Abstract:

My second tour of duty in the Global War on Terror took me, an Army reservist, from my research and teaching at Harvard to the mountainous valleys of eastern Afghanistan. My job on this tour, working for the Center for Army Lessons Learned, was to try to understand how we were trying to rid the battlefield of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which were causing most of the Coalition casualties. A field-grade officer with no troops under my command, I roamed my area of operation attached to tactical units to collect data. One such group was Route Clearance Patrol 13 (RCP13), an amalgam of combat engineers, explosive specialists, and specialized teams, clearing roads of IEDs (Figure 1). On these missions, I sat strapped into its Buffalo, a motorized beast whose extraordinary size and robotic arm capabilities were designed to directly engage the explosive devices in lieu of dispatching someone to check it out themselves.