The I.E.D was one of those weapons that comes out of no where and can change the whole nature of a war as it did in Iraq. Cheap effective and difficult to combat the weapon wreaked havoc on plenty of US convoys in Iraq and now its being used in Afghanistan.
From the Times:
FORWARD OPERATING BASE ALTIMUR, Afghanistan — The call came just after dinner: a pickup truck carrying Afghan national police officers had hit a buried bomb, and all five officers inside were dead.
When First Lt. James Brown and his team of bomb investigators arrived at the shredded remains of the truck, the grim significance of the attack became clear. One of the dead was a hard-charging commander who, more than any officer in this restive district of Logar Province, had helped fight a shadowy network of local bomb makers.“If he wasn’t trying so hard, if he was taking bribes, taking naps, he’d be alive right now,” Lieutenant Brown said of the commander, Gul Alam.
This is the war in Afghanistan today, where death is measured less by the accuracy of bullets than by the cleverness of bombs. And though the Afghan insurgency’s improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, are less powerful or complex than those used in Iraq, they are becoming more common and more sophisticated with each week, American military officers say.
This year, bomb attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan have spiked to an all-time high, with 465 in May alone, more than double the number in the same month two years before. At least 46 American troops have been killed by I.E.D.’s this year, putting 2009 on track to set a record in the eight-year war.
The can be overcome, but it takes a whole lot of endurance and patience to defeat these tactics which have the usa and our allies.The following clips are from Chechnya and show various I.E.D attacks on Russian vehicles. It illustrates the devastating affect of these weapons:
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