Since January 2006, the Pentagon has spent more than $18 billion trying to stop insurgent bombs — funding everything from radio frequency jammers to electronic dragnets that hunt bombmakers’ phone calls. But while the military is good at shelling out cash for futuristic bomb stoppers, it’s not as adept at tracking where its money goes. That’s how it ends up spending over $100 million on no fewer than six different kinds of directed-energy weapons designed to fry the bombs from a safe distance. And that’s just the tally of the laser, microwave or radio-frequency blasters that are currently in development.
Those are the findings of a report from Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), released on Tuesday. The report considered the bomb squad, known within the military as JIEDDO — the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization — a sprawling, bureaucratic mess. JIEDDO can’t even keep track of all the different anti-bomb technologies it’s supposed to coordinate, resulting in wasteful duplication.
“The military services have developed six different systems that emit energy, such as radio waves, directed at IEDs [improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs] to neutralize them,” the GAO report found. (.PDF)
The cost? At least $104 million, as best as the GAO could determine — although it could be higher, since the Pentagon’s crappy bookkeeping makes it difficult to get an accurate tally. And the GAO total excludes any of the laser weapons JIEDDO previously funded, like a $30 million “lightning gun” that’s considered one of the bigger military technology flops of the last decade. Not to mention the parade ofHumvee-mounted lasers and high-powered microwave generators backed by JIEDDO and its bureaucratic predecessor.
Directed-energy weapons are, to say the least, a gamble. The Navy has worked on laser guns in earnest for 15 years and still doesn’t think it’ll have one aboard a ship for another decade. The Air Force justunceremoniously retired its laser-firing 747 after 16 years of tests and billions of dollars spent. While there have been a few flashy demonstrations — and even a few battlefield trials — after all those billions, U.S. troops still don’t have a way to blast away the most lethal threat they face: a $265 improvised bomb.
None of this has been lost on those troops’ commander. According to the GAO report, Gen. James Mattis, leader of all U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, “conveyed concern” to JIEDDO in August about the multiple laser guns in development. “The correspondence called for coordination and cooperation by [the Defense Department] on its directed energy efforts to develop a directed energy system that works in theater as quickly as possible,” the report finds, “given that the development has been under way since 2008.”
The result? Well, let’s just say that the Pentagon bureaucracy didn’t immediately spring into action. Instead, JIEDDO decided that “the six systems will continue in development through fiscal year 2012 … at which point, JIEDDO will determine which of the systems best satisfies U.S. Central Command’s requirement.”
In other words: Don’t expect a bomb-zapper anytime in the immediate future.
How’d the Pentagon’s bomb-fighters wind up with so many redundant ray guns? Partially, it’s a method built into the organization’s DNA. When radio-controlled bombs became a nightmare for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, JIEDDO pushed 14 different types of radio jammers out the door, in order to keep the bombs from being triggered. Many of those jammers were of limited utility. Many interfered with radios, or even other jammers. The whole approach certainly burned through billions of dollars, not all of it well spent. But it saved lives. Small wonder that JIEDDO has taken a similar approach with other technologies.
What’s more, the Pentagon’s overall efforts at destroying homemade bombs were themselves redundant. In 2009, it set up two competing databases on those anti-bomb efforts, called the Technology Matrix Database and the Tripwire Analytical Capability — before ultimately scrapping both. The report found that JIEDDO is working on a new, pan-military database, but it’s in the “conceptualization stage” and the GAO doesn’t know when it’ll be finished.
These are “recurring themes” for JIEDDO: The report dryly notes that it has internally warned of them since 2007. No wonder Congress has been intermittently skeptical of the organization’s value almost since its creation.
JIEDDO claims GAO has it wrong. “Your report is inaccurate in stating that JIEDDO does not have a sound basis to determine how to invest our resources,” writes the organization’s director, Lt. Gen. Michael Barbaro, in an official rebuttal. “Coordination” between an alphabet soup of acronym’d military offices “ensures warfighter priorities, effectiveness of [anti-bomb] enablers (resourced by JIEDDO and other [Defense Department] activities) and cost reasonableness are addressed and evaluated.”
They better. The bombs that became so famously deadly in Iraq and Afghanistan are now spreading globally: the organization estimates there are 500 bomb attacks outside the two warzones every month. Its brand-new strategic plan argued that the next generation of homemade bombs will use expensive “nanotechnology” and “microbial fuel cells,” even though one of the reasons the deadly bombs are so resilient is because they’re dirt cheap.
The current Pentagon budget cuts JIEDDO’s funding by $700 million. But another $2.4 billion remains. And that’s one part of the vast sum of money the Pentagon devotes to stopping these jury-rigged weapons. After reading this report, even legislators who want to boost defense spending might wonder how much of that largess is being spent wisely. LINK
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