WASHINGTON, March 6, 2007 – Improvised explosive devices are to the war in Iraq what artillery and mortars were to World War II, Korea and Vietnam -- the main troop killers, a retired general working to defeat the deadly devices said here yesterday. Retired Army Gen. Montgomery Meigs, head of the JIEDDO Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, briefed media on progress in countering IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“IEDs are hybrid, idiosyncratic things that go off in surprising ways,” Meigs said. “But all they are, are the enemy’s fire system. The question is, ‘How do we deal with this fire system?’ And we spend a lot of time on that.”
In previous wars, the enemy delivered artillery shells through guns. In Iraq, the enemy delivers the ordnance “through the labyrinth of structures in that society,” Meigs said. But the coalition is making progress against the improvised weapons. “We have gotten better at it, (and we) know more what our enemies are doing,” Meigs said. He added that his organization also has done a better job of finding appropriate technologies to counter these weapons.
Car bombs and IEDs are responsible for about 65 percent of the coalition casualties in Iraq, he said. More than 2,500 Americans have died as a result of hostile fire in Iraq, according to DoD officials. But advances in defending against these weapons are working. The ratio of wounded to killed in Iraq is 9 to 1, Meigs said. In Vietnam, that ratio was 2 to 1, and in Korea it was 2.5 to 1.
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