"... an ... important story has been quietly unfolding: the U.S. loss of the pivotal war of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to the Taliban... the U.S. troop surge could not reverse the very steep increase in IED attacks and attendant casualties that the Taliban began in 2009... the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO)... spent more than 18 billion dollars on high-tech solutions aimed at detecting IEDs before they went off... (but) the Taliban simply produced and planted even larger numbers of bombs to continue to increase the pressure of the IED war...
"The counterinsurgency strategy devised by Gen. David Petraeus... pushed thousands of U.S. troops out of their armoured vehicles into (dismounted) patrols on foot in order to establish relationships with the local population... The main effect of the strategy, however, was a major jump in the number of “catastrophic” injuries to U.S. troops from IEDs...
"A June 2011 Army task force report described a new type of battle injury – “Dismount Complex Blast Injury”– defined as a combination of “traumatic amputation of at least one leg, a minimum of severe injury to another extremity, and pelvic, abdominal, or urogenital wounding”... the number of triple limb amputations in 2010 alone had been twice the total in the previous eight years of war..."
