Reading the Washington Post’s “left of boom” series on IEDs (the title refers to taking out bombmakers before they plant the bombs), I was impressed to learn that one of the best tools for spotting them is the “Mark 1 Human Eyeball”—that is, a trained soldier can spot 50 percent of IEDs, better than any machine has done in the field.
Of course, that’s 50 percent going unspotted, so the work in electronic detection, jamming and hunting down bombmakers is still vital. Even after the troops come home, this will obviously not be the last time we confront IEDs, since their success undoubtedly guarantees they’ll be employed against us in other wars in other places.
Still, 50 percent by the human eye alone is pretty darn amazing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.