Spy Planes Help Detect Roadside Bombs In Afghanistan -- USA Today
WASHINGTON – Images from spy planes and sensors that detect wires that trigger explosives have helped to mitigate the No. 1 threat to U.S. troops in Afghanistan — roadside bombs — over the past year.
The Pentagon has filled the skies over Afghanistan with high-tech sensors, and the effect has been measurable. From March through May, troops in vehicles found 64% of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) before they blew up, an 11 percentage-point increase over the previous quarter. Troops on foot patrol discovered 81%, a 4 percentage-point increase, according to the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO).
The rate of discovery before bombs exploded hovered around 50% for years. The most important measure of progress: IEDs caused less than half of troop deaths for the first time in five years.
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My Comment: Taking the fingerprints from unexploded bombs and matching it to Afghanistan's biometric data base has probably had the most pronounced impact on reducing IED attacks .... especially since you now know who are the IED bomb makers and handlers.
Unfortunately .... this has not been an easy road as the last sentence of this report reveals ....
.... Success hasn't been cheap. JIEDDO has spent more than $18 billion to counter the threat.
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