Navy News, news from Iraq - Navy Times

Metz: IEDs a ‘strategic weapon’

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — The Army general in charge of squelching the threat from roadside bombs and the enemy networks that make them said the makeshift devices are nothing less than “strategic weapons.”

Speaking at a defense forum here Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz said improvised explosive devices are not only deadly overseas, but would be devastating if used in the United States because they kill physically and attack psychologically.

“The IED is a strategic weapon and it’s got to be dealt with as a strategic weapon,” he told the audience at a conference on joint warfighting hosted by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

Much like the methodical ‘death of thousand cuts’ employed by communist forces during the Vietnam War, the strategy of opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan who employ IEDs against U.S. troops, Metz said, is to exploit the American public’s low tolerance for casualties.

“It’s a strategic weapon to wear our will down,” he said.

Metz is now the director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, which has an annual budget of roughly $4 billion to counter lethal weapons that can cost less than $100 to build and employ.

Metz raised the scenario of IEDs being employed in the United States, such as on a critical city bridge or in an auto tunnel. To find the required materials would be as simple for an enemy here as in the Middle East today.

“I’m told that in most homes there’s enough [chemicals and cheap technology] to make an IED,” he said.

Metz, who enlisted in the Army in 1966 and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1971, led the Multinational Corps-Iraq in 2004 and 2005, some of the bloodiest years of the war. He said troops are detecting and destroying IEDs in the combat zone in great numbers but the weapons remain hard to detect and deadly when employed, even against heavily armored vehicles.

He noted that one response to the roadside bomb, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, do save lives, but noted that the MRAPs cost about $1 million each, will the IED costs about $100.

“We’re a rich nation but that’s not the balance we want to get into,” he said.