By Marina Malenic
Funding for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) will likely decrease next year, and the Defense Department will ask for proportionally less of that money in mid-year supplemental requests in the coming years, the head of the organization said this week.
“I’m thinking about a third will end up in the base budget” in fiscal year 2010, Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz said at an Aug. 6 Pentagon briefing. “The remainder will be in the supplemental.”
JIEDDO was established in 2005 to discover and develop technologies and tactics that protect soldiers from improvised explosive devices. IEDs are said to account for as many as 70 percent of all combat casualties in Iraq and are an increasing threat in Afghanistan.
The organization’s base budget for FY ’08 and FY ’09 was $500 million per year. However, most of its funding has been allocated in response to supplemental requests. Its total budget was approximately $4.5 billion this year, and it has spent some $16 billion to date.
Metz said JIEDDO’s budget has very likely peaked this year; he expects an FY ’10 request of $3.5 billion.
“We are not on a steep growth pattern,” he said. “We will level off here, I think.”
Metz said “getting out of the jammer business” is the primary reason for the decline.
“We spent a lot of money the first couple of years fielding jammers, and we have done that now and turned [the program] over to the services,” he explained.
JIEDDO supported the development of a next-generation jammer that began service last year. Some 10,000 of the CREW (counter radio-controlled IED electronic warfare) jammers have been delivered, primarily to Iraq. EDO Communications [EDO] manufactures the device whose precursor, the Warlock electronic jammer, had been the most common technology of its kind used by U.S. forces previously.
While jammers have been successful, they have also “pushed the enemy away from radio-controlled IEDs” to more primitive, victim-triggered devices that are impossible to detect and jam electronically, according to Metz. However, the individuals who place such IEDs in roads must spend more time setting up the trigger device, thus making them more vulnerable to surveillance.
“It’s a constant interplay on each side between going more primitive to going more sophisticated,” said Metz.
The general attributes the success of jammers and other technologies fielded by his organization to his freedom to allocate funds for various efforts. He said the “secret sauce” in that recipe has been three years of “uncolored money.”
It’s “very unique in the Department of Defense…that you would receive money that can be spent over three years and it’s not in particular buckets, boxing you in between science and technology and acquisition or procurement and operational funds,” Metz said.
“Sometimes we get ideas in and they’re not mature enough,” he added. “But because of that three years of uncolored money, I can put money against further development, help it get on the conveyor belt, or… if I can’t get it across the hump, just drop it then.”
Once a counter-IED technology is accepted, Metz said testing is required–though not at the level of stringency needed to become a program of record.
Beyond the cost of jammer development and fielding, Metz said that future JIEDDO spending will also depend upon deployment levels.
“If we have a large force deployed three or four years from now, those commanders out there will produce the urgent operational needs…and so we’ll have plenty of business,” he explained. “If we have very few soldiers deployed, commanders will not have many urgent operational needs.”