Finding a roadside bomb was never easy, even back when insurgents made their improvised explosive devices IEDs from old artillery shells and other metal parts.
But now that militant bomb-makers favor wood and fertilizer as the main components for their IEDs, detection has become a complete nightmare.That’s why the U.S. Navy wants to build an entirely new kind of bomb detector, one that doesn’t rely on spotting the metal in the IED.
As far as improvised bombs go, the U.S. military is ensnared in a counterinsurgency game of constant one-upmanship. Just as the military finds a way to better detect an improvised bomb, the enemy finds a way to outsmart them and keep the bomb hidden until it’s too late.
