ISSN 2050-6732 (Print) ISSN 2050-6740 (Online)
Counter-IED Report Spring/Summer 2020
THE RATIONALE FOR SMART LANDMINES SMART IED THREAT MITIGATION TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP (SMiTMiTR) CONDUCTING IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE DISPOSAL IN HUMANITARIAN ENVIRONMENTS: DISPELLING THE MYTHS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING FOR EFFICIENT MINEFIELD CLEARANCE “BROTHERHOOD OF DISEASES”: THREAT NETWORKS’ DYNAMICS DURING COVID-19 CRISIS IMPROVING ROBOT DESIGN SECURING LARGE CONGREGATIONS AGAINST IED ATTACKS – THE CHALLENGES THE PERFECT STORM: UNMANNED IED THREAT IN THE MARITIME ENVIRONMENT
Behind every successful mission, there’s a TALONŽ Since 2000, TALON robots have completed more than 80,000 counter-IED missions. Now on its fifth generation, TALON 5 is the first Interoperability Profile (IOP) fielded robotic system that has successfully gone through Army Test and Evaluation Command testing. QinetiQ-NA.com/TALON Robots@QinetiQ-NA.com
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ISSN 2050-6732 (Print) ISSN 2050-6740 (Online)
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CONTENTS
CONTENTS
IFC QINETIQ NORTH AMERICA 4 - 5 GARRETT METAL DETECTORS 7
ICOR TECHNOLOGY
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NOVO DIGITAL RADIOGRAPHY
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L3HARRIS
12 BROKK 13 FOREWORD By Rob Hyde-Bales, Consulting Editor, Counter-IED Report 16
DYNITEC GMBH
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THE RATIONALE FOR SMART LANDMINES By Rob Hyde-Bales, Consulting Editor, Counter-IED Report
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SMART IED THREAT MITIGATION TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP (SMITMITR) –
By Ying Wing Wong, intern with the Communications team, United Nations Mine Action Service
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MILIPOL QATAR 2020
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COUNTER TERROR EXPO 2020 A DYNAMIC INFORMATION EXCHANGE PLATFORM ON MITIGATING THE THREATS OF IEDs FOR THE UNITED NATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS
COUNTER-IED REPORT, Spring/Summer 2020
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
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MSPO – 28th INTERNATIONAL DEFENCE INDUSTRY EXHIBITION
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CONDUCTING IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE DISPOSAL IN HUMANITARIAN ENVIRONMENTS: DISPELLING THE MYTHS By Matt Wilson MSc MIExpE, Head of Operations for the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action (FSD)
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FUTURE FORCES FORUM 2020
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NATO EOD DEMONSTRATIONS & TRIALS 2020
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“BROTHERHOOD OF DISEASES”: THREAT NETWORKS’ DYNAMICS DURING COVID-19 CRISIS By Lieutenant Colonel Jose M Rufas, Chief of Attack the Networks Branch, C-IED Centre of Excellence
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING FOR EFFICIENT MINEFIELD CLEARANCE By Alexander Bruckbauer and Vic Grout, Wrexham Glyndŵr University
58 MILITARY ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS 2020 59
IMPROVING ROBOT DESIGN By Rafael Jiménez Sánchez, Senior EOD Advisor at aunav, by everis ADS
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POLSECURE – INTERNATIONAL POLICE & SECURITY EXPO 2020
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COUNTER-IED REPORT, Spring/Summer 2020
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
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SECURING LARGE CONGREGATIONS AGAINST IED ATTACKS – THE CHALLENGES By Colonel H R Naidu Gade - Indian Army Veteran
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BEHAVIOURAL ANALYSIS 2020
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ISLAMIC STATE IEDs IN THE KABARDINO-BALKARIA AREA OF RUSSIA By Chief Superintendent (ret.) Michael Cardash, Terrogence Senior CIED Analyst / Author of Mobius reports
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FUTURE ARMOURED VEHICLES SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
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INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EXPO 2020
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DRONES AS IEDs: THE OMNIPOTENT AERIAL THREAT By Ashwani Gupta
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EDEX – EGYPT DEFENCE EXPO 2020
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THE PERFECT STORM: UNMANNED IED THREAT IN THE MARITIME ENVIRONMENT By Lieutenant Colonel Jose M Rufas, Chief of Attack the Networks Branch, C-IED Centre of Excellence
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CALL FOR PAPERS - COUNTER-IED REPORT
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FOREWORD
FOREWORD By Rob Hyde-Bales, Consulting Editor, Counter-IED Report
T
he most significant shock to the global system since the Second World War has not been the result of war or terrorism, but rather a virus – specifically the new Coronavirus, Covid-19. Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that can cause disease in animals and some of them can infect human beings – so-called zoonotic diseases. Covid-19 is closely related to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – SARS – which swept around the globe in 2002 and 2003 infecting some 8000 people and resulting in some 800 deaths. A subsequent coronavirus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – MERS – originated in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and to date has resulted in some 900 deaths. It is assessed that these three viruses originated in bats that are used for human consumption. Of note the West African Ebola virus, whilst not a coronavirus, in 2014 killed more than 11,000 people and originated in fruit bats. It is believed that Covid-19 emerged in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market which is a wildlife and seafood market in the industrial city of Wuhan in Hubei Province in Eastern China with a population of over 11 million inhabitants. Such markets encourage the growth of viruses as the employees handle both seafood and wildlife that is slaughtered on the premises for subsequent human consumption. What began as an epidemic in December 2019 limited to China and notified by the Chinese to the World Health Organisation on 31 December as a “pneumonia”, rapidly transformed into a global pandemic that has
now been detected in more than 200 countries. It is virulently infectious – attacking primarily the lungs – and its transmission can be airborne or by contact with infected surfaces. The World Health Organisation officially declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on 11 March. To date the worst affected countries have been the United States, Italy, France, Spain, and the UK and by mid-May there had been more than 4.4 million global cases resulting in more than 300,000 deaths. In addition to this cataclysmic shock to the global health system, the effect on the global economy has been equally devastating with a real risk of an ensuing global recession and massive unemployment around the world. With few exceptions countries, including those with advanced healthcare systems were woefully unprepared for this pandemic. This was despite a warning in 2015 in the aftermath of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa from the US philanthropist and champion of global healthcare, Bill Gates, that the world was far from ready to face a future pandemic. He accompanied his warning by recommending what needed to be done to improve preparedness. Sadly, his warning was not acted on by most of the world. In 2017 he co-founded the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Elsewhere, the two main military conflicts that involve the West continue to be in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US and thus its other coalition partners are seeking an exit strategy from both these countries. counteriedreport.com
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FOREWORD
In Afghanistan the US seems to have brokered a fragile peace deal with the Taliban, but critically this agreement was reached in the absence of the Afghan government and armed violence continues. In Iraq, Iranian backed militias continue to cause problems for both the Iraqi Government and resident US forces. In both these conflicts the IED continues as a major cause of both military and civilian fatalities. As this year will witness the next US Presidential Election there is real pressure from Washington to end US military participation in these wars. In a highly informative article Ying Wing Wong of the United Nations Mine Action Service outlines a most promising initiative in the search to counter the omnipresent existential threat of IEDs, which is the SMART IED Threat Mitigation Technology Roadmap. Against the horrific continuing global death toll caused by IEDs, UNMAS is developing a whole-of-system approach to IED threat information sharing and the identification of effective responses to IEDs. This innovative interactive platform categorises IED threats and identifies technologies that may assist in threat mitigation in close collaboration with Member States, UN entities, NGOs, research institutes and industry by identifying existing technologies and assisting with the development of future technologies. The key to this Roadmap is shared knowledge, cross-referenced data and coordinated actions among stakeholders. There are three main goals: increased safety when working in an IED threat environment; maximising the synergy between stakeholders’ efforts, and finally solving current and long running issues of sector wide IED Threat Mitigation Knowledge and Information Management. Effective information sharing among all interested parties is the holy grail of successful IED threat mitigation and this project offers real hope to achieve this aspiration. In a wide ranging and insightful article Matt Wilson does much to dispel myths and confusion surrounding IED Disposal (IEDD) in Humanitarian Environments. He is very well placed to do this, having served as an ATO in the British Army and now in the highly respected Swiss Foundation for Mine Action. From the 1970s and the ever-increasing use of IEDs by 14 COUNTER-IED REPORT, Spring/Summer 2020
insurgents, terrorists and criminals, the responsibility for Counter-IED and IEDD was very much with the military. Indeed, dealing with IEDs during the conflict in Northern Ireland during the last three decades of the last century put the British Army in the forefront of these efforts until 2015. Since then the withdrawal of NATO combat ground forces from Afghanistan and Iraq has meant that this responsibility has moved to a combination of national forces, often poorly trained and equipped, and the humanitarian community of mine action NGOs, commercial contractors and the UN. The article looks at the important distinction in what these organisations are doing in the field of IEDD, under what conditions and authority, to what standards and critically, the inherent potential pitfalls and grey areas. He explains the important differences between military and humanitarian IEDD operations. Humanitarian operations should only take place in a permissive environment – in the absence of insurgents or “enemy”. He examines the criticality of agreed definitions – highlighting the lack of an agreed definition of what constitutes an IED. He concludes by explaining the real – life challenges on the ground faced by those undertaking IEDD. In their article Alexander Bruckbauer and Vic Grout of Wrexham Glyndŵr University describe a new research project designed to explore the potential of machine learning to create a prediction model to identify the location of buried landmines based on the locations of those already found. A key element of the project is that research has shown that it is difficult for both humans and machines to achieve true randomness. The project will examine the possibility of discovering hidden patterns or sequences within buried landmine locations that could suggest where to search for additional landmines. The proposed project will support and not replace existing technology, hopefully to direct mine clearing resources more effectively. Machine learning is a technique that feeds data into an algorithm that tries to identify structures or patterns within the data and thus form a model. The most commonly known model is a probability sequence prediction used in smart phones to predict the next word to be typed. Whilst acknowledging the
FOREWORD
challenges of predicting landmine locations in this way, the authors are confident that even if this project does not initially yield the desired results, they will gain valuable insights to improve the chances of success in future projects. In his article Michael Cardash of Terrogence provides a uniquely interesting insight into the presence of Islamic State (IS) IEDs in the KabardinoBalkaria area of Russia in the North Caucasus. On 18 September 2019 Russian Special Forces raided a two-man IS cell in Chegem, in this region and discovered a fully assembled fragmentation Radio Controlled IED (RCIED) cased in a plastic bucket with metal nail fragmentation set in a white adhesive substance forming the top of the device. This and other IEDs recently seized in the area indicate the presence of IS in the territory of the Russian Federation. The use of buckets by IS as IED containers has been previously documented by Terrogence. The 2019 RCIED was equipped with a Motorola radio transceiver. Radio transceivers are widely used by islamist jihadists to initiate IEDs in the Caucasus region. The configuration of this and other IEDs found in the North Caucasus closely resembled those of IEDs documented in previous operations against IS in both Syria and Iraq. This indicates a specific transfer of knowledge that leads Terrogence to estimate that a professional IED maker with experience in Syria or Iraq moved to join IS in the North Caucasus. Previously this region was characterised by jihadist terrorist activity originating from separatists, mainly Chechen, until 2012-2103. Russian security operations curtailed this activity and more recently the emergence of IS activity can be identified both by the arrests by security forces and the characteristics of recently documented IEDs. Retired Colonel Rafael Jiménez Sánchez, EOD advisor for aunav robots of everis Aerospace Defence and Security, in a thought-provoking article examines some of the challenges and hazards that face us in an ever changing society and how we might best cope with such challenges. He opines that innovation and IT transformation combined with adaptability and resilience can do much to assist in the avoidance of repeating previous mistakes. He states that the
conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the current global terrorist threat and pandemic are clear examples of our limitations to deal with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – so called VUCA environments. He describes the example of the design of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) utilising innovation, IT transformation, adaptation and resilience and the development of Problem Based Learning (PBL). Such vehicles are critical to avoid the proximity of humans in dealing with various life-threatening hazards. PBL he states is key to identifying “the right problem”, then seeking to address this problem and finally assessing the results of the process. He illustrates ten problem areas to be examined in the development of the UGV. He concludes by pointing out that the design of a “perfect UGV” is an unrealistic aspiration. However, by adhering to fundamentals and using the PBL approach, a solution is possible by focusing on the interaction with the user and the adaptation of what is already proven to work. Above all, do not be afraid of failure but learn from it. ■
Rob Hyde-Bales biography During his career in the UK Royal Engineers, Rob Hyde-Bales was responsible for landmine clearance in Libya and, more latterly, Afghanistan in the running of the first United Nations humanitarian landmine clearance training programme – Operation Salam. The programme trained Afghan male refugees in landmine clearance techniques, and Afghan women and children in mine awareness and avoidance training. More recently he set up the Caribbean Search Centre in Kingston, Jamaica. The Centre is designed to train security forces across the Caribbean in modern search techniques. After retiring from the army he joined Cranfield University at Shrivenham, near Oxford, and undertook a research project on behalf of the UK Ministry of Defence that examined ways to improve the sharing of IED threat information between the military and civilian organisations in hazardous areas. counteriedreport.com
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