Times Online UK

Christina Lamb

The soldier breathes loud and fast as he lays a timed charge on an explosive in a Baghdad street. “I want these people to know if they’re going to leave a bomb on the side of the road for us, we’re just going to blow up their f****** road,” he growls, walking away. Before he can reach safety, an Iraqi punches a code into a mobile phone. The explosion sends the soldier flying in a cloud of dust and debris.

The opening eight minutes of the Oscar-nominated movie The Hurt Locker bring to light the terrifying work of bomb disposal units. The special effects may be Hollywood, but there is no exaggerating the horror of IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that are by far the biggest killers of British and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The IED has supplanted the Kalashnikov to become the insurgent weapon of the 21st century. It can be assembled by villagers in a back yard and it enables the Taliban to take on an enemy with far superior numbers and fire power just as Stinger surface-to-air missiles enabled the Mujaheddin to neutralise Soviet air power in the 1980s.

In Afghanistan now, in the battle for Marjah, the coalition has 15,000 soldiers ranged against an estimated 400 Taliban fighters. It sounds like no contest. Yet progress is slow and bloody because the Taliban have ringed the town with IEDs in what soldiers call the “belt of death”.

The work of the British and American soldiers who disarm these devices is heroic. But the real race to counter the threat is going on thousands of miles away in secret laboratories on America’s east coast.

Over the past three years, the Pentagon has spent $15.5 billion and employed top scientific minds in an effort to come up with the best ways to detect and survive IEDs. Its scientists and engineers are working round the clock on robots, lasers, chemical detectors and even specially trained bees.

The Sunday Times has had unprecedented access to this massive shadowy programme, which brings together brainpower and money on a scale last seen in the second world war when the Manhattan project raced to develop the atom bomb.

Its headquarters is a grey office block with no name. Inside, the Wall of Fallen Heroes is covered with plaques bearing the names of US soldiers killed by IEDs. January was a bad month, with about one a day killed, all in Afghanistan. In 2003 there were 81 recorded IED incidents in Afghanistan. Last year there were 8,159. In Helmand it is common to see soldiers vomit before they go on patrol because the chances of being hit are so high.

IEDs are nothing new. Guy Fawkes used one to try to blow up parliament. Lawrence of Arabia placed bombs on the road and railway to disrupt Turkish supply routes during the first world war. They were common in Vietnam when the Vietcong fashioned them from unexploded American ordinance. The term IED was coined in the 1970s by the British Army when the IRA made bombs from fertiliser and Semtex smuggled from Libya.

The war in Iraq saw them used on a new scale. The country had enormous stockpiles of munitions. By September 2003 there were 100 explosions a month, soon rising to 2,000. General John Abizaid, who took over US central command in July 2003, asked the Pentagon for a “Manhattan project-like” approach. The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (Jieddo) now has more than 3,000 staff and funds of $4 billion a year.

The man in charge is General Michael Oates, a four-tour veteran of Iraq. “The war against IEDs is very personal,” he says. “I’ve lost many of my men to them and I’ve been in proximity many times. A vehicle behind you blowing up, a vehicle in front, your own vehicle getting hit ... My driver killed. Virtually every soldier I know has seen an IED or been close to one or knows someone who died.”

About half of all American soldiers who died in Iraq were killed by IEDs, while in Afghanistan the figure is now about two-thirds. But insurgents quickly learnt that they inflict more than just death and injury. “The IED is a tactical weapon in that people use it to maim and kill us, but also a strategic weapon in that it impacts the will of our countries to operate overseas,” says Oates. “So tactically we need to find ways to detect and defeat it, and survive it if we don’t, but in our national capitals we have to remove it as a weapon that overly influences our strategy, and that’s very difficult.”

Oates views the task of defeating IEDs as a combination of improving protection for the troops, detection and interrupting the financial networks behind the attacks. To this end, his team includes all sorts, from FBI agents specialising in gangs, top scientists, cultural specialists and social anthropologists as well as demolition specialists.

To see what progress is being made, I head north to the Aberdeen proving ground in Maryland. It’s a spooky place that houses the world’s first programmable computer (on which the ballistic calculations for the Manhattan project were done) and sealed buildings behind barbed wire.

In a hangar a group of soldiers is operating a remote-control robot the size of a lawnmower. The men are explosive ordnance disposal specialists in the 20th Support Command, whose informal motto is “Initial success or total failure”.

Sergeant John Stricklett has done four tours in Baghdad, often taking the “long walk” to defuse a bomb. He shows me how he can operate the Talon robot from a laptop in a case, studying the area from its four mounted cameras and manoeuvring its claw-like hands.

“It becomes my hands and disassembles the bomb while I can stay at remote distance,” he says. “On my last deployment I lost three robots. If I’d walked down that street instead, they would have got me.”

At $150,000 a time, the robots are expensive, but cheap in comparison with the lives they save. When robots don’t work, the technicians have to put on a blastresistant suit and a transparent face shield, resembling an astronaut’s mask. The suit is enormously heavy and suffocatingly hot.

“All you can hear inside is your breathing and your heart beating,” says Master Sergeant Charles Wyatt.

The scientists working on ways to defeat the IEDs are led by Dr Augustus Way Fountain, the US army’s chief chemist and an expert in electro-optics. I meet him at his lab in the Edgewood chemical biological centre. Every IED encountered in Afghanistan is sent here to be replicated.

“The operational word in IED is ‘improvised’. As they are constantly changing, we need to keep vigilant and maintain our technological expertise to stay ahead of the game,” he says. The main focus of his work is finding chemical signatures of bombs. A ground-penetrating laser known as a Huskie has been developed to try to detect them through mass spectroscopy. The task now is to miniaturise it and enable it to work from a distance.

The irony of amassing all this money and brainpower to defeat a bunch of largely illiterate Afghan farmers assembling bombs in their mud houses using fertiliser packed in kitchen jugs is not lost on him. “Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to defeat,” he says. “As Americans we like technology, we like complicated things. That’s what I’ve been trying to get my head round — how to think more simply.”

One of the more bizarre suggestions has been to use honeybees because of their acute sense of smell. The small hairs that bees use to detect pollen can be used to detect any scent, prompting them to stick out their tongues.

A defence research laboratory in Los Alamos has found they can be trained within 20 minutes to recognise a particular chemical. It proposes putting bees in a detecting machine with a monitor that registers a signal when the bees stick out their tongues. But the logistics of carrying bees inside army vehicles moving around Afghanistan have proved unworkable.

The main testing site for the counter-IED programme is an island in Chesapeake Bay at a facility so secret I am asked not to name it. It is dotted with concrete bunkers. Signs proclaim “extreme noise area” and “firing in progress”. Every so often there is a loud boom. Every device encountered in Afghanistan, once replicated, is tested here, and for the past five years Scott Schoenfeld, a computational physicist, has been studying nothing else.

A siren sounds and he takes me into a bunker with a thick steel blast wall and lots of computers. About 100 yards away a copy of the latest Taliban IED is blown up and the screens all light up. “As it explodes, the device sends out lethal fragments and explosive gases, and what we are doing is using X-ray imaging to capture this in real time,” he says. The information enables Schoenfeld and his team to design better armour for army vehicles.

Once the debris stops raining down and the all-clear sounds, we go outside. The wooden stall where the IED was placed has been obliterated and the wall where the armour is tested is pitted with scars.

Schoenfeld admits that, whatever his team comes up with, the insurgents always seem to be one step ahead. “As soon as we discover a way to find this stuff or protect our men, the enemy adapts.”

First the army strengthened the Humvee from a 1.25-ton chassis to 2.5 tons. Then it built 20-ton MRAPs — mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles with V-shaped hulls to deflect blasts. Now even those are being hit as the Taliban have adapted by using larger explosives.

“You might argue, why don’t you just armour more,” says Oates. “But the problem is, you reach a crossover point where you can so protect yourself you can’t do your mission. What we really want to do is cause the population to stop people placing IEDs and we can’t do that if we’re inside vehicles so protected we can’t go outside.”

Last month Afghanistan banned ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which is the main ingredient of Taliban bombs. But most of it comes from across the border. And there’s no ban — yet — on ammonium nitrate in Pakistan.

The real secret, as Schoenfeld says, to defeating the IED is to get into the minds of the insurgents. Jieddo has set up a group called the technical gaming team that sits in an office plastered with maps of Pakistan and Afghanistan and tries to predict what future IEDs might look like.

“Think chess, not checkers, always trying to be one move ahead of insurgents,” says Erin Piateski, a mechanical engineer who is part of the group. “They come up with things we never expected,” she says, in an almost admiring tone. “They take something extremely simple and make it extremely complex. These guys are really creative.”

She takes out a big cardboard box of what looks like junk — old mobile phones and wires, circuit boards, 7-Up cans, toy cars, walkie-talkies, key rings, handheld electronic games. “This is what we call the IED petting zoo,” she says, “otherwise known as the ‘petting zoo of death’.”

The most common IEDs in Afghanistan are simple pressure plates — two wooden blocks with metallic strips inside that make contact when a person or vehicle goes over them, attached to a command wire that sets off the explosion.

“Look at this,” says Piateski, taking out some metal-lined strips of wood. “They come up with pressure plates so intricate and I wonder, ‘Why did you go out of your way to make it so complicated?’ Maybe the maker is a budding engineer.”

She pulls out a wire with several pressure plates along it. “This is what’s known as a Christmas tree light,” she says.

The problem with the basic pressure-plate design is that the insurgent can’t select a target and may end up blowing up a farmer and his goat. For a while, insurgents were using wireless devices that could be triggered by punching a code into a cellphone as a convoy passed. When coalition forces started using jammers on their vehicles to block the phone signal, the Taliban devised new command-wire and pressure-plate IEDs. These are hard to detect because they use graphite for the connections to avoid being found by metal detectors, though this is expensive. The insurgents are also working on ways to defeat the jammers.

The Taliban are not believed to have a centralised IED unit, and there is a lot of regional variation. But everyone under a certain regional commander will tend to use the same design. “After a while we begin to recognise their signature,” says Piateski.

The Taliban are good at disguising IEDs in rubbish, potholes or craters from previous blasts. But for all the US technology, a high percentage of IEDs found are spotted by soldiers noticing that something doesn’t look right.

In the assault on Marjah last week, a British lieutenant moving into a bazaar with his men noticed a new wire on an old pole. Further investigation revealed it was connected to eight buried mortar shells.

“Finding devices is in my view a stop-gap measure,” says Piateski. “If someone really has it in their mind to set off an IED they will succeed — you can’t catch them all the time.”

Back in Jieddo’s head office, Oates agrees. Though optimistic that his scientists will come up with new means of detection, he believes the real answer is to go after the financiers who pay for the explosives. To help, he has brought in organised crime experts from the FBI as well as experts in Afghan culture and society.

“IED networks are like organised crime — people have turf,” he says. “You’ve got to understand who is operating where and why. At first we assumed the IEDs were all there to kill us, but they may not be. The purpose may be very different if you’re involved in a criminal enterprise such as drug smuggling. The last thing you want is coalition forces interdicting your free flow, so you may put a device out there to say ‘don’t mess with this porcupine’.”

The money Oates has to spend is almost double the entire spending of the Afghan government. Not everyone agrees throwing all this money at the problem is the best way to go. “Defeat of the IED is not an arms-race type environment where you win by protecting or detecting,” said Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian general who commanded Nato forces in Kandahar until November. “It’s the Afghan population who will defeat IEDs — it’s them who see them being made and planted. Just as your towns are safe not because of the police but because of you — picking up the phone to the police to say there’s someone doing X.”

Oates does not agree. How can he? The money protects his soldiers. It saves lives: civilian as well as military. And he knows what it feels like to face IEDs when you are just trying to do your job. His emotion when he talks about it is infinitely more powerful than the Hollywood special effects that give The Hurt Locker its force. “After you’ve survived one but clearly felt the effect, you know the feeling next time you go out, when you’re looking around all the time so much your neck hurts, waiting for the next,” he says. “Try and explain that to someone. That’s why we’re doing this.”