Dealing with IEDs

If it wasn't for our military's attitude about not wanting to acquire weapons from smaller countries, we could have been protected from IED's years ago.

During the Second Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Israeli Defense Force was taking a lot of casualties from IEDs, just as we are now. They developed some sort of pulse-transmitter which sends out strong pulses of electromagnetic energy, which detonates the bombs before the troops get in range of them.

There was a point in time, about 4 years ago, that the IDF quit encountering these bombs. That was because of the pulse-generator, and the fact that the Israelis used it pre-emptively, detonating a lot of explosive while it was still in the hands of the terrorists. That was sufficiently discouraging to the terrorists that they stopped using IEDs, since they were taking so many casualties.

We could have done the same, but if the runor I heard is true, we didn't because we didn't have the guts to stand up to the terror-apologists' counter-charge of irradiating innocent bystanders.

Rather than deal with several different detonation mechanisms, the IDF weapon simply created inductive current in the detonator wiring, causing the detonators to set off the main charges.

We have developed EMP generators ourselves, and should be putting them to use in Iraq.

If the terrorists are using cell phones to detonate IEDs then just shut down the cell network. End of problem. I doubt they are though, as they need to be close to the IED to see when to set it off. That means that we would know (1) which cell site was used and (2) exactly what time the call was made. We can then find out whos phone was used. We should not allow disposable cell phones in Iraq.

Too often, they are using simple radios like Motorola "Talkarounds," which you might use to talk with your family on a trip. They modify these by adding a touch tone pad. The receives has a simple touch-tone decoder. This allows the terrorist with the transmitted to enter a sequence of touch-tones to detonate the bomb. It's all actually very simple to build and any 12 year old geek could do it. When I was 12 I did it and now a touch tone decoded is on a tiny chip at Radio Shack.

Radio receivers actually transmit radio signals generated by a part of them called a "local osscilator." The terrorists are probably not using a wide variety of transceivers, so it may be practical to listen for these emissions, just as a police officer can listen for a radar detector. Then again, there may be too much radio noise to do that, but along highways it could work.

Also, these signals transmitted to detonate a bomb can be jammed. The terrorists won't use a radio signal alone to set off an IED bacause there is plenty of radio traffic. They need the touch tones. So, we can transmit a much more powerfull signal to wipe it out. Our jaming signal won't set off the bomb, but it will prevent the weaker signal from the handheld radio from reaching the bomb.

If we can really detonate them as RIVRDOG said, I'm all for that as well.

The problem with something that will detonate pretty much any detonator in the targeted area is the huge amount of ordinance laying around Iraq. They're still finding buried stockpiles from past wars that would have been enough to supply, say, the IRA for decades.

I think the only reasons Iran (and others) are sending in new stuff is partly to adapt to our responses to what they've been using and largely just so they know where it is.

And I've heard that a lot of convoys run with jammers enabled but they're not much use against wires run to an observation point.

Why not triger the cell system to ring all of the phones @ random intervals. Blow up the guilty and annoy the innocent.

They've also gone back to manual detonation and simple tripwire detonation...putting the wire high enough to clear cars but not tanks/trucks...not just cell phones.