Small, homemade bombs are an ever-present threat in America’s wars. Commonly known as Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, these bombs are easily made by insurgents, hidden along patrolled roads, and surprisingly deadly. In the early years of the Iraq war, the Department of Defense commissioned a serious bomb-proof vehicle program and borrowed lessons from submarine warfare to protect troops against these bombs. There’s another, lower-cost way for America to fight IEDs: Dogs.
Improvised explosive devices are the scourge of the modern battlefield, assembled from simple components and placed along frequently patrolled roads to ambush troops walking by. The American military used a special sensor named Copperhead attached to drones to find these IEDs placed in Afghanistan and Iraq. With U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan winding down, Sandia National Labs, the developer of Copperhead, is handing the technology over to the United States Army.
When American and coalition troops rolled into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, they quickly began doing exactly what any military playbook said they should do, leveraging their superior firepower and aerial superiority into a string of quick victories. In both engagements, coalition forces quickly hammered conventional military threats into submission and settled into a long role of occupation and rebuilding. That's when the bombs started going off.
Improvised explosive devices are far and away the single biggest killer of coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the ability to identify hidden explosive threats is key to keeping soldiers safe. A team of researchers at Michigan State University has developed a tool that could detect roadside bombs from afar, using nothing more than a laser with an energy output of a presentation pointer.
