An American Lion

Buried in this piece is a conveniently self-serving little lie:

The Pentagon certainly hasn’t been sleeping. The U.S. military has repeatedly declared neutralizing the IED threat to be a top priority. Since 2003 the Department of Defense (DOD) has thrown some $20 billion at the problem, setting off a gusher of gadgets, training programs, and acronym-studded bureaucratic bailiwicks. Now Gates has pressed the restart button. Last month, he announced that he was creating a new military task force, to be headed by two Pentagon heavyweights, “to break down the stovepipes” that have kept the various anti-IED efforts across the national security bureaucracy from cooperating more effectively.

His decision came soon after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a scathing report on the Pentagon’s inefficient and ineffective efforts through a bureaucratic jungle of agencies, working groups, and initiatives. Among other things, the report criticized the lead DOD agency on the problem, the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), for failing to maintain a database keeping track of the many efforts now tackling the problem throughout the vast American military bureaucracy — which would presumably help reduce unnecessary overlap and waste.

That’s not to say that JIEDDO and its various affiliates haven’t already accomplished a lot. Since JIEDDO was founded back in 2006, it has devised a wide variety of special jammers to block the remote-control signals used by insurgents to set off buried bombs. It has come up with advanced ground-penetrating radars that can tell operators if there’s anything suspicious under an unpaved road. It has promoted the development of sophisticated bomb-disposal and detection robots. And — even more usefully — JIEDDO has also developed intelligence-gathering systems for thwarting bomb-making networks and retraining troops on how to deal with the threat in the field. Ex-JIEDDO chief Gen. Montgomery Meigs, now a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, boasts that the U.S. military succeeded in reducing the casualty-to-blast ratio of IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan during his tenure. In 2002, he says, each bomb explosion caused, on average, six casualties (wounded and killed). By the end of 2007, when he left the position, that figure was down to one.

Meigs is, of course, conveniently forgetting the fact that the military went from using unarmored HUMVEES with fabric doors in 2002 to using Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles. General Meigs seems to forget that an IED against this vehicle:

Iraq War Gun Truck

would have a much different effect on this vehicle:

Mine Resistant Ambush Protection vehicle

But when you have a shameful legacy of incompetence, profiteering, lying and failure to contend with, why bother telling the truth?