The WP’s series on IEDs is almost too much to take in — especially online, where you’re confronted by all kinds of great visual extras — but anyone who wants to follow the Iraq War as it’s being fought there (as opposed to here) should read it. Though, of course, the way we fight wars here has been a big part of the real problem:
The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. “If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week,” a former Pentagon official said.
“We all drank the Kool-Aid,” said a retired Army officer who worked on counter-IED issues for three years. “We believed, and Congress was guilty as well, that because the United States was the technology powerhouse, the solution to this problem would come from science. That attitude was ‘All we have to do is throw technology at it and the problem will go away.’ . . . The day we lose a war it will be to guys with spears and loincloths, because they’re not tied to technology. And we’re kind of close to being there.”
