BUILDING THE C-IED ENTERPRISE TO COUNTER THE IED SYSTEM
BUILDING THE C-IED ENTERPRISE TO COUNTER THE IED SYSTEM By Paul Amoroso, an explosive hazards specialist at Assessed Mitigation Options (AMO) consultancy
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NTRODUCTION
Previous articles by this author, in recent editions of The Counter-IED Report, on national and regional approaches to C-IED have spoken of national and regional C-IED enterprises. This article will examine what is meant by a national C-IED enterprise and how broader, less security centric only approaches, are preferential. It will then discuss how one may go about building such an enterprise with a particular examination of who may and should be part of such alternative whole of society C-IED enterprises. This article is based on the experience of the author from working on strategic C-IED initiatives over the past few years along with research conducted on the identification of strategic C-IED principles for East Africa. For any national C-IED enterprise to be effective it must first understand the problem it is trying to counter. In this case, a national C-IED enterprise is attempting to counter an IED system. We will start by first examining what do we mean by the term IED system.
DEFINING AN IED SYSTEM If the starting point for contemporary C-IED is taken to emerge from Western efforts to counter their use in Iraq and Afghanistan,1 initial efforts were mostly military centric owing to the operational environment they were conducted in and those who were available and hence tasked to undertake various C-IED activities. These initial C-IED efforts were typically defeat the device activities and then expanded to include attack the network and prepare the force or variations of these lines of effort. These three lines of effort may be considered the traditional military paradigm of C-IED. Initial military led attack the network activities were often kinetic in character using C-IED exploitation to support targeting approaches employed against IED network personnel such as find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze and disseminate. It was common practice for these attack the network activities to focus on targeting IED network members involved in IED manufacture, their transport, or components thereof, their emplacement, or their use, including suicide bombers.
1 The author acknowledges that, before this response to IED use in Iraq and Afghanistan, other IED affected states had undertaken initiatives and collective efforts to counter their use but did not use the term C-IED. Examples include the UK, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Columbia. These collective practices referred to as C-IED continue to evolve.
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