Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz
Director
Joint Improvised Explosive Device
Defeat Organization
Metz was commissioned as an infantry officer following his graduation from the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in 1971. He served in a series of positions of increased responsibility throughout a distinguished career as a leader and trainer of soldiers from Europe, to Korea, Iraq and the United States. From his start as a platoon leader in the 1st Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Mainz, Germany, General Metz has commanded at every level from a rifle company up to III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas. Prior to becoming the director, he served as the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command’s deputy commanding general and chief of staff.
Metz has been a key player in laying the groundwork for the Army’s ongoing transformation as the director of the 4th Infantry Division’s experimental force 1995–1997, then as the assistant division commander for the same command the following year. From 1998–2001, he served in two key billets for prioritizing and allocating resources for our armed forces as a deputy and vice director in the Joint Staff Force Structure, Resources and Assessment Directorate, J-8.
He has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University and taught the subject at West Point and also holds a Professional Engineer’s License for the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is a graduate of the Army’s Command and General Staff and War Colleges, is an expert infantryman, and wears the Ranger Tab and senior parachutist wings. His awards include Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), Legion of Merit (with three Oak Leaf Clusters), Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), and Army Commendation Medal (with three Oak Leaf Clusters).
Q: Could we start with an overview of the Joint IED Defeat Organization purpose and mission?
A: The Joint IED Defeat Organization was formed out of an Army task force in April 2004 while I was a corps commander in Iraq. General Cody had the wisdom to see the IED coming as a weapon system the enemy was going to use, and later that summer [then] Deputy Secretary [Paul] Wolfowitz pulled it up to the joint level. About three years ago, Deputy Secretary [Gordon] England asked retired [General] Montgomery Meigs to lead it, and it became a joint organization working for the deputy secretary.
During that period, the violence associated with IEDs continued to grow. What the task force was doing—either in the Army, the joint effort and then with the formation of the Joint IED Defeat Organization— was not unlike trying to build an airplane while flying it at the same time. This was an urgent need because of the continued upward climb of fatalities and casualties due to the IED. The threat was ongoing; at the same time we were building the organization.
Basically the DoD mission statement tells us to lead, advocate and focus all of DoD’s counter-IED efforts. We support all of the COCOM commanders and their joint task forces. But the key part of the mission statement that many people overlook is we are to defeat the IED as a strategic weapon of choice for the enemy. I am very careful to emphasize the point that the IED is a weapon that cannot beat us tactically—the only way it can beat us is strategically, and that is why we were put into place.
How I like to paint the picture is to understand that mankind has been ambushing mankind for a long time. In 1277, a Chinese emperor was guarding his castle by filling the moat with gunpowder and lured the enemy to climb the walls and blew them up at the time of his choosing. That weapon system—that lethal ambush—is not going to be removed from the battlefield, but the systemic use of the IED to support strategic purposes can be.
The way you do that is train the force, attack the network and defeat the device because if it doesn’t cause a casualty—you may lose some equipment—but without that casualty the enemy loses the strategic value. Once you start working left of boom by attacking the network, that’s when you really start making a difference. At that point you start going on the offense.
It’s a lot more complicated mission than most people initially thought. Some thought we could use our great technologies, point a ray gun at an IED and the problem is solved. Well, it’s not that easy—while we would love to have that ray gun—but in the meantime, we will continue to work to influence the blasting cap, which is a pretty common component in most IEDs. The silver bullet just hasn’t come around yet, so we are attacking by protecting the soldiers, defeating the device, and working left of boom to attack the networks. When you can work even farther left of boom is when you can talk about training the force to use all of the kit we have given them and to be able to attack the networks.
Q: What can you tell me about the actual structure of the organization itself?
A: I have changed the structure of the organization over the past year to be very similar to any joint headquarters that has a J-1 for personnel, a J-2 for intelligence, a J-3 for operations, etc. We do have a couple of special offices. One is the Technical Requirements Integration Division that really is responsible for bringing in all of the great ideas filtering through them and championing those that we think have the most potential. I always stress the word potential because if this is our measurement of success: something comes in the front door, it must go out the back door; then I don’t think we are looking at all of the available options. We have to accept the risk that some of those good ideas are going to fail and that it’s acceptable to invest appropriate levels of funding in an initiative that may fail.
By doing so you have learned from that process and go back and tell the proponent of that solution why it failed opening up the option of making adjustments to improve; it can be brought back to us for re-evaluation.
Because we eventually transition those initiatives to the services, we need some acquisition oversight so that we have an office [Acquisition Oversight Division] that works those issues. For action arms, we have field teams in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Counter-IED Operations Integration Center that helps us monitor a common operating picture for operations and intelligence in the IED arena. We are beginning to form for that center, which is focused on helping the warfighter, a duplicate center specifically to train the force to use this asset.
The one thing that is still maturing is our Competitive Strategies Group, which is not unlike a red team effort, to help us look at ourselves through the enemy’s eyes both in a social and technical way. In addition, we think we need to look at ourselves in the total environment. An example of this would be the cell phone systems in developing countries. These systems will not develop as ours did by going from copper wires to every home to picking up the phone and talking to an operator who would dial the number, to direct dialing, to touch tones, to now with digital cell phones. Developing countries are going to jump to the highest level system they can. This is their environment and is independent of the enemy, but the enemy will use it in every way they can.
Q: And your acquisition process?
A: Acquisition within the DoD is heavily regulated on the combat development side by the Joint Capabilities Integration Development System, or JCIDS process. It is a very thorough system that works and develops the requirements and criteria for future defense programs. There is also a whole 5000-series regulation that manages the acquisition of the department.
We really are set up to bypass this. Congress has given us what we call “three-year uncolored money” for us to spend on everything from basically fundamental science and technology all the way to procurement. This ability is why we need this Acquisition Oversight Division because we are in the acquisition business with authorities that are very broad within the department. To be prudent with the taxpayers’ money, I need to make sure I have a staff that is tracking things very closely.
We work very hard to make sure that we don’t drag in the negative attributes of the bureaucracy into the process so that it becomes just like the one we are working to avoid. Our enemy does not respect our budget cycle; they do not respect our acquisition process. They are moving out at their own speed and are very agile, nimble and ruthless, so we need to have a system that is more agile and more nimble.
Q: Tell me about the budget you are working on now and what you expect in the FY10 budget?
A: When the Joint IED Defeat Organization was formed, Congress established a joint IED defeat fund that came out of the supplemental and gave us that “three-year uncolored money” we just talked about. It allowed three years to spend it, which gave you the flexibility across the fiscal years, and it was not boxed into a particular, limited spending requirement.
To date we have been funded through the supplemental funds. Although the president’s budget has not been submitted yet, we think that inside that budget we will have a baseline funding across the fiveyear defense plan that will give us substantial base dollars that will let us do our enduring staff functions, and we expect that we will be rounded out with supplemental dollars.
As much as we need to move away from supplementals, I go back to our agile enemy, in that we have no idea what they are going to do 18 months from now. Those 18 months are within our budget cycle, and so if we want to be able to react to an enemy, I need to be able to move and have the funding do so. So far Congress has recognized that there needs to be a fund that will be for those joint urgent operational needs from the warfighter.
While we may not know exactly what the future operational needs may be, we can take what has come in, what we have learned and what the costs have been and extrapolate that out looking ahead. This will offer us an estimate of what our costs may be for 18–24 months. In summary, we will continue to use supplemental dollars and are working hard to be represented in the president’s budget with base funding because we do need that foundation upon which to build.
Q: Let’s talk about success and measuring success. How does JIEDDO as an organization measure success and put it in terms of cost-benefit? What metrics do you use to do that?
A: The baseline metric is loss of life and limb. Without the loss of life and limb, the enemy cannot achieve its strategic purpose for the IED. Having said that, for example, when more forces go into Afghanistan, I anticipate the loss of life to IEDs will go up. If you use that as a pure measurement, it would appear that we are going in the wrong direction, when in reality we are making great progress against the IED. So while an important metric, it is not the only metric. Another metric would be, for example, when I was a corps commander in Iraq. Every IED created a casualty in about a one-forone ratio. We have driven that ratio now to over nine IEDs for one casualty—and in some months [it] peaks well beyond that. So another way to look at it is that it is costing the enemy a lot more to create his strategic purpose.
We have never really ever gone down the route of measuring equipment lost because we are a nation that respects the value of life, and therefore [life] is the larger measurement.
Where it becomes very, very difficult in our business is that if I increase the commanders’ understanding of the battlefield, the enemy and the environment, I know from my experience in uniform that that is an advantage, but how do you measure that? How do you measure a more alert commander, a more alert combat unit to what is going on around them? This is really hard to measure, but I am absolutely convinced that by training them better to find the IED, to avoid the IED and to defuse the IED, we are defeating the enemy use of the IED. We are struggling, to a degree, to find the right metrics, and we are getting better at it. Some of the measurements could take you down a less logical pattern than you would want to go. We have to be careful in the metrics of a strategic purpose that is related to life and limb.
So far we have been in counter-countermeasure battle with the enemy. My real stretch goal is to get a step ahead in what—in gunnery terms—we want to shoot ahead of the target instead of behind.
Q: Going back to funding, does JIEDDO actually fund and manage programs within itself, fund service-managed programs or a combination of both?
A: It is really a combination. There will be some programs that will be very distinctly inside a program executive office in a service, and we will fund it. They will be able to use our funds and take the program to the next level or to move it closer to the warfighter as a capability. In other cases, we will totally manage a program. It will be so unique that we think we need to husband it.
There is a wide array of how each initiative may be managed so we look at each individually and take whatever path is, ultimately, in the best interest of the warfighter.
There are some great news stories of how a program was already in place. We were able to add funds to it to get it moving faster or more efficiently to a way to solve an IED problem. In some cases the program may not have initially been designed to particularly solve an IED problem, but we saw a way to adapt that capability to help meet a need we had.
That is the true goodness of this organization; we cut across the spectrum and are not captured in small channels.
Q: Can you talk about how many programs you manage and run?
A: On any given day we have in the neighborhood of 30–40 programs that would fall within the science and technology domain. There are probably another 300 programs that are maturing and in some cases have been taken into theater, and we are doing operational assessments there. This in itself is a very unique way of doing business. We don’t do it without safety in mind, but we do take a pretty raw system and get it out there to the warfighter, and their input has been instrumental in maturing some of these systems very quickly in the real-world environment.
If in the field the prototypes show promise, we can buy 10 more prototypes for more evaluations, and if we still have a winner it can move into a program for one of the services.
Q: Any success stories that stand out?
A: The ground-penetrating radar in Afghanistan is a perfect example of this. With all of the rural terrain, the route clearance units have to cover a large area, and the enemy has just too many opportunities to put out the IEDs.
It is a very tough physics problem to have radar that can look into the ground that can process through the false positives and give reasonable results. Ground-penetrating radar seems to have met the needs of the soldiers in the fight, and they are talking about it being a real game changer. We have now tested the system so it can be used safely, and the warfighter has asked for a lot of the radars to be delivered. So this is a great illustration of us developing something, getting it to theater, testing it in theater, and testing it successfully.
In Iraq, an example would be the entire series of jammers that we have put out there. When I was in Iraq, we were less than a third of what the peak was going to be in ‘06 and ’07; nevertheless, almost everything was initiated or armed by a radio-controlled device. With the ever-increasing sophistication, power and capabilities of our jammers, we pushed the enemy almost completely off the use of that as an option.
Now that has a good news and bad news piece to it. What the enemy could have done was move the technology up the complexity scale and made something more sophisticated—which I think we would have welcomed as we could have chased him up that scale. In reality, what he did was go down the sophistication ladder and went to command wire or pressure plates. Those are still tough physics problems. If you think about it, what you really want to be doing is moving and be able to detect something in enough time to react. The jammers have freed up our efforts in the radio-controlled domain.
Q: The C-IED Technology Master Plan was completed in 2007 and is still a classified document. Do you consider that document a completed piece or more a marker and work in progress?
A: The entire organization has to be a living, learning organization. I want very little to be set in stone because the world we live in today has very little set in stone. Our enemy is certainly enjoying an environment that is free flowing. When you can move information around the world in a second and share it with unbelievable number of others you can’t set very much in stone.
That document is constantly being updated. We are learning so much so quickly that keeping up with things on the science and technology end of things is a challenge. For example, DARPA is out there in the realm of what could be and they prove whether concepts can work, and then they move on to the next project. This is what their mission is so it’s not meant as criticism, but they are not necessarily creating something close in for the warfighter. DARPA is giving the service good ideas and suggests a path forward to conquer the technology.
I want our organization to be in the trade space that we are accountable for something. We are either accountable to the joint urgent operational needs of the warfighter to actually solve their issues, or we have done enough discovery learning to know how we can help them. We need to be able to push solutions to the warfighter— both materiel and non-materiel initiatives.
Q: Based on the C-IED Master Plan, can you give us an idea of the most important things you are looking for over the next 12 months?
A: I first would go back to the jammers. We were very successful and will continue to evolve those systems in case the enemy wants to go back to using any signals on the electromagnetic spectrum. So we will keep working this.
As he goes to other arming and initiation means, we will take on those challenges—like the command wire. We have a number of very promising programs that will allow us to see that command wire.
Ground-penetrating radar to see underbelly [IED] is another. We are working very hard to figure out the signature that an explosively formed projectile would have. Basically an EFP has a copper disc, generally in a cylinder, generally deployed in an array of two or three in a group; all of this tells me that there has to be some kind of a recognizable signature. Whether you need radar or something seismic I don’t know, but the EFP is unique in its design so it has to be unique in its signature.
On that note, we have a very rapidly developing intellectual and material signatures group within JIEDDO. They do great work either in finding those signatures that radar would return or a unique acoustic signature or a unique refraction from lightwave forms, or one of several other detectable and identifiable signature options. We are finding that one sensor will give you too many false positives, but if you can put several sensors against a particular signature, you can determine the algorithms to dampen out the false positives, and then you can get a very high probability of seeing what you are looking for. Now the warfighter can either find or avoid the IED based on the immediate mission and need.
There is exciting stuff going on all the time around this place.
Q: For your groups like the signatures groups, do you or they dictate out to industry what types of solutions they are looking for, and do you look for industry to independently come up with solution options and present those to you?
A: We absolutely do both. We put out broad agency announcements on subjects that we are concerned with and invite industry to come help us with their solutions.
If industry, in their own research and development, has found something, our doors are wide open for them to bring it to us. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s one of the big defense suppliers—we are also open to good ideas from a mom-and-pop shop or backyard garage. We are open to any and everyone that can bring us a potential solution. We will measure it on its merits and do the very best we can to get it to the warfighter.
Q: How do you reach out to industry?
A: We hold two outreach conferences every year. We work really hard to invite anyone who is interested in solving the counter-IED problem. We hold the conferences in different parts of the country to encourage companies from different regions to come and see us.
We spend some time at each conference explaining ourselves and then much of the conference listening to what industry has to say. The conferences have proven very beneficial.
In some cases we have a number of return visitors with new ideas, and we always see new people with their new ideas as well. We want to continue to cast the net as wide as possible.
Q: Are the IED threats that you see Iraq the same or similar to the IED types being encountered in Afghanistan? Do you see common threads in the design and application of the IEDs between the two countries?
A: We don’t see that tight of connection between the two theaters. It’s not to say that there is not information being traded and similarities that do occur.
You can really characterize Afghanistan—because the terrain and it being relatively rural—with underbelly devices whether in culverts or under unprepared road surfaces. We also see the enemy, because they are a little poorer and more judicious with their equipment, they will actually move an IED if it is not activated. They might lay one, and if the ambush doesn’t happen they will move it somewhere else.
In Iraq with a much larger, better financed insurgency you see more variety. The EFP for example is used more and is a cause of greater concern because while it represents perhaps only 5 percent of the IEDs, they cause about 35 to 40 percent of the casualties. It is a lethal weapon, which we don’t see often in Afghanistan. Because of the infrastructure in Iraq the threats are not limited to underbelly attacks but could come from the side or overhead.
It’s not to say that there is not any cross-talk, but so far they haven’t needed to do so to develop their own systems.
Q: What are the plans to move the current Joint IED Defeat Organization from its current structure to a permanent organization?
A: I sit here thinking very confidently that we are a permanent organization within the Department of Defense, and although the president’s budget has not gone through OMB [Office of Management and Budget] to Congress, I think that when it does, we will be in there and it will ask Congress for baseline dollars.
In earlier budgets [2008 and 2009] we had a little money in a base, and Congress made a decision to not fund it there but to give all of our money in the supplemental. I think that will change this go around. The leadership of the last administration had shared among the DoD that we are a permanent organization, and it will be up to the current administration in the future. I can make a very strong argument that the nation’s fighting force will fight an enemy that will continue to try and use the IED as a strategic weapon against us. I also believe that if we have organizations like the Missile Defense Agency, which is important in countering a major strategic threat, or the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is focused on keeping weapons of mass destruction from going off, then we need JIEDDO because we are also countering a weapon that can affect our nation.
Fighting the threat abroad is the right way to fight it and learn all we can about it. This will be part of the deterrent from keeping it away from the homeland.
While there are scenarios that could take us in different directions, I think the dominant road is a permanent organization to fight in what many of us consider an era of persistent conflict in which asymmetric weapons will be used. We need to keep this organization focused on solving and beating the enemy in their use of it as a strategic weapon. Open source data tell us that outside of Afghanistan and Iraq anywhere from 300–400 IEDs go off a month. I like to keep a six-month running average, which right now is running at about 350 for terrorist purposes worldwide. I think that using classified sources, that number would go higher.
As we become the nexus of information on the IED we will be more and more help to our friends, allies and coalition partners—and for our own homeland defense for that matter.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: I often talk about three special sauces of the Joint IED Defeat Organization. One of which is clearly the faith and trust that Congress gives us with the funding provided to date. Another is, by virtue of the directive the department has given us, and I work directly for the deputy secretary of defense, that we have an urgent mission that must be accomplished. We have a solutions network that not only permeates the DoD but also academia and industry. We have a synergy about us that is very special.
The third sauce is that the people that come to work for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, in my opinion, are very passionate about solving the problem and share a sense of urgency about getting that done.
The burden on me is to go across the river and convince Congress to continue to trust us with the money. To continue that every part of the department—the intelligence agencies, and the services—understand that we are the enabler. We are not trying to do their work or compete with them, I am trying to enable the warfighter via their help to defeat the IED. As for our industry partners, I would like them to step back and think of how the enemy is thinking. Many companies have their own red team efforts and can use that opportunity to look at how they would solve the problems that we face. One that came to mind the other day is a Formula 1 race car driver can hit the stadium wall at 200 miles per hour, the car comes completely apart with flames and fire everywhere, and somehow the driver climbs out of what’s left. While you can’t apply everything there directly to a military vehicle, the thought that we need to protect the whole military vehicle is maybe the wrong approach. Taking the Formula 1 thought that we really only need to be protecting the driver and crew.
Industry can be helpful in trying to find innovative solutions to the counter-IED problems we face. ♦