On October 1, 2017, a roadside bomb northwest of Baghdad killed Spc. Alexander W. Missildine. The 20-year-old was the latest American soldier to die in a war that had lasted, in some form or another, since he was in kindergarten. And as much as the Iraq War had changed over the past 14 years, the weapon that killed Missildine — the improvised explosive device, or IED — remains just as potent, and just as vexing, as it was when the U.S. originally invaded Iraq.
For a few years, it looked like the U.S. was about to make headway against IEDs, using a combination of old military insights and new data-processing techniques. The project was called JIEDDO, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. Born on Valentine’s Day, 2006, for nine years it remained a central part of America’s wars in the Middle East. In the annals of the pre-surge war in Iraq, few acronyms conjure as many strong feelings among Washington’s national security establishment, or offer as clear a lesson about the challenges of quickly building smart new systems and keeping them on track.
The idea was appealing: IEDs were a new and unpredictable weapon, but the U.S. had had great success using data against an unpredictable weapon before. During World War II, the Allies faced irregular attacks from an unseen foe, the new German submarines preying on shipping in the North Atlantic. By analyzing the attack patterns, and developing new technologies that could spot and then destroy U-boats before they attacked, science and data secured safe passage across the Atlantic, and left the once-feared U-boat fleet strategically sidelined.
Counter-IED warfare was envisioned along the same lines: Find the limitations of the technology, find the patterns of attacks, and then fund whatever new tools were needed to defeat it. The first director of JIEDDO, retired Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, literally wrote the book on data and anti-submarine warfare. After leaving the service in 2002, he had been a professor for four years at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, publishing articles on asymmetric warfare before he returned to the Defense Department to apply what he knew to the most pressing battlefield threat the United States had seen in a generation.
Two improvised explosive devices are left unburied after insurgents leave the area of Arab Jabar, Iraq | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By then, the idea of a specific force to stop IEDs had already accumulated both momentum and bureaucracy. Three years before JIEDDO formally launched, the Army had formed a small task force to find a “Manhattan Project-like” answer to IEDs. In three years, that team’s budget expanded from $100 million to $3.6 billion, when it was formally reorganized into JIEDDO. JIEDDO accumulated a massive amount of cash and a large staff, and started to acquire and develop tools.
IEDs are a nesting doll of problems: They’re a specific weapon made from a diverse array of materials — from gunpowder from cached artillery rounds to imported fertilizer. They are a tactic, placed to punish troops on patrol or civilians going about their lives. They are the end product of a network, the pointy end of the spear of an invisible insurgent force. And IEDs are an iterative technology, with designs shared between insurgents across countries and quickly adapted to defeat whatever countermeasures the Pentagon could come up with.
“Our opponents can go to the world marketplace in information technology and get literally for free off of the internet very robust codes, cryptographic means, instant communications” — retired Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs
To stop IEDs, JIEDDO had one fundamental asset: a massive fund of money devoted to rapid acquisition. With that money, JIEDDO could make new technology go from development to deployment in months, rather than the usual years of Pentagon research and development. That speed was useful, but sometimes meant fielding technologies that didn’t work right away, or didn’t work nearly as well as expected, or solved a problem that the troops were no longer facing. Like the IED bombmakers, it was an iterative process, but sometimes without feedback, or without feedback through useful channels.
One problem for JIEDDO was that it depended on data collected from the field, but the soldiers and Marines collecting the data saw data collection as a low-priority responsibility. Determining the direction, nature and shape of a recently exploded bomb usually takes a back seat to the immediate needs of survival when under attack. There is also a selection problem: The better an IED attack worked, the less likely it yielded useful information. Troops that spotted unexploded bombs on patrol could report plenty of detail. It was far harder to collect and record information about an IED attack that worked.
An unexploded IED left by ISIS is seen on the road from Erbil to Mosul, found on October 18, 2016 | Carl Court/Getty Images
Another problem was an irony: A project built to harness critical data in a war against a deadly foe didn’t keep records of what measures were effective and what measure weren’t. “You want to be able to say, ‘This is a piece of crap. Don’t buy any more of them,’” Bill Solis, director of Defense Capabilities and Management at the Government Accountability Office, told the Center for Public Integrity in 2011. When digging through JIEDDO projects to assess effectiveness, the GAO regularly found the relevant program managers no longer worked at JIEDDO, with the data collected but scattered. Also, remarkably, the DOD didn’t catalog all of its counter-IED efforts. In 2011, the GAO counted no fewer than 1,300 different efforts underway, and no clear way to evaluate overlap or redundancy between them.
Another problem was that the initial concept simply didn’t pan out all that well. There are deep limitations to what can be learned about IEDs from studying submarine warfare. IEDs are so cheap to assemble as to be near-infinite in supply, while U-boats were limited in number and in how they could operate. The improvised nature of the weapon allowed IEDs to adapt far more quickly to new defenses than a sub fleet ever could.
“You have many more degrees of freedom in the IED problem than you did in the U-boat problem,” Meigs said in an interview with Wired shortly before leaving JIEDDO in 2007. “Our opponents can go to the world marketplace in information technology and get literally for free off of the internet very robust codes, cryptographic means, instant communications. And they can buy all kinds of things that can be transformed into ways of arming and initiating IEDs. And sensors.”
Faced with these limits, however, JIEDDO didn’t ramp down. Instead, it expanded. From the start, it had been a massive rapid-acquisition program for new gear and technology. It bought jammers to interfere with the radio signals used to detonate the bombs. It acquired the heavy, armored MRAP troop carriers with special blast-deflecting V-shaped underbellies for use by explosive ordnance disposal units. (Notably, it was a different program office that pushed widespread MRAP [mine resistant ambush protected] adoption to replace the lighter, more vulnerable Humvees for all troops.) The organization also invested in massive airships to watch vast swaths of countryside for insurgents setting traps.
Soldiers discover a shopping bag filled with mortar rounds and an oil bottle filled with homemade explosives during Operation Fox Hunt | Patrick Baz/AFP via Getty Images
This was all broadly covered under JIEDDO’s expansive mandate, to collect and analyze data from the field, assess it, and develop new intelligence tools, but at some point the mission expanded far beyond fighting a tactic. IEDs were simply one tool among many used by an insurgency, and in growing to limit the use of that tool, JIEDDO broadened its mission set to encompass the entirety of winning the war.
JIEDDO’s three-part motto: “Attack the Network, Defeat the Device, Train the Force” meant JIEDDO was simultaneously collecting intelligence, testing and fielding technology, and teaching the rest of the military what to look out for. In 2008, that meant a portfolio of everything from funding Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded software startup, to purchasing and installing heavy culvert covers.
“At the most fundamental level, a lot of the limitations that JIEDDO ran up against are limitations in the ability to use data to drive decision-making” — Andrew Hunter
Sometimes, JIEDDO’s comprehensive approach yielded valuable information, like tracking the specific types of fertilizer used to create IEDs in Afghanistan, and then allowing the United States to work with Pakistan to put controls on the kinds of fertilizer that might go to non-agricultural purposes. Attacking the IED supply chain is exactly what JIEDDO was supposed to do. But if negotiating export controls with Pakistan sounds a little far afield from addressing roadside threats in Iraq — well, that was just the beginning. JIEDDO’s scope grew far beyond countries where the U.S. was actively fighting. A 2014 report from the DOD inspector general found that JIEDDO’s intelligence collection branch iimproperly collected information on U.S. citizens.
For observers and policymakers in 2017, JIEDDO stands as a cautionary tale about how Pentagon spending — even chasing a good idea — can accelerate without ever fully addressing the problem it was built to solve. It’s also a story of how the siren song of smarter battlefield response — an idea driving much Pentagon strategy, even now — can lead back into some familiar patterns of thinking and spending. “At the most fundamental level, a lot of the limitations that JIEDDO ran up against are limitations in the ability to use data to drive decision-making,” said Andrew Hunter, now a senior fellow at CSIS, who oversaw JIEDDO’s transition away from specifically a counter-IED tool and into a regular part of the Pentagon’s rapid acquisition structure. “The reality is there is a tremendous amount we did learn, but it didn’t necessarily completely make the IED obsolete.”
A U.S. Army bomb disposal team destroys an IED near Baghdad, Iraq | John Moore/Getty Images
There’s no doubt that data collection in war is important, and that data-centric programs can yield valuable intelligence unattainable elsewhere. In another example from World War II, Allied statisticians were able to analyze the serial numbers of destroyed German tanks and correctly estimate the total production of German armor. But in some ways, that turned out to be the wrong tool for this job: The backyard production of IEDs, as well as the iterative design, means that there is a limit to that approach. Insurgencies, by their nature, are designed to foil the kind of brute-force calculations of economy, material and manpower that made scientific, industrial approaches to war possible.
JIEDDO still exists, though it is nowhere near its presurge budget and influence. Reorganized first as the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Agency in 2015, and then again as the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization in 2016, the organization is now a specialty acquisition arm for whatever new threat may emerge, capitalizing on what turned out to be JIEDDO’s core strength: funneling a lot of money quickly into new technologies. It remains to be seen if the rechristened JIDO will learn from the great stumblings of its predecessor — which could fund new tools but failed the first principle of any data-driven program, which is to use the data to see if those tools actually work.
Kelsey Atherton is a technology writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.