The military is studying why some soldiers are good at detecting IEDs

[Felan]

I was reading mindhacks.com and they had an entry that referenced a couple of articles I thought were interesting.

http://soldiersmind.com/2009/04/08/goal-of-study-to-identify-those-who-are-able-to-identify-ieds/

http://www.army.mil/-news/2009/04/03/19247-study-aims-to-identify-ied-detection-experts/

 

[walfin]

Now that's something.

 

[Tyria]

I've heard stories about this. If I was ever over there, I would fight just to be in the same unit that these people are in. Skills like that could save your life, and the lives of everyone else in the squad.

I always wondered though... couldn't the military deploy lots of cheap robots to blow up IED's?

 

[Perseus]

Some types are touch-feelies. I know somebody who can unfasten combination padlocks by touch without fail. I can do it by thinking but the failure rate is high (it relies on laziness by the padlock setter or guessed knowledge and information). .

 

[Sapphire Harp]

They're looking for some advanced combinations of intuition, awareness, and alertness I suppose...

I wonder if there are multiple routes to the same acuity? If there are, searching for a single combination would be rather difficult...
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I always wondered though... couldn't the military deploy lots of cheap robots to blow up IED's?

I've heard this is done to some degree... but it aggravates how much time is necessary to take care of an IED - which raises the risk to the whole unit, as opposed to just mitigating the risk to an individual...

Besides, how cheap is cheap? As I understand it, the average production cost of an IED is less than the cost of a pizza. And the IEDs have a fair bit of variance, too... with remote control varieties out there. Any way you slice it, the makers of the IED win on economics many times over. They'll still be able to afford to make IEDs long after we run out of robots.

(I've also heard it suggested that the IED is the one weapon of this war that has most dramatically evolved from the beginning of it. IEDs as a class of weapon have become more effective, more sophisticated, and more economical than any other weapon used.

The studies referred to by these articles are a very good example of it. What do you suppose the budget on JIEDDO is? They're trying to evolve counter-measures, but they're again losing economically... The advancement of IEDs occurred through experimentation with progressing results - each experiment costing much, much less than the testing and simulations being done...)

*Most of this I learned from The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich...
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[Artifice Orisit]

In Vietnam there was a distinct difference in the number of booby-trap related casualties between US and Australian troops (after accounting for the difference in troop numbers) which was heavily investigated; it turned out the US troops were going in gung-ho on existing trails and roads while the less keen Australian troops took great care to avoid taking obvious trails at all costs.

The US boot camp is one of the worlds most developed series of psychological discipline exercises and as such is an excellent means of creating aggressive ground troops who barely even know how to retreat; simply put they're taught not to think, just do.

On the battlefield, intuition is the art of guessing what the enemy is thinking, and well the terms "grunt" and "jarhead" are all proudly owned by the US marines; in fact the movie called Jarhead explored this aggressive mentality quite well, with the sniper who basically had a mental breakdown when denied permission to shoot somebody in his sights.

 

[Veritas]

We deploy the robots to take out IED's, however they are only sent out there after the IED or potential IED is detected by the soldiers or Marines who have discovered it, and the EOD team is called in. Regarding the training, it has progressed to where they are giving us an overview of every common type of IED that has been created over the last few years, the various methods of deploying them, and we go on several exercises to learn how to spot them. Observation is key, and the grunts, who are generally the ones out there first, are very proficient with their observation skills, as 'attention to detail' is harped and engraved in your brain since boot camp. They also train and practice during their off time with the same scenarios that are being found overseas. As for the first article, it will be a very interesting find when the more information of those studies come out. People who are gifted with the overpowering ability to notice detail of a physical nature always intrigue me.

 

[Cogwulf]

This is interesting, I wonder if they've considering it being linked to the Se function.

For me, through years of playing computer games, especially online FPS games, I've developed a very strong Se shadow function. For example, if a few pixels of a certain colour move in the corner of the screen, I notice it almost instantly and know it's an enemy. Though unfortunately, even tiny distractions switch off that function and usually get me killed

 

[RubberDucky451]

I love this quote from the 2nd article, it made me chuckle.

"Obviously we can't measure 'spidey sense"

Haha

 

[Muadib]

Intuition can be a powerful thing. Even in training I have managed to just not go down a road because of nothing more than "Ive got a bad feeling about this, Sir." Turns out we were going to get ambushed by the enemy force 4/5 times