (killed in action) casualties from IEDs, then they’ve all been unsuccessful. Period,” he said.
One U.S. soldier who was based in Baghdad in 2008 said: “We were out there every day. We studied our destroyed vehicles, and (the enemy’s IED tactics) kept changing. So we kept trying new ideas, anything, to stop them. JIEDDO didn’t help us.” The soldier declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, who recently stepped down as the agency’s director, acknowledged missteps but said they were inevitable because the agency was tasked with producing devices quickly.
“We fund things,” said Oates, who was the agency’s third director in five years. “Sometimes we fund things that don’t work. Some call that waste; I call it risk.”
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