There have been no easy problems when it comes to IED countermeasures. The U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have pretty much confirmed that technology alone can’t solve the IED problem. The difficulty of the counter-IED challenge arises from many factors. The physical, electromagnetic, and chemical environments in which IEDs are deployed are chaotic and cluttered. The social networks that let insurgents fund, build, and emplace IEDs are incredibly complex. And IEDs themselves are hugely diverse, their makers having proved themselves tireless in adapting and altering their creations.
With the United States and other countries pouring billions of dollars into *counter-IED activities, a couple of questions come to mind: how much can technology do, in the absence of local cooperation, to reduce casualties from IEDs? Can some combination of the technologies now being pursued, together with nontechnical approaches such as intelligence exploitation, suffice to marginalize the strategic influence of IEDs?
The IED continues for the foreseeable future to be the weapon of choice for the world’s terrorists, insurgents, *militias, guerrillas, revolutionaries, and marginal or failed states.
What Kayani will mention is: increasing intel gathering, restricting the sale of bomb making material easily available in the market like urea nitrate and ammonium nitrate, produced using nitrogen-based fertilizers, policing and analyzing social networks, installing jammers on vehicles, road clearance by foot, looking for 'indicators' like lose disturbed soil, use of hyperspectral imagers that costs the earth ($500,000 a pop!), sniffer dogs and so on.
In short, there is at present no silver bullet that can counter this threat and probably will never be.
