JIEDDO, Pentagon's IED Detection Program, Has Not Delivered

The Center for Public Integrity:

JIEDDO's outgoing director, Lt. General Michael Oates admits "there are no silver bullets that are going to solve this problem," Indeed, the most effective IED detectors today are the same as before JIEDDO, and they don't hum, whir, shoot, scan, or fly. They talk. And they bark. The best bomb detectors, Oates says, are still dogs working with handlers, local informants, and the trained soldier's eye.

Read the whole story: The Center for Public Integrity

Comments

[April22]

02:15 PM on 03/28/2011

In spite of all of our military's sophistication in weaponry and not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars spent, we are being bested by IED's.

Well, maybe we'll stop thinking we are so great and stop trying to dominate the world's economy, at everyone elses expense, including our own.

[The Dude67]

01:16 PM on 03/28/2011

Did the person who wrote the headline read the article???

This program was a resounding success!!  Did you see they landed a $21B deal and were responsible for keeping track of none of it, and producing absolutely nothing?

I've been in business a long time, and there is only one way to characterize this project - massively successful.

[00BTB]

01:09 PM on 03/28/2011

Boondoggle -"The launch of JIEDDO eventually turned what had been a 12-person Army anti-homemade bomb task force into a 1,900 person behemoth with nearly $21 billion to spend."

[JoeBlough]

10:49 AM on 03/28/2011

The military is highly successful­. They managed to latch on to and spend billions of tax payers money to produce nothing. A business success, an American tragedy.

[jeb50]

10:37 AM on 03/28/2011

The only goal of the pentagon's brass is to make sure there is a nice cushy seat on the Board of some contractor they have funneled billions to.

[totaldisbelief]

10:34 AM on 03/28/2011

MIC spends trillions ..then gets defeated for a few bucks
Someone really should rethink these issues.

[jsarets]

10:18 AM on 03/28/2011

There are really only two solutions to this problem: we can place the main roads under persistent surveillance using some combination of fixed and airborne infrared, and/or we can stay off the unsecured secondary roads as much as possible moving mostly by helicopter.

Or we could ask ourselves what the heck we're doing there and whether it's worth the trouble...

[JoeBlough]

10:52 AM on 03/28/2011

We should leave them alone in their own country. We keep hitting the hornet's nest to make the mad so the MIC can make a few bucks.

[doctordoubt]

09:42 AM on 03/28/2011

In the real world, it's not new technology that doesn't work, it's called junk.

[doctordoubt]

09:40 AM on 03/28/2011

'Sometimes we fund things that don't work. That's call risk.'

Are you kidding me? That's called mur*er. We aern't talking a new conroller for a WII system. These are soldiers lives you're risking. Send the R&D guys out to test them. Bet they get it right the next time. This is a perfect example of MIC simply throwing money away, as well as the lives of our friends and families. How disgusting can you get to call it 'risk'?