Photo: Staff Sgt. Jason Robertson/DOD Photo

HELP IS ON THE WAY: The Pentagon plans to send thousands of mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles to Iraq in the coming year. But MRAP supply is lagging far behind demand.

Kenney also wonders how much a budding guerrilla can learn by simply reading. “Building bombs with your bare hands is still the best way to learn how to build bombs,” he says. “Shooting a firearm over and over is the best way to become a sharpshooter. These are skills that cannot really be learned from recipes that you download through the Internet.… The reason Iraq has proven to be such a rich learning environment for insurgents has more to do with practical, on-the-ground opportunities for learning that the fighting provides.”

Nevertheless, he agrees with Jackson that terrorist groups are proving to be fast learners. They're able to change their activities in response to practical experience and technical information, store this knowledge in practices and procedures, and select and retain routines that produce satisfactory results. As they gain experience, their learning cycles will only continue to shorten.

All the bomb-building advice in the world would be meaningless, of course, if the materials to build those bombs weren't also easy to come by. But they are, and terrorist groups are proving adept at using commercial, off-the-shelf technology to create effective and low-cost weapons systems.

A good example is last year's plot to smuggle common chemicals on board commercial flights using drink containers. The chemicals would then be mixed together to form explosives, which if detonated by a small charge from, say, a few modified AA batteries, could be powerful enough to bring down the aircraft.

Here again, information technology plays a crucial role. Fast and efficient worldwide distribution channels set up by the likes of Wal-Mart and Federal Express greatly simplify the acquisition of requisite components. Free from the administrative burdens of maintaining their own infrastructure, terrorist groups can spend the majority of their time on how best to achieve their collective vision.

The conflict in Iraq has become a test bed for open-source war, and the insurgents' weapon of choice is the IED. Since the beginning of the war, insurgents have rapidly improved their ability to create, deploy, and detonate IEDs. They've moved from simple makeshift explosives—old artillery shells or fertilizer—to shaped charges that can penetrate heavy armor plate and to buried explosives that can destroy a 61‑metric-ton Abrams tank. In one favored mode of attack, insurgents detonate an IED beneath a military convoy vehicle, then follow up with a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and rifle fire.

Even as coalition troops have become proficient at identifying roadside bombs, insurgents have shifted to using IEDs to booby-trap houses. “Nothing they're doing is going to win any prizes from the Department of Defense for high tech, but the stuff is deadly,” says Lawrence Husick, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Philadelphia. “They're using a huge variety of cheaply available stuff.” One recent innovation is IED detonators made from battery-powered doorbells. The doorbells consist of crude 400-kilohertz transmitters and receivers. “They're sloppy as hell, but they are really hard to jam,” Husick says.

That unconventional style of mine warfare is something coalition forces clearly didn't anticipate, and response has been slow. Earlier this year, for instance, the Pentagon decided to spend $25 billion on mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armored vehicles, whose V-shaped hulls and raised chassis make them better than armored Humvees at fending off bomb blasts [see photo, “Help Is on the Way”]. The price tag includes $750 million to airlift the 12-metric-ton vehicles to Iraq, instead of sending them by ship. In August, though, the Pentagon scaled back its schedule, saying only 1500 of the planned 3900 vehicles would be delivered by year's end.

It's a race against time. As happened first to unarmored Humvees and then to armored Humvees, insurgents have made destroying MRAP vehicles a high priority—a “trophy kill,” as some observers call it. MRAP designs are already reportedly being rethought to deal with emerging insurgent tactics.

You might think that the lag time was due to bureaucratic screwups, but in fact, that's just how long the bureaucracy takes to respond. Marine commanders in Iraq first requested MRAP vehicles in May 2006. Acquisition officials reviewed the request and ultimately approved it late in the year. By April, five suppliers had demonstrated they could meet survivability requirements, production numbers, and delivery timelines, and they were then awarded contracts. But ramping up production doesn't happen overnight. Before MRAP vehicles became a high priority, the sole manufacturer, Force Protection, in Ladson, S.C., was making only about five per month.