American commanders in Afghanistan are for the first time systematically using aerial drones to kill militants planting roadside bombs, the low-tech, low-cost weapon that has emerged as the biggest threat to U.S. and coalition forces throughout the country. The shift, the details of which have not been reported previously, represents a sharp escalation in the military's ongoing fight against improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which account for nearly 60 percent of coalition battle deaths in Afghanistan.
The push is being led by a new military unit called Task Force Falcon Strike. It began operating in southern Afghanistan late last year and expanded over the summer to eastern Afghanistan, a violent, insurgent-dominated area along the porous border with Pakistan.
In recent weeks, Falcon Strike drones have been targeting bomb-planters in the eastern provinces of Ghazni and Logar, according to a Defense official with knowledge of the group's activities. Between June 27 and July 7, Falcon Strike helped kill at least 26 militants burying IEDs in the two areas, while also reducing the number of roadside bombs there by 62 percent, the Defense official said.
Falcon Strike is working closely with Task Force ODIN, a once-secret Army unit that has been at the forefront of the military's fight against IEDs in both Iraq and Afghanistan. ODIN drones and aircraft killed hundreds of bomb-planters in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, the task force had been limited for years to what amounted to a pure surveillance mission. ODIN drones monitored key Afghan roads for signs of new bombs, but the robotic aircraft weren't being used to target individual militants.
That's all changing, according to senior military officials. Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, who heads the military's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, said in an interview that drones were now being used for "find, fix, finish" missions designed to kill bomb-planters or to help ground units track and arrest them.
"Initially, ODIN couldn't close the deal," Oates said. "It could find, but it couldn't finish."
The change comes as roadside bombs, often cobbled together using homemade explosives and crude triggering devices, kill and maim growing numbers of American troops throughout Afghanistan.
In its annual report, Oates's command said that IED casualties in Afghanistan soared by almost 2,400 between fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2009, an increase of 39 percent. IEDs killed 275 troops last year, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths. The bombs have killed 282 troops so far in 2010.
ODIN -- whose name is derived from Norse mythology but is also an acronym for "observe, detect, identify, and neutralize" -- began operating in Iraq in the summer of 2007. The unit initially used civilian planes with advanced surveillance systems attached to their underbellies, as well as a small number of aerial drones. Some of the remote-controlled planes had the ability to fire missiles at individual militants, while other ODIN aircraft were used to relay detailed targeting information to Apache attack helicopters and nearby ground troops.
Military officials believe that ODIN aircraft ultimately helped to kill or capture more than 1,000 militants throughout Iraq, sharply reducing the IED threat there.
As the war in Afghanistan intensified over the course of 2008 and 2009, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, R-Calif., began pressing the military to use ODIN drones to target individual bomb-planters there rather than merely carry out surveillance missions. Hunter, a Marine Reserve captain who fought in Falluja, believes that the military erred in dispatching large numbers of additional troops to Afghanistan without first having a unit in place that was devoted specifically to killing IED-planters.
"We knew what the bad guys were going to try to do, and we knew how they were going to try to do it," he said in an interview. "We should have known that they were going to IED the heck out of us, like they did, and set up ODIN prior to the surge."
Oates said that it was important to use drones to "take emplacers off of the battlefield" in Afghanistan.
Still, he cautioned that killing individual bombers wouldn't be enough to decisively win the IED fight. The commander noted that insurgents in Iraq were at times planting roughly 4,000 IEDs a month, while ODIN, over the course of its entire existence there, helped kill a total of 1,000 bomb-planters. That meant large numbers of militants were continuing to bury bombs in Iraq's roads even after ODIN began directly targeting them.
"It's important, but it's not a silver bullet," Oates said. "The IED problem is much more complex than killing."
This article appeared in the Saturday, October 2, 2010 edition of National Journal.
Want to stay ahead of the curve? Sign up for National Journal’s AM & PM Must Reads. News and analysis to ensure you don’t miss a thing.
Leave a Comment