New tech needed in continuing fight against IEDs
- By Defense Systems Staff
- Aug 31, 2012
The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization faces an uncertain future as the war in Afghanistan winds down and funding begins to run out, but its CIO hopes the work it has done can continue to be applied across the government, reports FCW, a sister publication of Defense Systems.
“We all know Afghanistan is going to wind down for America…and it may well be that JIEDDO" may not continue as it is, JIEDDO CIO James Craft said Aug. 28 at an AFCEA event in Vienna, Va. "Regardless, there have to be enduring capabilities, which means we need to fine-tune what we’re doing that’s working and have those capabilities survive.”
Adversaries are "using [commercial] technology effectively, and it’s proliferating. We have to innovate faster than they innovate; we have to learn faster than they learn," he said. That means being tool-agnostic and company-agnostic, and harnessing innovation beyond just JIEDDO – and also beyond the private sector, he noted.
One example of a successful counter technology is a new software created by a team at West Point called Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine (SCARE), which identifies the location of weapons caches using a mathematical model, based on the research theory of geospatial abduction. The software is designed to predict with significant accuracy where an IED depot is based on previous attack locations and other intelligence.