The Pentagon and Its Bogus Bomb-Zapper: A Love StoFor years, Pentagon officials and the president blasted journalists for disclosing details about a miracle weapon that could destroy improvised explosive devices with bolts of man-made lightning. The accusers conveniently neglected to mention that the weapon never really worked.
https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/pentagon-still-hearts-its-bogus-bomb-zapper/
A new report reveals just how lame the lightning weapon was — and how the technology lives on, despite a gaggle of failed tests.
The builders of the golf cart-sized “Joint IED Neutralizer,” or JIN, convinced the Pentagon to give it $30 million on the promise that it could use short-pulse lasers to carve conductive channels in the air. Electricity could then be sent down those channels, zapping roadside bombs from a safe distance.
In 2006, President Bush complained about pesky reporters publishing “details of a new anti-IED technology that was being developed…. We cannot let the enemy know how we’re working to defeat him.”
The following year, the Pentagon office responsible for stopping those bombs — the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO — made similar claims about the bomb-zapper.
Which was a little unusual. Because, by then, the bomb-zapper had already flopped a long series of trials.
Scientists told the Pentagon that the “device would be rendered useless by damp ground or dust,” according to an investigation from the Center for Public Integrity.
A 2006 attempt to deploy the JIN to Afghanistan failed miserably. The golf cart-sized bomb-zapper “had trouble climbing steep mountain terrain, and experienced safety problems as well — reportedly it kept shooting out lightning bolts after its switch was turned off. JIN also needed to be nearly on top of a bomb to blow it up.”
At the time, one JIEDDO official told me that the zapper was “bul..hit … maybe a C+ effort.”
Yet, the organization continued to characterize disclosures about the JIN as events that could risk lives. And money continued to flow to Ionatron, the controversial, politically-connected company behind the JIN. As the Center for Public Integrity notes:
With a $400,000 earmark from Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi) and $1.5 million more from JIEDDO, the Marine Corps set out to hang the JIN on the front of a mine-roller [used to crush buried bombs]. The combination of the JIN and the roller was called a “JOLLER,” and the Marines bought the program last October. A slide from a May 2009, Marine Corps briefing (.pdf) shows a Tesla-ball-like device labeled JOLLER attached to mine rollers shooting a bolt of electricity straight down into the ground. “Lightening Bolt: Pricele$$” says the slide.
Maybe the zapping technology’s kinks have been worked out. Maybe it’ll be so effective that insurgents in Afghanistan will turn away from their weapon of choice, the improvised explosive. Maybe the tide of 1,300 bombs a month there will begin to come down. If so, it’ll mark a major turning point in the decade-long Afghan conflict.
Until then, the mission of JIEDDO will be incomplete, as Rep. Duncan Hunter, a key member of the House Armed Services Committee, notes.
“So as long as the IED metric keeps going up, and as long as we keep taking the majority of our KIA (killed in action) casualties from IEDs, then they’ve all been unsuccessful. Period,” he tells the Center.
In an interview last month with Danger Room, outgoing agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Oates delivered a similar message.
“When that volume [of bombs] starts dropping, then I think you can start making some assumptions about the effectiveness of the overall counterinsurgency,” Oates said.
After that article ran, JIEDDO publicly claimed that the story “got it wrong,” by focusing on that metric. “Inaccurate quotes, ignores facts,” an agency representative tweeted.
In private, however, agency officials praised the piece. It’s not the first time that the organization’s public statements didn’t quite match its behind-closed-doors sentiments — or the facts.