The J-I-N for the I-E-D is S-H-I-T

I know and you know and anybody not in need of surgery to remove their head from between their own buttocks knows that the Bush administration has f—ked up in Iraq. But they didn’t mean to f—k up. They meant to be heroes. And how these Boys From Bureaucracy turned tragedy into farce – and a damned expensive farce at that – helps explain how the Bushies screwed up.
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Our guide down this road to destruction is a paper prepared for the Joint Forces Staff War College, titled “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization: Tactical Success Mired in Organizational Chaos; Roadblock in the Counter-IED Fight.” And the length of the title offers the first clue was to why the IED problem could never be solved by the Pentagon. These people can’t wipe their butts without using forty rolls of toilet paper to print up instructions, where five simple words would describe it all; How We Lost The War.
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First, what the hell is an Improvised Explosive Device? Is it a bomb? If it sits there quietly until somebody lights the fuse or pushes a plunger or calls it up on their cell phone, then it’s a bomb. The why the hell not call it a bomb? Or, if you step on it or drive over it or past it and it blows up, then it’s a mine. The guy who was blowing up buildings in New York City during the 1940’s, wasn’t called the “Mad Improvised Explosive Devicer”, they called him the Mad Bomber and everybody instantly knew who and what the hell we were talking about. We had a perfectly good word to describe these damn things, why the hell did we start calling them IEDs? I think we lost this war because the idiots running it lost track of what the hell they were taking about!
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And while I’m on a rant, what the hell is an enemy combatant? Would you call an enemy civilian a non-combatant? Sorry, stupid question; the military actually does call them that.
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Now, where was I? Oh, yea, how we lost the war. The paper was written by Lt. Commander Richard Ellis, USAF, Major Richard Rogers, USAF and Lt. Commander Bryan Cochran, USN, and records that this particular disaster began in October of 2003 when the guy in charge in Iraq, General John Abizad, sent a memo to SecDef Rummy and JCS Chairman General Myers identifying the Improvised Explosive Device as the “number one killer of American troops” and asked for a “Manhatten-like Project” to defeat them. It was a memo that could have been a press release, and, what a surprise, it became one. This how you get promoted to big jobs in the Pentagon – you send home memos that give your bosses handy press releases, like when President Shrub says he gave the generals everything they asked for, be sure to ask for something expensive and l avoid asking for something cheap and sensible, like a MISSION THAT MAKES SENSE!
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By the way, the Pentagon loves the Manhattan Project because it was run by General Groves, the same guy who built the Pentagon, and it was big and expensive and it worked. What’s not to love, from a bureaucratic stand point? So, if you ever become a general, in any Bull S—t memo, be sure to referrer to the Manhattan Project when ever possible.
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Okay, the Pentagon immediately formed a 12 person taskforce under Deputy CoC for G3, LT. General Cody to look at the problem, but before they really got started Paul Wolfowitz came up with a bright idea; let’s make it bigger. So, in July of 2004 the 12 person team morphed into the Joint Integrated Process Team to see if there wasn’t some way to spend more money on the problem. And oddly enough progress was made, for awhile, like improved body and Humvee armor and robot bomb disposal robots – off the shelf solutions. And those were clearly not spending enough money. So in June of 2006 the AssSecDef created the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. At last the Pentagon and its civilian members had a big enough name to justify spending some REAL money.
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As the authors of the paper explain on page two; “…JIEDDO, as an organization possesses neither the structure nor the authority to effectively prosecute the war against IEDs…lacks the agility to quickly react to a changing enemy and has no legal authority to compel other DoD entities to act.” But, it did have a four star general, and a staff of 360 and a budget of $3 billion.
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General Abizaid himself, the guy who started this whole mess, would complain later that JIEDDO’s “emphasis on multi-million dollar contracts to develop high-tech sensing equipment has been ineffective at curbing attacks by homemade bombs.” Well, hell, general, it was your idea in the first place. What did you think Rummy and Wolfie were going to come up with?
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But the story is much more sordid than all of this, because this is Washington, where stupidity and incompetence are nothing if you don’t add greed and deceit. And in a future column we shall tell you the story of how the safety of American ground combat troops was sacrificed in the name of profits for a bunch of ex-CIA boys on the penny stock market. If you like blood sport and lasers and liars, you’re going to love this story.
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