Jammer-equipped U.S. Army patrol in Iraq. Photo: David Axe.

On Jan. 7, someone strolled into a supply room at Camp Eggers, a coalition base near the U.S. embassy in downtown Kabul, pocketed two sets of car keys and walked out undetected. Sometime over the next 24 hours, the thieves drove away with two black-painted, armored Toyota Land Cruisers belonging to the U.S. Army’s 26th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade, a unit that escorts coalition personnel around Kabul.

The loss of the Land Cruisers is bad enough. But what’s really got the Army worried is what was inside the vehicles: two sets of top-secret Duke radio frequency jammers used to block the signals that detonate remote-controlled Improvised Explosive Devices. In a notice posted to the Website of the Army’s Criminal Investigative Command (and first noted by Military Times), investigators plead for anyone with knowledge of the theft to contact CID offices in and around Kabul.

If the Army suspects who might be responsible, it’s not saying. Equally, it’s not clear if the bandits were after the Duke equipment specifically, or if the Land Cruisers were the sole target and the jammers were simply bonuses.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

It made news last week when the PANTEX plant in Texas completed dismantling one of the last Cold War monsters, an early-’60s vintage USAF B-53 nuclear gravity bomb. Using the same “physics package” as the Titan II ICBM warhead, the B-53 was a bunker-buster fitted with huge parachutes and an aluminum-honeycomb crumple zone; its 9 megatons of fission and fusion power could pulverize granite mountains and reduce whole cities to radioactive ash. Within strategic-arms treaties, the U.S. managed retain a few in reserve until the late 1990s — when smaller, more accurate weapons were deployed in the same bunker-busting role.

The B-53 had a venerable pedigree, according to Nuclearweaponarchive.org: “The Mk-53 apparently can trace a design lineage back to the very first solid-fuel radiation implosion device ever tested, the Shrimp detonated in the Castle Bravo test.”

It’s also the 50th anniversary of the Tsar of Bombs, “Big Ivan” as it was known to its creator Andrei Sakharov.

Nikita Khrushchev ordered several nuclear spectacles to be staged during JFK’s first year in office, and Sakharov’s 100-megaton bomb was to be the climax. No bomb so gigantic had yet been designed or tested, but when the Premier/General Secretary notified the world of the forthcoming test, to commemorate the October Revolution, Sahkarov and his team got cracking. One would not want to fail Krushchev.

The team decided to substitute inert lead for uranium in the third-stage tampers; this cut the bomb’s yield in half, but also greatly reduced the fallout, which could have boosted atmospheric radioactivity by 25 percent.

In less than 10 months, the Arzamas-16 weaponeers developed and built an enormous device as large as a small tank — a bomb so big that the Bison bomber to carry it required radical surgery on its bomb bay in order to fit just part of the weapon’s bulk inside the fuselage. If anything displayed the military impracticality of such a weapon it was this, for the slow turboprop Bison was slowed further by drag and maximum payload. There was no target in Western Europe big enough to merit such a blow, even if the lumbering Bison made it through air defenses.

Big Ivan was released over the Novaya Zemlya Test Range on October 30, 1961 and exploded at 13,000 feet altitude. The detonation was measured at 57 megatons and produced a magnitude-5 earthquake. Everything was obliterated out to 16 miles from ground zero, everything knocked flat out to 30 miles. Unprotected observers could have received 3rd-degree burns over 60 miles away.

The remains of Big Ivan are embedded in the bones of everyone alive on Earth at that time.

Rhino.

A deadly suicide attack on a NATO convoy in Kabul at the weekend underscored a key vulnerability in the alliance’s practices. A vehicle filled with explosives rammed a heavily-armored transport traveling along a predictable route. Seventeen NATO soldiers and civilians died in the blast.

The targeted vehicle was of a design known as a “Rhino.” Custom-built by Labock Technologies in Florida, the Rhino is specifically designed to protect its occupants from bomb blasts. Weighing up to 13 tons, the Rhino comes in various configurations seating up to 36 people. Its sloped hull and sophisticated armor protect it from all but the most powerful explosives.

Read the rest at The Diplomat.

Ryan Alexander-Tanner art.

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have become the number-one killer of NATO troops in Afghanistan. The lasting effects for those who have survived the powerful blasts include memory loss and changes in personality, the true toll of which we have yet to learn.

After I wrote about being bombed while riding in a MaxxPro Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle in Afghanistan, a representative of Navistar, the vehicle’s manufacturer, emailed me to ask if I would mind answering a few questions for the company newsletter.

The exchange is copied below. Since I never heard back from the guy, I’m assuming he never printed my responses.

Q: Can you give me a quick summary of your experience with our trucks? I’d like to find out about where you’ve ridden in them, where you were going, what was the mission, etc.

A: I’ve ridden in almost every MRAP variant — and other mine-resistant vehicles — in the course of seven years reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan and across Africa.

Q: If you want to add something about the ride/comfort (lack thereof) please do; I’d like to know what people think of our vehicles overall.

A: MRAPs are not comfortable. In fact, I hate them — not only for their cramped interiors and many sharp metal edges and the way the seat cushions get flattened or their frames bent after repeated use, but also because MRAPs and other Army vehicles are basically bomb magnets. Which is, of course, why International and other designers produced the MRAP in the first place — to make it more likely the occupants of an ambushed vehicle will survive the attack. I’ve been bombed or nearly bombed in MRAPs twice since 2009, and while I’m grateful to have emerged mostly unscathed, I’ve learned that in a warzone I’d rather walk 15 miles up a mountain with a rucksack on my back than ride two miles in an MRAP or any other vehicle.

Q: You’ve been in our trucks during an firefight and an IED attack, can you tell me a little bit about those? You can pick to talk about both, or just one, up to you.

A: In Afghanistan, I was attacked while riding in a MaxxPro belonging to the 10th Mountain Division twice: once in 2009, again two years later. In 2009 in Baraki Barak, an IED destroyed the MaxxPro behind mine in a convoy and then the Taliban opened fire with rockets and machine guns. The Americans and their attached Afghan National Army fired back — the Americans from their MRAPs, the Afghans from their Nissan pickup trucks. The firefight lasted 10 minutes or so before the Apache helicopter showed up and ended things rather quickly.

In 2011, I was in the rearmost seat of a MaxxPro on a patrol outside the village of Pakhab-e-Shana when a large IED exploded underneath the front of the vehicle, destroying everything but the crew compartment. Five soldiers were hurt — two of them badly. I and one other soldier, both of us sitting in the rear, were mostly unhurt. One officer was injured because he had not buckled his safety belt and flew around inside the compartment as the blast lifted us in the air and threw us 15 feet down the road.

Q: What did it feel like inside the truck?

A: A loud sound, a violent motion, dust in the air, impact as we struck the ground, then incredible silence … followed by screaming.

Q: Did you feel safe inside the truck? Did the crew?

A: Prior to the attack, I felt safe in MRAPs. Today I do not feel safe in any Army vehicle in a combat zone. I feel safer on foot.

Q: After all that you’ve been through, would you ride in another MaxxPro? What things would you change about it? What do the soldiers say about the MaxxPro?

A: I’ll ride in a MaxxPro or other MRAP when required to do so — but never voluntarily.

Q: Most days, people at Navistar don’t get the opportunity to interact with their customers and it’s easy to forget that people are counting on our trucks everyday overseas. If you could tell the people at Navistar anything about their truck or their work, what would it be?

A: Your trucks will keep people alive when they are bombed, but the vehicles also attract attacks. It’s a Catch-22 situation. You need safer vehicles like the MaxxPro because you’re riding in vehicles in the first place.

Freelance video journalist David Axe was embedded with the U.S. Army in Logar province, south of Kabul, when the military vehicle he was traveling in was struck by an IED. See the complete program here.

Staff Sgt. Marcus Jimenez was pissed. On March 19, he had led a force of U.S., Afghan and Jordanian soldiers into the village of Pakhab-e’Shana, in eastern Afghanistan’s Logar province, with what Jimenez considered the best of intentions. While the Americans conferred with village elders, the Jordanians and Afghans would inspect the town’s four mosques, to see if there were any repairs NATO and the Afghan government might help pay for. In addition, the Americans and Jordanians had some soccer balls to hand out.

But the elders greeted the soldiers with what looked like cool indifference. And the village’s legions of children greeted them with rocks, hurled artillery-style over mud walls. A rock struck one of Jimenez’s American gunners in the face, drawing blood. The stocky staff sergeant stormed to the nearest elder, Pashto interpreter in tow. “They hurt one of my guys!” Jimenez yelled. He demanded the elder “get control of” his people. Three minutes later, Jimenez had calmed down. He grinned. “Kids will be kids,” he said. “We can’t forget that most people here are good.”

An hour later, Jimenez would be dragged, barely conscious and badly hurt, from the twisted wreckage of an armored truck blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device just a stone’s throw from Pakhab-e’Shana. I was lucky — and so was a medic named Michael Sario. We were sitting in the very back of the vehicle, farthest from the explosion. I escaped with gashes and, later, a minor case of the shakes. Sario was rattled but apparently okay, otherwise. Jimenez, three more soldiers and the interpreter were not. They were injured in the blast, and had to be evacuated by helicopter.

The attack was a setback in a province where NATO is still hoping to win hearts and minds. Across Afghanistan, NATO has largely shifted from a “soft” counter-insurgency strategy to a more lethal counter-terrorism approach. But in many parts of Logar, COIN still rules. Two years ago, Gen. Stanley McChrystal highlighted Logar’s Baraki Barak district as a model for the whole country; today, McChrystal is gone, replaced by his former boss Gen. David Petraeus. Under the more aggressive Petraeus, Logar is less a model than the exception. But even in one of the last bastions of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, the dangers remain very real. And the personal cost to NATO troops and, yes, embedded reporters — too high.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

541st Engineer Company route clearance. David Axe photo.

With a deadly bomb possibly lying just inches under their feet, any sane person would — oh, I don’t know — run away. But these uniformed madmen have a job to do. They run toward a potential explosive, with nothing but steady hands and body armor to protect them.

It might seem nuts, but the calculated insanity practiced by teams of U.S. Army engineers may be slowly turning the tide against Afghanistan’s insurgent bombers.

On Friday afternoon in Logar Province, just south of Kabul in eastern Afghanistan, Spc. Justin Torres and Pvt. Wendell Burley, both from the U.S. Army’s 541st Engineer Company, are patrolling a dirt road with their hand-held metal detectors when they pinpoint a suspicious, buried object.

It could be nothing: garbage or decades-old scrap. Or it could be one of the roughly 1,300 bombs per month that the Taliban and other armed groups use to attack NATO forces. There’s just one way to be truly certain. Torres and Burley step aside; Sgt. Leslie Pittman and another NCO unsheathe their bayonets, leap on the spot Torres and Burley indicate, and begin digging.

The two veteran engineers have scraped several inches below the road’s surface when there’s a ding sound. One of them has struck metal. I’m standing nearby with a video camera rolling. And although I’m a veteran of several bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan — or maybe because I am — I suck in my breath and hold it.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

Army patrol in Kampala. Via World News.

Fifteen days after twin suicide bombings killed 76 people in Kampala, Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni used an African Union summit in the capital city to declare war on the Somali group responsible for the July 11 bombing — as well as on foreign fighters aiding the group. “The terrorists should be wiped out of Africa,” Museveni said on Monday. “Let us act and sweep them out of Africa and to where they came from in Asia and the Middle East.”

But to secure its borders, cities and regional interests, Uganda must do more than target terrorists. Roving rebel groups, many of them homegrown, also threaten this rapidly developing country of 32 million people. Terrorists from the east and rebels from the west raise the prospect of a two-front war for Kampala. American assistance factors heavily on both fronts. And both also represent potential security quagmires.

Al-Shabab, the most dominant of Somalia’s many Islamic insurgent groups, claimed responsibility for the July bombings, which were timed to strike a rugby field and a restaurant, both packed with World Cup spectators. An Al-Shabab spokesman said the attacks were meant as retaliation for Uganda’s contributions to a 6,000-strong A.U. peacekeeping force in Mogadishu that Sheikh Muktar Abu Zubayr said has “massacred” Somali civilians. “We will keep revenging what your soldiers remorselessly did to our people,” Abu Zubayr said. “Your tanks destroyed the remains of our buildings in Mogadishu, and we will also revenge that.”

The heavily armed Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers fight alongside the U.S.-backed Somali Transitional Federal Government against Al-Shabab and other Islamic groups, who are aided by “freelance” foreign fighters that stream into Somalia from neighboring countries, Yemen, Central Asia and even the United States. Every year, hundreds of civilians die in the crossfire. In addition to deploying peacekeepers to Somalia, Uganda — which does not share a border with that chaotic country — hosts tens of thousands of Somali refugees who cross into Uganda by air or by land through Kenya.

Read the rest at World Politics Review.