The improvised explosive device, the IED, the roadside bomb has been the great killer of American troops in Iraq, the great equalizer between the world’s most powerful military machine and the Iraqi insurgency.
When you see Iraq veterans missing arms, legs, body parts, the terrible odds are an IED did it. The Pentagon has spent billions trying counter makeshift bombs buried in dirt.
It is the humble and humbling Manhattan Project of the Iraq War. And maybe it can’t be done.
This hour, On Point: Pulitzer prize-winning Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson goes deep on the roadside bomb.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer-winning author and reporter at The Washington Post, his four-part series on the struggle to defeat roadside bombs is running in the Post this week. His new book on World War II, “The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944,” has just been published.
Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson III, professor of political science and director of American Politics, Public Policy and Strategic Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
