Defeating IEDs/EFPs: Possibilities Part One

I've got a little lull in the workload at the moment (only working partial weekends) so I, though it would be a good time to start following up on a previous post concerning the military concept Persistence, how Persistence relates to IEDs/EFPs, and more specifically what can be done to attenuate the placement and detonation of these 'weapons that wait'.

In this post, I present the general processes an enemy could use to employ what has to be their current weapon of choice. The processes shown are not designed to be all inclusive: They are general enough to capture all the relevant concepts, but are also specific enough to allow me to efficiently propose how and why the enemy's behaviors can be shaped and IED/EFP deployment and effectiveness attenuated (no threat can be completely eliminated).

First, the obvious:

The employment of Weapons That Wait (from this point forward they will be referred to as WTW) I have broken down into two sub-processes: 'Acquisition' and 'Employment'. There were a couple of other ways I could have broken things down, but these will serve my greater purpose. If the enemy does not have a weapon or weapons in hand, they have to first get their hands on it/them.

Now for the less obvious. I have chosen (there are other ways) to break the acquisition process down as follows:

The enemy, once they have a weapon in hand, must complete the Employment process. That process I have chosen to break down as in the flowchart below. (Note: sub-processes of both the Acquisition and Deployment processes can be conducted concurrently but are, obviously, completed sequentially.)

We will return to these processes several times in future posts, but I am planning to next bound the concept of 'Persistence' sufficiently such that when we do return to these processes, we will only be dealing with Persistence as it relates to stopping these WTW.