Desperate for Bad News
quote from Atkinson's report on IEDs.
The Washington Post today prints the first in a series of stories by Rick Atkinson on the IED threat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon's response to it. The title of the piece: "'The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding.'" That quote is damning, but fortunately, it's also four years old:
By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."
It's heard to say where this series is going, and to be honest, I don't have too many complaints about the first piece. As a history of the IED problem, it seems accurate so far, ending in mid-2004 with the military's "Manhattan Project-like" approach to defeating the IED. I remain deeply skeptical of that approach, which the military pursued with little success in an attempt to find a technological rather than a tactical solution to the IED problem. There is no silver-bullet, miracle jammer, or armored vehicle that will completely eliminate the threat from the IED--the only real solution is to kill the bad guys who are building, facilitating, and emplacing these devices. But Atkinson seems to get that, quoting Admiral Macy in the introduction to the series:
"Americans want technical solutions. They want the silver bullet," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington, which now oversees several counter-IED technologies. "The solution to IEDs is the whole range of national power --political-military affairs, strategy, operations, intelligence."
And then Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England:
We've had people killed and injured, but we've probably saved five or 10 times that number of people by preventing attacks, or capturing and killing [insurgents], or getting caches of weapons, or disabling them."
Indeed. Here's the recent analysis from Former Spook:
In other words, the number of fatalities from roadside bombs and other IEDs has dropped by 64% in the past six months--a time when the overall ops tempo among U.S. forces has increased dramatically. During that period, Army and Marine units have entered a number of former terrorist strong-holds and cleared them, suffering fewer casualties than many analysts had predicted. And, the declining number of IED deaths shows that the troop surge is hitting the bad guys where it hurts most--in their bomb-making networks.
We're still a long way from defeating the IED, and further still from victory in Iraq, but this headline is a cheap shot at a time when the exact opposite is true--the military may finally be getting the IED problem under control, and as MRAP vehicles begin making their way over to Iraq, the situation is likely to improve even further. We still have to stop the bleeding, but there too, the trend is overwhelmingly positive. Atkinson's introduction appears cautiously optimistic, but the defeatist left, desperate for bad news, is sure to cherry pick the worst bits from this report, as the Huffington Post has done by putting up the four year old quote that Atkinson's editors chose to use as a headline. But that doesn't change the real story here: IED fatalities are down 64 percent over the last six months. What are the chances of a headline like that popping up in the Washington Post at the end of this series?