The Most Lethal Weapon Americans Faced in Iraq

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October 18, 2013, 10:35 am Comment

The Most Lethal Weapon Americans Faced in Iraq

By JOHN ISMAY

In the first part of this series, At War explored the various conventional
weapons used by insurgents in Iraq, as evidenced by reports, called
“storyboards,” written by United States forces detailing the contents of
captured weapons caches. Often times these weapons had been considered
obsolete before 2003. But they were well known to Western intelligence
services and militaries.

Today, we look at weapons that the American military could not have
reasonably foreseen entering the fray, but that caused large numbers of
casualties. These are the improvised weapons that were made by hand, or in
small shops, and that, with one exception, were not made in industrial
factories.

Improvised Explosive Devices

At the time these storyboards were written, improvised explosive devices, or
I.E.D.’s, caused approximately 80 percent of all coalition casualties.

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A network of insurgents financed, designed and manufactured these weapons.
Skilled bomb makers worked in clandestine shops, and leaders of I.E.D.
networks sent “bomb emplacers” to bury or hide their improvised bombs along
routes American patrols were expected to take.

Standard bomb-making equipment showed up again and again in the caches,
including: multimeters for checking the electrical continuity in circuits;
personal mobile radios for transmitting firing signals; switches to close
circuits; electric blasting caps; detonating cord for when multiple charges
were used.

Earlier firing systems often employed a variety of radio-controlled features.
Keyless entry fobs for automobiles, garage door openers, toy car controllers
— these all provided parts for initiating bombs, at least until coalition
electronic countermeasures made them almost completely ineffective. Other
common articles took their place.

Insurgents stripped timers from washing machines, or bought them by the
hundreds from commercial sources. Motion sensors meant to open grocery store
doors or to turn on security floodlights also found their way into bomb-maker
supply bins. These devices could trip a switch and initiate an explosion when
a soldier crossed their path.

The first bomb emplacers, many of them uneducated youth, sometimes blew
themselves up while connecting the basic components of their weapons: power
source, switch and explosive charge. They were supposed to connect these
parts with an open circuit, since connecting a closed circuit would send
current to an electric blasting cap. If that happened, it usually meant
instant death for the emplacer. To make bomb emplacement less
catastrophically failure-prone, bomb makers searched for devices that could
mechanically break the electric circuit. The washing machine timer was one
that worked. All the emplacer had to do was wind it up before connecting the
circuit and he would have a set amount of time to escape before the bomb was
armed. The use of these timers showed an adaptive enemy who learned from his
mistakes.

Explosively Formed Penetrators and Iranian C4

The single most lethal weapon American forces faced in Iraq was the
explosively formed penetrator, or E.F.P. Unlike other I.E.D. charges, E.F.P.
warheads required some skilled milling as well as heavy presses to produce.
Certain copper alloys were used as well, and analysis of their construction
was used to pinpoint the manufacturers.

What makes E.F.P.’s so deadly is that they form “slugs” at detonation that
maintain their shape over distances of over 100 yards or more, traveling at
speeds of nearly a mile per second. This allowed insurgent forces to hide
these weapons far from the road, better camouflaging them and making them far
more deadly. In some I.E.D. factories, American forces found E.F.P.’s
camouflaged to look like trash or rocks.

Much has been made of E.F.P.’s generally being “new Iranian weapons,” but
that conflates two unrelated facts. First, E.F.P.’s technology was invented
in the late 1930s by the oil industry to punch holes through the metal pipe
in wells and into the rock outside. These are called oil well perforators or
perforator guns. Any country engaged in oil field development has access to
E.F.P.’s. Iran lists their domestically produced perforators for sale online.
Second, militaries applied this technology to anti-armor weapons as early as
World War II. (The United States military currently employs several weapons
incorporating E.F.P. warheads, to include the M2 SLAM, the TOW-2B, and the
M303 SOF Demolition Kit.)

But they became known as Iranian weapons because American intelligence
agencies reported that Iran passed E.F.P. technology to the Lebanese militia
Hezbollah, which in turn passed E.F.P. kits to proxy groups fighting in Iraq.
In the case of the Iraqi insurgent weapons, E.F.P.s arrived in kit form, and
were hand-packed with plastic explosives by bomb makers in Iraq just before
use. For their explosive charges, insurgents often turned to an Iranian copy
of an American staple: C4, packaged nearly identically to the original
1.25-lb M112 blocks. (Of note, the American M112 blocks changed their
markings slightly in 1996 once chemical tracers, called taggants, were added
in accordance with federal law; Iranian M112 block markings mimic the
pre-1996 markings.) According to an official with the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, manufacturing C4 is not difficult for any
nation capable of making industrial chemicals.

Homemade Explosives

Not long after the invasion, insurgents began mixing their own batches of
explosives and using them against their American adversaries. At first, these
mixtures were referred to simply as U.B.E. – unknown bulk explosive. Later,
the term HME, for “homemade explosive,” came into wide use.

As an agrarian society, Iraq had a nonstop demand for nitrated fertilizers —
urea and ammonium nitrate being the most common. Ground urea, mixed with
nitric acid, drained and dried, is a powerful explosive. Some caches held
bags of hexamethylenetetranitramine, which when mixed with nitric acids
produces a powerful explosive known as RDX. Still others combined ammonium
nitrate and diesel fuel oil to create the same explosive Timothy McVeigh used
to level the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Fertilizer plants, such as this one at Baiji, produced 500,000 tons of
fertilizer per year.

When homemade explosives first came into wide use in Iraq, American military
officers initially thought it was a sign that the insurgents were running out
of conventional or “military-grade,” munitions. That assumption had no basis
in fact. What it did signal was that the enemy had realized that bulk
explosives were more valuable and, in certain situations, more lethal.

Experience showed that a large enough charge could destroy any armor, or at
least wreak enough damage to cause casualties inside the targeted vehicle. In
Afghanistan, homemade explosives became such a problem for NATO forces that
President Hamid Karzai’s government banned ammonium nitrate in 2010.

End State

Although the last United States Army mission to destroy excess ordnance ended
in November 2011, violence in Iraq has continued well past the withdrawal of
the last American combat forces. According to the United Nations, nearly
1,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September alone, amid levels of violence
last seen in 2008.

Between 2003 and 2010, the State Department spent more than $200 million on
destroying unexploded munitions in the country. Groups like Mines Advisory
Group continue their work in Iraq as well.

In July 2012, the State Department’s own Web site gives an idea of the
challenges that lie ahead: In spite of progress, at least 719 square miles of
land is still contaminated by as many as 20 million land mines and millions
of pieces of unexploded ordnance. More than 1,600 municipalities are
affected, as are huge swathes of farmland, meaning clearing those explosives
will be an economic necessity. And as American forces discovered early in the
insurgency — and which Iraqis know all too well — every weapon and every
explosive that is not disposed of will eventually be put to destructive use
by some faction.

John Ismay is a former U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer who
served in Iraq in 2007, and is now a member of Columbia Journalism School’s
class of 2014. Follow him on Twitter (@johnismay) and on his blog
johnismay.com.