IED success rates

Six Canadian soldiers and one Afghan interpreter have been killed, may they rest in peace:

A roadside bomb has killed six Canadian soldiers and an Afghan interpreter in the Panjwaii district of Afghanistan.

Brig.-Gen. Tim Grant, commander of Task Force Afghanistan, confirmed the deaths during a news conference Wednesday in Kandahar.

He said the soldiers -- who have not been identified pending notification of next of kin -- were travelling in a RG-31 Nyala armoured vehicle with the interpreter when they were struck by an improvised explosive device.

All the vehicle's occupants were killed.

Sadly, this incident reinforces something I tried to put to words when the Gator was blown up and three lives lost a couple of weeks ago: sometimes you're screwed no matter what you do.

The RG-31 Nyala is one of the most IED-resistant vehicles in the Canadian inventory. If all six souls in the vehicle were lost, this must have been the mother of all IED's, proving once again that all the armour in the world won't protect you from a big enough bomb.

In this context, banning the Gator seems a little pointless; if you're not safe in a Nyala, you're not really safe in much. And if the insurgents can build a bomb big enough to do this, they can build one big enough to take out a Leo. It's just a matter of them getting lucky with the circumstances at some point, a question of odds.

Understanding this takes some appreciation of the context in which our forces operate. Our soldiers often come across as fatalistic in interviews - "When it's your time, it's your time" - but still prepare meticulously and follow rigourous procedures in their operations. Why? The prep and procedures are there to stack the odds in their favour, and the fatalism is a coping mechanism against the certainty that sometimes the bad guys beat really, really long odds.

It would help the Canadian media, and through them the Canadian public, to understand this dynamic better if BGen Grant and his successors would follow through on information he hinted at during his press conference:

Grant told reporters the RG-31 is considered one of the safest vehicles in the Canadian fleet, and was driving on a road that the military has used regularly over the past month.

When asked what steps the military is taking to reduce deaths caused by IEDs, Grant said troops are finding and disarming IEDs more often than not.

"When IEDs are successful they get reported. What doesn't get reported is ... the many number of times where we neutralize IEDs -- when they're pointed out to us by locals, or we find them ourselves. We dismantle them and we exploit them, so we can learn how to defeat them," Grant told reporters.

"We're not perfect, and we do miss some, as we've seen today. But the battle against the Taliban and the battle against their choice of weapons . . . is successful." [Babbler's emphasis]

Why don't the unsuccessful IEDs get reported? Because JTF-Afg and CEFCOM don't release that information.

I have no idea what the real stats are, but what if the CF in Kandahar defeat 49 out of 50 IED attempts? What if over the last twelve months the number of IED attempts had declined by 20% per month on average? Would that information give the Canadian public a more educated foundation upon which to base their opinion of whether the mission is making progress or not? I'd say so.

I understand the OPSEC concerns, and I fully support the aim of giving the Taliban as little intelligence as possible. But in this case, all the CF is doing is publicizing their enemies' successes and concealing their enemies' failures. Given the way that slanted coverage - not the media's fault, this once - affects public opinion, I think it's high time the balance between OPSEC and public information shifted.