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DoDBuzz: Afghan IEDs Hammered Soviets

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unhappycamper Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Dec-16-09 07:25 AM
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DoDBuzz: Afghan IEDs Hammered Soviets
Afghan IEDs Hammered Soviets
By Greg Grant Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 12:17 pm
Posted in International, Land, Policy

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced cre­ation of yet another counter-​​IED Pentagon task force, he was clearly frus­trated with the inabil­ity of the mil­i­tary, the intel­li­gence agen­cies and indus­try to come up with answers to the sim­ple yet dev­as­tat­ingly effec­tive road­side bomb as the IED war shifts from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The num­ber of IED “inci­dents” in Afghanistan, defined as IEDs either found before det­o­nat­ing or actual IED attacks, have jumped from around 100 a month dur­ing 2006 to over 800 a month this past sum­mer; in August IED inci­dents topped 1,000. In 2006, 41 U.S. and NATO troops were killed by IEDs. So far this year, 260 coali­tion troops have been killed by IEDs, accord­ing to the web site ica​s​u​al​ties​.com that tracks troop casu­al­ties. IED casu­al­ties in Afghanistan don’t approach those of Iraq dur­ing the height of the fight­ing there when some days saw 100 IED inci­dents, but the trend lines are headed in the wrong direc­tion. As more troops arrive, casu­al­ties are sure to increase.

Gates said one of the IED group’s first tasks was to scour records from the Soviet-​​Afghan war dur­ing the 1980s for poten­tial lessons on the Mujaheddin’s use and the Soviet response to IEDs and mines. That war was marked by extreme bru­tal­ity on the part of all com­bat­ants and both sides used land mines lib­er­ally. The Soviets ringed their strong­points with thick mine belts that de-​​mining teams con­tinue to clear to this day.

The Mujaheddin used mines and IEDs prin­ci­pally as an offen­sive weapon to bleed the Soviet occu­piers, rather than to seize and defend ter­ri­tory. And bleed them they did: the Soviets lost 1,995 sol­diers killed and 1,191 vehi­cles to mines and IEDs dur­ing their eight year long war. That’s just killed, cer­tainly there were many thou­sands more wounded, as IEDs tend to maim more than they kill (the Soviets never pro­duced a true account­ing of their losses in Afghanistan, thought to be much higher than pub­licly avail­able num­bers). Those sta­tis­tics come from the Army War College’s Lester Grau whose trans­la­tions of Soviet gen­eral staff stud­ies of the Afghan war, as well as Mujaheddin accounts of the fight­ing, are invaluable.

Like the U.S. mil­i­tary, the Soviet army in Afghanistan was road bound, rely­ing on the country’s few roads to resup­ply scat­tered com­bat out­posts. Much of the fight­ing was for con­trol over these lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The roads link­ing the major Afghan towns such as Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Khost and Jalalabad were the scene of count­less bloody battles.


Rest of article and a pretty good discussion at: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/12/15/afghan-ieds-hammered-soviets/?wh=wh
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MercutioATC Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Dec-16-09 07:40 AM
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1. Rule #1: Don't fuck with people who have little or nothing to lose.
Edited on Wed Dec-16-09 07:41 AM by MercutioATC
...especially when they're used to living on, even in the best of times, some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.
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