Old news, new report?
Some of this footage has appeared before and was subject of a thread months ago.
Incidentally similar grenades, drogue grenades I think we called them, appeared in Northern Ireland, used by the Provisional IRA in an urban setting. Used against police and army vehicles.
davidbfpo
Danger Room, 17 Sep 07: CSI vs IEDs: Inside Baghdad's Forensic Bomb Squad
They can dig up all the roadside bombs they want, and jam every radio-controlled killer out there. To get ahead of insurgents, coalition forces have to figure out who's really building and planting the bombs.
That's why tens of thousands of improvised explosive devices and their components wind up every month at this nondescript collection of trailers, in the middle of a U.S. military base near Baghdad. Here, troops and geeks from England, Australia and America pore over the weapons 24 hours a day, piecing together forensic evidence about the bombs -- and the bombers. It's CSI meets IEDs. And it's called "Sexy."
Captain Scottie Morris, a lanky, black-haired Aussie, takes me for a tour around the Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell -- CEXC, or "Sexy," for short. To the best of my knowledge, I'm the first journalist they've allowed inside....
Fires Bulletin, Jul-Aug 07: A Different Approach to the Counter-IED Fight in Iraq
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are the preferred weapons employed by insurgent forces in Iraq today. This form of warfare is not easy to counter. Often techniques for countering IEDs are passive in nature, thus allowing the insurgents to have the upper hand. However, as the old saying goes, “There is more than one way ‘to skin a cat.’”
Tasked with the maneuver enhancement mission for the 101st Airborne Division’s area of operations (AO), the 555th Combat Support Brigade (CSB) aggressively attacked the counter-IED fight in Iraq by applying combined arms techniques to the mission. By combining engineer patrols to clear routes with brigade combat team (BCT) intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and division-level lethal assets, the 555th CSB took a proactive approach to countering IEDs and forced the insurgents to react to Coalition efforts, denying the insurgents freedom of action.....
'The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces'
30 Sep Washington Post - 'The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces' by Rick Atkinson.
It began with a bang and "a huge white blast," in the description of one witness who outlived that Saturday morning, March 29, 2003. At a U.S. Army checkpoint straddling Highway 9, just north of Najaf, four soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division, part of the initial invasion of Iraq, had started to search an orange-and-white taxicab at 11:30 a.m. when more than 100 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive detonated in the trunk.
The explosion tossed the sedan 15 feet down the road, killing the soldiers, the cabdriver -- an apparent suicide bomber -- and a passerby on a bicycle. Lt. Col. Scott E. Rutter, a battalion commander who rushed to the scene from his command post half a mile away, saw in the smoking crater and broken bodies on Highway 9 "a recognition that now we were entering into an area of warfare that's going to be completely different."
Since that first fatal detonation of what is now known as an improvised explosive device, more than 81,000 IED attacks have occurred in Iraq, including 25,000 so far this year, according to U.S. military sources. The war has indeed metastasized into something "completely different," a conflict in which the roadside bomb in its many variants -- including "suicide, vehicle-borne" -- has become the signature weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan, as iconic as the machine gun in World War I or the laser-guided "smart bomb" in the Persian Gulf War of 1991...
Weapon of Choice
I indexed the Washington Post series on IEDs at the SWJ Blog here ---> Weapon of Choice. The series includes articles, video interviews and graphics.
I believe somebody with a sense of humor purposely manipulated the acronym CEXC for the name. Got to admit I thought it was a joke when I first heard of the staff section called "Sexy" when I was on the Vth Corps (MNC-I) staff for OIF IV.
JP
Try going through all those long marches and cadence calls in basic training when you're the only one in the unit whose name rhymes with "sex" ...Originally Posted by SabreXray
(and now back to our regularly-scheduled thread)
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