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Gates sets up new counter-IED task force

ABOARD DEFENSE SECRETARY’S PLANE — Defense Secretary Robert Gates has established a senior-level task force to streamline the efforts of military services and agencies to find and destroy roadside bombs, which have plagued American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The task force will be led by Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter and Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Paxton, the Joint Staff’s director for operations J-3, Gates told reporters Thursday aboard his jet en route to a military vehicle factory in Wisconsin.

The secretary said he wants the counter-improvised explosive device (IED) task force “to break down the stove pipes” that keep various anti-bomb groups scattered across the military services and agencies from working together. He also wants the new group to “get the troops what they need.”

Gates said he expects to meet with the task force “monthly” and thinks it will carry out its work for about six months. The task force will examine both offensive and defensive counterbomb tactics and tools, he said.

Gates told reporters it recently became clear to him that he had to place counter-IED efforts “among my top priorities.”

The secretary added that it is important that the task force be linked to U.S. Central Command because military brass in Afghanistan “will have a big say in this.”

In addition, Gates has directed Pentagon officials to study lessons from the former Soviet Union’s military experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

That’s because “we’re seeing the same kind of bombs” there that the Soviets faced, Gates said. “What can we learn from that?”

The review of the Soviet IED lessons could spawn new tactics for how the U.S. military detects and destroys both the makeshift explosives and the networks that design, build, plant and detonate them, Gates said.

His comments came hours before he was slated to tour Oshkosh’s M-ATV plant in Wisconsin. The Pentagon plans to buy 6,600 of the all-terrain, blast-resistant vehicles, Gates said.

If President Barack Obama decides to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, Gates said the Pentagon will look at buying more than the planned 6,600.

He declined to discuss White House talks Nov. 11 between Obama and his top war advisers about Washington’s Afghanistan strategy and troop levels. He did say the discussions were about how to combine the “best features” of several plans presented to the president.

“I think we’re coming to the end of that process,” Gates said of the president’s deliberations about altering U.S. strategies in Afghanistan.

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