From the NY Times:
The explosion that killed 14 marines in Haditha yesterday was powerful enough to flip the 25-ton amphibious assault vehicle they were riding in, in keeping with an increasingly deadly trend, American military officers say.
In recent months the roadside bombs favored by insurgents in Iraq have grown significantly in size and sophistication, the officers say, adding to their deadliness and defeating efforts to increase troops’ safety by adding armor to vehicles…
Senior American commanders say they have also seen evidence that insurgents are making increased use of “shaped” charges, which concentrate the blast and give it a better chance of penetrating armored vehicles, causing higher casualties.
Bomb-making techniques used by the anti-Israeli militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon have increasingly begun appearing in roadside bombs in Iraq. A senior American commander said bombs using shaped charges closely matched the bombs that Hezbollah used against Israel.
“Our assessment is that they are probably going off to school” to learn how to make bombs that can destroy armored vehicles, the officer said.
Not good news.
Dennis J
Not good news at ALL.
We live in sad times. Not as bad as many in the past, but sorrowful nonetheless.
Phillip J. Birmingham
John, you might find John Robb’s Global Guerrillas site interesting. Here’s his article on the same topic:
THE IED MARKETPLACE IN IRAQ
Veeshir
Wait, you mean the Islamo-wacko groups work together?
Whodathunkit?
Mr Furious
Possible. Or they are just getting better with practice. What a fucking mess.
Stormy70
I can’t believe our enemies will just fight back like this. I mean, it is almost like we are in a war on global terror like President Bush told us in Sept. 2001.
ckrisz
Dude, it ain’t GSAVE anymore, did you get the memo?
http://nytimes.com/2005/08/04/politics/04bush.html?hp&ex=1123128000&en=997cdd1d8ec001fa&ei=5094&partner=homepage
I find it hard to believe that predominantly Sunni insurgents, a significant number of whom are primarily interested in killing Shiites, would either accept or be given help by Hizbullah, which is very very Shiite. Plus, someone had to train Hizbullah — maybe Syrian involvement here, though I wonder to what degree it is “authorized” vs. freelance/mercenary.
More likely, I think, the bombmakers are just taking additional measures to defeat armored vehicles as more and more Hummvees get armor. Since a lot of these guys are ex-Iraqi military or RG, it’s not like they’re unfamiliar with shaped charges.
ckrisz
Oops, didn’t read your article re: the slogan of the week below.
Defense Guy
Hezbullah is a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran, so you can bet your ass they will try to make themselves helpful in any fight against western freedom, especially one involving the US (aka the Great Satan).
Slartibartfast
The whole GSAVE bit is disturbingly reminiscent of GPALS. Our government can’t name things to save their own lives, I mean: The Department of Homeland Security? What are these guys thinking?
Oh. They aren’t.
Richard Bottoms
Bush is resolute and does not flip flop.
That should take care of it.
Ckrisz
Pop quiz: Iran is (A) Shiite (B) Sunni?
If you’ve keeping track of Iran/Iraqi relations in the past month, I think you would know Iran is extremely amenable to the new Iraqi government, and not at all disposed to the Sunni guerrillas.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18150
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/16/AR2005071601165.html
BadTux
G-FATSO (the Global Fight Against Those Sitting on our Oil) is perfect proof of the theory of evolution. Much as bacteria, subjected to antibiotics, slowly develop methods of coping with antibiotics and evolve to become deadlier and deadlier through the simple expedient of the stupidest and weakest dying and the stronger becoming smarter and stronger, so, too, goes with the insurgents in Iraq.
As someone pointed out, the notion of the Shiite group Hizbulah training Sunni guerillas who hate Shiites is as ludicrous as the notion that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons (a notion which may have made some sense in August 2002, but by February 2003, after UN inspectors had been traipsing around Iraq for months with radiation detectors going wherever they wanted to go, anybody reading the reports coming out of Blix’s office knew it was a ludicrous notion). It’s not happening. What’s happening in Iraq today is simple evolution. As we pour stronger “antibiotics” into Iraq, the bacteria are gaining resistance. They’re getting smarter, deadlier, and tougher.
If we’d roared into Iraq with 300,000 troops, we wouldn’t have that problem — we would have wiped out the disease much like a massive antibiotic regime will wipe out a disease in your body. Sort of like how, after we conquered Germany and stationed close to a million soldiers there (Germany was a nation of roughly 100 million people prior to the war, probably 50 million left in our occupation zone by the end), not a single U.S. soldier died due to enemy action. But Rummy and Dear Leader wanted to wage a war “on the cheap” and ignored the lessons on the past… thus, like a doctor prescribing weak antibiotics, giving the bacteria a chance to develop resistance to the medicine.
Look, I’m not against G-FATSO. There’s a global crisis coming up as the oil starts running dry, and I’m patriotic enough that I want America to survive that. But the Bush Administration implementation of G-FATSO has been just one incompetent bungling after another. They’re proud to tout their “victory” over Saddam’s armed forces, without telling the American people that Saddam’s armed forces were so weak that they could not retake northern Iraq even when going up against only maybe 20,000 Kurdish peshmerga armed with RPG’s and AK-47’s… anybody who knew anything knew that the big issue was going to be what to do after Saddam’s armed forces collapsed, because there was no way they were going to stand up to the best-equipped military in the world for more time than it took our tanks to drive from the border to the center of Baghdad. *I* knew this, before the first shot of the war, and all I did was look at the history of the Iraqi Army’s failed attempts to retake northern Iraq. Only an utter fool could have thought that the hard part was taking Iraq. As with Afghanistan (which the Soviet Army conquered in two week’s time), the hard part came *after* the conquest, and only a fool would differ. Unfortunately, an utter fool is, apparently, what we have as a leader…
– Badtux the Military Penguin
PS: For those who say, “but Iraq was not about oil!” — do you really *truly* believe that we would have invaded Iraq if their biggest economic resource was turnips rather than oil? If so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you…
frontinus
Sunnis are oil and Shi’a are water. Everybody knows this.
Idiots.
They worked together to push the English out of Iraq. They worked together to make war several times against Israel. They worked together when Hizbollah attacked the Khobar Towers for al-Qaeda in 1996. They worked together in Sudan when Mugniyah met bin Laden.
I swear always the most opinionated people are coincidentally the most ignorant.
By the way, the Taliban were Hanifa Sunni while al-Qaeda were Hanbali Sunni. Those damned sectarian walls are like a sieve.
frontinus
Oh, and how many years ago was it that the American al-Qaeda published the 7,000(yes, ladies…seven thousand) page manual for jihad? If they had plans to turn a cigarette into a deadly(ok, more immediately deadly) weapon I seriously doubt shaped charges were a Gordian knot.
Steve
Iran has NO interest in undermining the new Iraqi government. Zip, zero, zilch.
shark
Bomb-making techniques used by the anti-Israeli militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon
Why are they afraid to call Hezbollah what they are: TERRORISTS?
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE “PEOPLE”??