From Daily Kos:

Secondly, I hate to spoil CNN's euphoria over the vote on the referendum, but 5 soldiers and a Marine were killed by IED's on Saturday. I wonder if the families of those tragically slain on the "peaceful" day are celebrating the turn-out on Saturday? I know I don't think that it was worth Casey dying so the people of Iraq can vote in a theocracy.

The soldiers and the Marine were all killed by IED's. There exists such a thing as an IED jammer. For $47,000/vehicle, our children can be saved from most of the IED attacks. The Pentagon has decided that $47,000 is too much to spend to keep our children alive!!! Halliburton steals that much from the Pentagon before the CEO's first cup of morning coffee. For the two vehicles that were destroyed and the 6 of our children killed, it comes to a little over $15,000 per person. Not to be crass, but the government will be handing each family a check for $100, 000.00 soon (the deaths are still "pending") and $400,000.00 in insurance death benefits. I know each family would mortgage their homes, or sell their souls, if they knew it would have cost $15,000.00 to keep their precious family member alive.

The post goes on about bringing them immediately, leaving the Iraqis to the tender mercies of the insurgents, ya-da, ya-da.

So why isn't the US government buying these $47,000 devices?

Maybe because you can buy 47 of these devices for the price of whatever gizmo Cindy Sheehan is talking about:

Warlock Blue. In May 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directed the Army to buy 10,000 Warlock Blue jammers. It was the largest single purchase of such jammers to date. The systems are said to cost less than $1,000 each.

Congress provided $60 million for the jammers, in addition to allotting $308 million in vehicle armor. Under pressure from Congress to expedite the jammer purchase, Rumsfeld gave the authority to waive all procurement rules involving the testing, development, solicitation and contract award. Within 60 days of Rumsfeld’s directive, the Navy and California-based Tyco Electronics produced and delivered the first Warlock Blue handheld jamming devices—a significant feat, considering that such a process normally would take six or nine months.

Warlock Blue is vehicle-portable and reprogrammable and can be handheld. Additional details of the device, however, are classified.

Warlock Blue replaces the less effective Warlock Green, in use since the middle of 2004.

You have to realize that triggering an IED can be done with a cell phone, a garage door opener, a keyless door entry fob, a wireless doorbell, a pager, and so on and so forth. Each of these devices work on different frequencies (and possibly different frequencies in different countries, so insurgents could get shipments from other places to make thing even more difficult). Different frequencies requires even broader jamming, which means greater energy output, and greater chance of a signal burning through.

And then you can forgo the radio and just trigger the IED with a wire -- no jammer will protect you from that.

Armour is of limited utility:

The U.S. military initially responded to the proliferation of IEDs by up-armoring vehicles. According to news reports, 9,000 of the 12,000 HMMWV in Iraq have been armored, as of June 2005.

For a time, the additional armor could shield against the relatively unsophisticated IEDs. But the devices grew proportionally, to the point that an armored HMMWV can be easily blown apart. “The enemy has destroyed our most powerful armored tanks with underground bombs that leave craters in the roads large enough to make swimming pools,” wrote embedded journalist/blogger Michael Yon.

Less-sophisticated IEDs include the “double-bangers,” made from artillery rounds. The next most powerful, according to Yon, are “five-bangers,” which can destroy HMMWVs. Even bigger bombs are becoming more common. In early August, such a bomb destroyed a U.S. Marine Corps 28-ton armored personnel carrier, killing 15 people. “No amount of armor can completely protect us,” pointed out Yon. “Armor is extremely important, but given time, the enemy will defeat it.”

So what else is the murderously penny-pinching Department of Defense working on?

Well, there is the problem of spotting IEDs in the first place. They can be hidden in any number of ways:

According to the Force Protection Working Group, explosive ordnance disposal personnel have found IEDs in:

• Black plastic garbage bags


• A bus (with a grenade attached to the fuel tank)


• Milk cartons, soda cans, cigarette cartons (with plastique or C4)


• A pothole in the road filled in with dirt and an explosive charge


• A refrigerator compressor


• An MRE bag


• Vehicles faking car problems

The hope is that Buckeye can help:

Buckeye. Researchers at the Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) at the Engineer Research and Development Center within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have developed the Buckeye, which uses imagery analysis to detect recent changes along roads and sides of roads––a possible indicator of IEDs.

The Buckeye consists of a frame camera with an electro-optical sensor, and software for processing the imagery. Typically mounted on a UAV, it takes pictures of a given territory to produce 3-D images, and later flies over the same territory to take pictures again. It compares pixel to pixel see what kind of changes have occurred during the intervening time. If an IED is suspected, the location can be inspected in order to confirm the presence of one.

Image comparison is carried out by people rather than computers. “We determined that it’s actually a very large waste of time to have the computer do the any images processing for changes,” said TEC Director Bob Burkhardt. “The human eye is able to operate much faster. And speed is of the essence.”

The Buckeye system has been successful in determining the location of IEDs, said Burkhardt. And it can be used for much more than IED detection. “In Iraq, the Buckeye initially was for IEDs, but commanders had such a need for this level of imagery for intelligence searches and situational awareness that it’s been used to do all sorts of things, not just IEDs,” he pointed out.

And then there is a portable electromagnetic pulse system being worked on by the Navy designed to fry the circuitry of an IED,

And the Shadow UAV that uses hyperspectral sensing.

And the IED activity detection system that treats a prone area with a fluorescent material invisible to the naked eye but that will reveal tampering with the environment using before and after photos.

And more. Much more. Sounds like the Pentagon is spending lots of money and applying some of the best (and most expensive) brains in the business to the problem of protecting the troops.

But the best device is still the Mark I Eyeball:

Not all of that involves the use of high-tech devices. One of the best IED detection systems has nothing to do with technology at all: keen vigilance. “The best sensor we have for detecting an IED is an individual soldier’s or Marine’s eyes,” said Christine DeVries, a spokesperson for the Joint IED Task Force.

Yon, embedded with the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, better known as Deuce Four, recounted a prime example of such vigilance, in an incident that took place in Mosul in early August. As the Stryker unit with whom he was traveling approached a traffic circle, two insurgents were watching their approach, pretending to talk to a taxi driver. One of the terrorists concealed a Motorola radio transmitter in his hand. Just as he was about to detonate a massive bomb buried under the road, one of the other insurgents did a nervous double-take at the lead Stryker. That tipped off Deuce Four commander Lieutenant Colonel Michael E. Kurilla, who immediately ordered evasive action.

“Had Kurilla not spotted that nervous double-take seconds before the stripe-shirted terrorist could hit the #7 key, that bomb might have hit us,” wrote Yon.

So is a combination of superb training and clever technology saving lives? Well, we always hear about the IEDs that find their target. No one talks about the ones detected and avoided.

The new ideas are working:

During the early stages of the IED problem, Task Force officials believed that technology was the best way to defeat the threat.

“The first items that we helped with were the up-armored Humvees, the add-on armor to protect from the blasts and the small-arms protective inserts that go inside the outer tactical vests,” said Col. Lamont Woody, deputy of the [Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force]. “Since then we have gone on to counter radio controlled initiators that the enemy has been using. In other words, we have gone out and tried to figure out how we counter the radio controlled threat.”

Since 2003, the JIEDD TF has invested about $378 million toward the acquisition of technology to counteract radio-controlled devices used to detonate IEDs. The devices, called Countering Radio-Controlled IED Devices – Electronic Warfare, or “jammers,” exist in six vehicle-mounted forms to detect and prevent potential IEDs.

“We have done a lot of research and study, and started to get the production lines in America spun up to get the actual jammers on the vehicles and to the troops that are deployed,” Woody said. “Our goal is to reduce the casualties and to make sure that the troops have the very best TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures), and the very best equipment that we can provide them.”

Woody, who is responsible for joint operations and integration for the JIEDD TF, said that overall IED casualty rates have declined since the inception of the task force, despite an increase in IED usage by the Iraqi insurgency.

According to JIEDD TF statistics, there has been a 45 percent decrease in the rate of IED casualties since April 2004. An estimated 30-40 percent of IEDs are found and rendered safe before they are able to be detonated.

Let's recall Cindy Sheehan's words:

The Pentagon has decided that $47,000 is too much to spend to keep our children alive!!! Halliburton steals that much from the Pentagon before the CEO's first cup of morning coffee. For the two vehicles that were destroyed and the 6 of our children killed, it comes to a little over $15,000 per person. Not to be crass, but the government will be handing each family a check for $100, 000.00 soon (the deaths are still "pending") and $400,000.00 in insurance death benefits.

Sounds like Cindy Sheehan is being crass, as well as ignorant.