Army Spec. Hugo Gonzalez was misidentified in two photo captions with the Oct. 1 installment of the Left of Boom series, and his rank was incorrect on Page One. Also, in some editions of the Oct. 2 installment of the series, the full name of an EFP, a type of weapon used by insurgents, was incorrectly given as "explosively formed perpetrator." It should have been "explosively formed penetrator."
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'There was a two-year learning curve . . . and a lot of people died in those two years'
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VIDEO | 'Without the Video, It's Just an Attack'
Ben Venzke, CEO of the counterterror intelligence group IntelCenter, explains how insurgents are using video cameras to document their attacks in order to recruit and raise money. TOOLBOX
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Blitz organizers had intended for the operation to last four weeks, but Centcom pressed for better results. A month passed, then two. Keeping a round-the-clock persistent stare grew more difficult, particularly as demands intensified to shift resources elsewhere in Iraq. "Slowly but surely," an Army colonel said, "it unraveled."
Eight of the 14 Makos crashed. Horned Owl also was a disappointment, as Abizaid's deputy, Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance L. Smith, found when he flew a mission in Iraq. The radar was bedeviled by false positives, including oil barrels and car hulks. The Iraqis, Smith observed, were "wonderful buriers." The aircraft would be sent home for further tweaking.
The most disheartening day came on Thursday, Nov. 4. By chance, virtually all surveillance assets -- satellites, U-2s, drones -- happened to be focused simultaneously on one small swatch of Route Tampa. Traffic appeared normal. Two hours later, another sequence of images revealed a scorched crater where a bag of artillery shells triggered by a detonation wire had just killed one American soldier in a truck and severed the leg of another. Dozens of photos showed the burning vehicle veer across the median, and rescue vehicles convene at the site. No images revealed the IED being placed, or the triggerman.
Analysts soon surmised that bomber cells around Balad in late summer had shifted "to a just-in-time device-placement method," as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst put it. Instead of requiring hours or days to survey an ambush site and bury a device, "hasty emplacement" took two hours or less.
Blitz ended on Nov. 15. In 10 weeks, 44 IEDs had detonated or were discovered by ground clearance teams. Asked how many had been detected by aerial surveillance, the Air Force officer said, "To be honest with you, I can't say any of them.
"We had only a 20-kilometer stretch," the officer added. "There are thousands of kilometers in Iraq." By the end of 2004, about 5,600 IED attacks had occurred across the country, according to Centcom.
If "the results were less than expected" in Blitz, as the DIA analyst concluded, intelligence experts also learned a great deal: The surveillance sensors might not find bombs, but they could conceivably be used to hunt bombers by watching where vehicles spotted near an ambush site were subsequently driven, a technique later called backtracking. "It's a vehicle-borne insurgency," the Air Force officer said.
That realization would take many months to bear fruit. The immediate lesson of Blitz was summarized by an Army lieutenant colonel. "You can do the unblinking eye," he said, "but you can't do it everywhere, and you can't do it very long."
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Blitz underscored that in the theater and at home, U.S. efforts remained fixated on "the fight at the roadside": finding or neutralizing planted bombs, and attacking those who buried them. But killing an emplacer rarely disrupted a bomber cell for more than several days, and few insurgents captured by U.S. forces proved to be ringleaders, financiers or IED builders.
A classified U.S. government proposal called the Cerberus Project specifically targeted bombmakers as "disproportionately valuable to the terrorist operation chain" because of their technical skills. By collecting forensic signatures of individual bombers, such as fingerprints, handcrafted circuits and soldering marks, analysts could identify patterns and better understand the IED networks spreading through Iraq.
Britain and Israel had similarly targeted bombmakers in Northern Ireland and Lebanon, respectively, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared "the enemy bombmaker as the operational center of gravity" for U.S. warfighters, according to a senior officer involved in the operation. Yet such painstaking efforts would not pay off for months or years. A Cerberus Project briefing paper in August 2004 warned that "the window of opportunity to prevent the terrorist and insurgent bombmaking knowledge base from being transferred, or evolving . . . is closing."
