Countering the Threat of Improvised Explosive Devices Basic Research Opportunities: Abbreviated Version (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Thus, a mine produced for regular forces may be considered an IED if it is used by irregular forces, but an unmodified mine placed by regular forces is not considered an IED. Explosive devices designed to disperse chemical, biological, or radiological material are generally not classified as IEDs and were not considered for this study.
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In an IED campaign, the adversary must carry out numerous steps before initiating an IED attack. That process includes obtaining funding and bomb materials, recruiting people, constructing the device, selecting the target, delivering the device to its target, carrying out the attack, and disseminating information about the attack for propaganda or other purposes.
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US forces need the capability to extract strategic and tactical actionable intelligence information from massive amounts of diverse, potentially incomplete, and noisy data in a timely and dynamic fashion. Analytical Techniques for Assessing IED Countermeasures Analytical methods that quantitatively assess the effectiveness of IED countermeasures are needed.
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The recommendations reported here are intended to supplement ongoing work and to provide a broader focus on disrupting the entire IED threat chain. The following recommendations represent research challenges in the five areas discussed above that are compelling based on their potential impact, the potential timeline for their payoff, and the relative level of current effort in these areas.
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Research subjects include how ideas and tactics are imitated and migrate within and between cultures and societies, the relationship between local insurgents or political factions and transnational terrorist conspiracies, and the role of the media, including the Internet, as a communications tool for terrorists/insurgents. The role of the Internet as a source of information for constructing IEDs and for promoting the cross-national diffusion of ideas and tactics is a particularly important issue that should be examined.
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Research should include development of methods to integrate data from diverse sources into a single inference structure; of open-architecture inference engines that can support new plug-in sensor packages and data sources; and of prototypes for massively scalable data storage and processing architectures. Computer and computational scientists and researchers in data acquisition and analysis, data representation and statistical inference, image interpretation, and sensors can make valuable contributions.
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Metrics and analytical methods for assessing IED countermeasures would allow identification of what works, what does not work, and why. Specifically, research should seek to determine trends in overall counterIED operational effectiveness; determine the relative effectiveness of different counter-IED systems and tactics; discern differences and trends in adversary systems and tactics in different areas; design, test, and evaluate new systems, tactics, and operational concepts; anticipate and pre-empt adversary countermeasures against new systems and tactics; and provide realistic and dynamic simulations.
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• Perform case studies of actual IED construction and events to determine whether and how resource control might be implemented, with the eventual goal of developing the ability to model the connection between resources and the IED threat chain. The availability of resources helps to determine the type, number, and effectiveness of IED construction; the ease or danger of manufacture and deployment; the lethality achieved; and the potential for detection and countermeasures.
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Process and chemical engineers, explosives chemists, researchers who study historical and current terrorism, researchers in international studies, and operations researchers can make valuable contributions to answering those questions. The integration of that research in a way that recognizes the interplay of resources, human behavior, and context will be invaluable.
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