The Pentagon's Brain (38 page)

By 2006, the Pentagon had spent more than $1 billion on “defeat-the-IED” technology. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recommended the creation of a permanent program, and on February 14, 2006, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) was established to deal with the ever-increasing IED threat. With a first-year budget of $3.6 billion, JIEDDO was described as its own mini–Manhattan Project. Hundreds more electronic warfare specialists were sent to the war theater in Iraq. To the explosive ordnance disposal technicians, called EOD techs, working to defuse bombs in the war theater, there was something that DARPA was working on that could not get there fast enough: its force of next-generation robots.

Master Chief Petty Officer Craig Marsh was a Master Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician, assigned to the first ever Combined Joint Counter-IED Task Force, otherwise known as CJTF Troy. EOD techs are part of the Special Operations community and frequently operate alongside Navy Seals, Green Berets, and other Special Warfare units on classified missions. In 2006, Marsh deployed to Iraq to help establish CJTF Troy as the Operations (J3) senior noncommissioned officer. Marsh was trained to respond to and dispose of bombs planted underwater and aboveground, including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. When he was a younger sailor, he served on the classified Mark 6 Marine Mammal System program, swimming with highly trained bottlenose dolphins to detect and mark the location of underwater intruders and explosives.

In Iraq, the daily work of EOD techs was among the most crucial, most deadly, and most nerve-racking of jobs. IEDs were ubiquitous. Defusing these homemade bombs, and collecting intelligence about the bombs and the bomb makers, made for an extraordinarily stressful workload. In Hollywood, the efforts of EOD technicians would be made famous by the Academy Award–winning
film
The Hurt Locker.
In Iraq, the work was overwhelming, and many of the younger technicians were largely unprepared for what they were up against. “We were dealing with thousands and thousands of IEDs,” Craig Marsh recalls. “Ninety-five percent of the guys had never seen an IED before.”

At forty-two years old, Marsh had nearly twenty years of experience in the EOD community defusing bombs. In Baghdad, it was his job to oversee the work of eighty EOD teams spread across Iraq, each composed of two or three technicians, and he was to coordinate the fragmentary orders (FRAGOs) from the Multi-National Corps-Iraq three-star generals across the entire Joint Task Force Troy.

At Task Force Troy, Marsh lived on the fourth floor of the Al Faw Palace, or Water Place, formerly inhabited by Saddam Hussein and his entourage. The palace had roughly sixty-two rooms and twenty-nine bathrooms. It was loaded with garish gold chandeliers and expensive marble tile. The Al Faw was surrounded by artificial ponds filled with large, hungry carp, notorious for attacking and devouring ducks that landed on its shimmering surface. The Americans set up a headquarters here and renamed the place Camp Victory, Iraq. Combined Joint Task Force Troy lived inside.

Over time, Camp Victory would grow larger and come to be encircled in twenty-seven miles of concrete wall, making it the largest of a total of 505 bases operated by the United States in Iraq. Even Saddam Hussein and his cousin Ali Hassan al Majeed, known as “Chemical Ali,” lived at Camp Victory during the war. The two men were imprisoned in a top secret building on an island in the center of one of the ponds. Accessible only by a drawbridge, the prison was code-named Building 114. In the mornings, Marsh would pass by the island on his morning jog.

Task Force Troy was the first operational counter-IED task force in U.S. military history, and the unit was only a few months old when Marsh arrived. “In 2006, everyone was still running
around with their hair on fire,” he recalls. “We were still trying to determine who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.” There were thousands of bombs to defuse. Too many to count. “All eighty teams would be out in the field, working eighteen, twenty hours a day. Some guys would clear ten locations, then come back, then get sent back to the same hole” after another IED had been planted in it. “There were snipers to deal with. The cost was tremendous,” Marsh says. Death was commonplace. “It was painful and frustrating. Within the first couple of months, one of the sailors I was working with was blown up and killed.”

Another part of Craig Marsh’s job was to coordinate the work between the teams that were trying to locate bomb makers and the lab technicians examining evidence. At every location, before and after an IED blast, there was forensic evidence to collect, a potential means of identifying and capturing members of local terrorist cells. Task Force Troy worked in concert with a forensic counter-IED team called the Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell, or “sexy” (CEXC) for short. CEXC had an electronics shop and laboratory at Camp Victory where technicians worked around the clock examining evidence. This was home to some of the most technologically advanced forensic equipment in the world, including high-powered microscopes, reflective ultraviolet imaging system fingerprint scopes, and x-ray photographing machines.

Task Force Troy had access to some sensor technology, but it did not do much good in the field. “Sensors are great for identifying anomalies at the bottom of the ocean,” says Marsh. “Technology can be very good for gathering intelligence. But when it comes to assessing technology, nothing comes close to an experienced human. The ‘ah-hah’ moments almost always came from a guy in the lab at CEXC.”

Human intelligence, HUMINT, offered Task Force Troy some of the best leads in trying to identify who might be building and planting the IEDs. Task Force Troy teams would go out in the field
and talk to locals, taking paper-and-pen notes. “We’d follow up on these leads,” relates Marsh, only to discover “we were now dealing with death squads.” For Iraqis, working with Americans carried a high price. “These guys would kill entire families just for talking to us. It was brutal. We’d find vans stuffed with bodies. Villagers who talked to us would wind up dead, blindfolded, left by the side of the road.” Corpses went unidentified and lay rotting in the streets because extended family members were afraid to claim the bodies, fearing reprisal. As the violence swelled, trust disappeared.

The psychological toll grew heavy. Marsh remembers being back at Camp Victory one night, longing for some kind of a break, when he and a colleague were watching a training video illustrating how a DARPA robot could allow first sighting of visible wires and other components of a partially buried IED. Marsh recalls what he saw. “The robot’s working the road. Then the robot blows up. The dust clears. Along comes another robot and it starts working on a second IED in the road.” EOD teams had used DARPA robots before, “but there were not enough of them to go around,” says Marsh. “The few robots [we had] were taking a beating due to IED blasts. DARPA was the momentum behind pushing the much-needed volume of robots into the hands of those of us who really needed them.” When Marsh learned more robots were coming to Task Force Troy, “that was a ‘thank God’ moment,” he recalls.

The workhorse of all the counter-IED robots was DARPA’s Talon robot, first developed for DARPA by Foster-Miller, Inc., in 1993. The robot was originally conceived as a counter-mine robot, designed to work in shallow ocean waters, called the surf zone. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war, Talon robots were used to remove unexploded munitions. On 9/11, Talon robots were used on-site at the World Trade Center, searching through the rubble for survivors. And Talon robots were the first robots used in the war on terror. They accompanied Special Forces during action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on a classified mission in Afghanistan in
2002. “Talon robots have been in continuous active military duty ever since,” DARPA literature reports.

Now, a fleet of combat-ready, man-portable Talon robots was finally ready for battle in Iraq. It was 2006. This generation of Talon was small and squat, weighing just one hundred pounds. It had a robotic arm and was mounted on a four-wheeled platform that rolled along on two tank treads. The robot was operated from a portable control unit through a two-way radio or a fiber-optic link.

The EOD techs gave the Talons high praise—and human names.

“Sorry for the late report on Gordon the robot,” reads one EOD operator report. “While I was in direct control of Gordon, 8 deep buried IED’s were disposed of, 7 houses were cleared of possible HBIEDs [house-borne improvised explosive devices], 13 Unexploded Ordinances (UXO) found in houses that were to be placed as IEDs, 18 landmines. Approximately 300 lbs of HME [homemade explosive] was disposed of.”

Several days after that report, Gordon the robot was launched out the back of an EOD truck and was searching an intersection for a deeply buried IED when a bomb detonated approximately ten feet from where Gordon was working. “Still functioning, he continued to search the area,” the EOD tech reported. “On the opposite side of the road, another IED was detonated and had turned him upside down. Everything was still working until a fire fight started. Gordon took 7 rounds to the underside and was done for the day.” The EOD technician took Gordon back to the robot shop for repair. He was fixed, returned to the team, and sent back out into the field.

Not long after, Gordon was searching a gate near a house, looking for possible booby traps, when an IED detonated right next to where he was working. “Gordon was mangled beyond repair. Now his replacement, ‘Flash,’ is here to finish his job,” wrote the tech. The beauty of robots, says Craig Marsh, is simple to understand. “Some leaders say you can’t take the man out of the mine field. But
the bottom line is, robots save lives. EOD technicians will choose to work smarter instead of harder when at all possible.” The Talon robots cost between $60,000 and $180,000 per unit, depending on what sensor technology the robot is fitted with.

The longer-term goal of Task Force Troy was to turn the bomb detection and defusing technology over to the Iraqis themselves. “We were trying to establish a partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of Police, but we got a lot of pushback,” Marsh recalls. “We’d say, here’s how DNA works. Here’s how fingerprinting works. And they’d look at us like we were talking about magic.” In Marsh’s experience, the way the Iraqi police force worked in 2006 was based on a man’s word. “They’d ask someone, a suspect, ‘Did you build this IED?’ And if he said ‘no,’ that worked for them. Proof to them was an eyewitness. Judges would ask, ‘Are there any eyewitnesses to back this up?’ If the answer was no, and [the suspect] said he didn’t do it, he would be let go. The system was based on deceptions. On a lot of untruths.”

Task Force Troy worked with CEXC to build what it called “targeting packages,” files of evidence that could be used by Iraqi police before a judge. “It made things complicated and frustrating. Trying to assist the Iraqi judicial system—we were not supposed to say ‘train’—and to prosecute the war.”

There was a major turning point in cooperative science on February 22, 2006. Early that morning, sixty-five miles north of Baghdad, in the city of Samarra, a massive IED blast tore apart the Golden Dome of the Askariya Shrine, one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines. “This is like 9/11 in the United States,” declared Abdel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents, a Shiite Muslim.

When Craig Marsh learned about the bombing, he walked across the Al Faw Palace compound to update his commander, Colonel Kevin Lutz, on the other side of Camp Victory. The two men discussed next steps. “There was so much evidence to collect at the Golden Dome,” says Marsh. “We wanted to get eyes on the
incident site and at least do our best to preserve the evidence for collection without damaging an already sensitive relationship with Iraqi leadership. CEXC guys were well equipped to handle that.” The Iraqi government in Baghdad was not. But now they saw how they could “benefit from the science,” says Marsh. For the first time since Task Force Troy had been set up, the government of Baghdad, which was led by Shiite Muslims, agreed to allow CEXC to investigate something that had nothing to do with coalition force deaths. A team of Task Force Troy CEXC technicians descended on the rubble of the Golden Mosque.

In working with forensic science to identify the terrorists who blew up the Golden Dome, Iraqi leaders in Baghdad warmed to science in general, says Marsh. Then advances in science took a bizarre and tragic turn. Marsh learned that Iraqi security forces were relying on a device to detect bombs that had no science behind it at all. Word was the device, called the ADE 651, “was a totally bogus piece of equipment,” he says. It was a small handheld black box with a swiveling antenna attached to the top. The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives had purchased more than 1,500 of the devices from a private company in England called ATSC.

Craig Marsh took the problem to senior officers, who invited top Iraqi officials to Task Force Troy for a technology demonstration. “We had the Iraqis come to the laboratory and we had DoD guys demonstrate” that it did not work, Marsh recounts. The ADE 651 “did not detect explosives of any kind. We took it apart. We had it x-rayed. It had no electronic components inside.” There was also no power source. The Iraqis insisted the device worked on “nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR.” Despite overwhelming evidence coming from the CEXC lab at Task Force Troy that the device had no scientific value whatsoever, Iraqi officials stood behind the ADE 651 bomb detector, which cost $60,000 per device. Soon, almost every Iraqi guard at every major checkpoint
across the country was using the worthless device in place of any kind of physical inspection. It was dangerous and frustrating. “Insurgents were able to get dump truck bombs past checkpoints” into Baghdad, Marsh says. “Coalition checkpoints did not use this device because we had actual explosive detection systems at our disposal.” The ADE 651 “was nothing more than a magic wand.”

“Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the General Directorate for Combating Explosives, told the
New York Times.
“I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.”