Disrupting Improvised Explosive Device Terror Campaigns Basic Research Opportunities: A Workshop Report

Countering the threat of improvised explosive devices (IED)s is a challenging, multilayered problem. The IED itself is just the most publicly visible part of an underlying campaign of violence, the IED threat chain. Improving the technical ability to detect the device is a primary objective, but understanding of the goals of the adversary; its sources of materiel, personnel, and money; the sociopolitical environment in which it operates; and other factors, such as the cultural mores that it must observe or override for support, may also be critical for impeding or halting the effective use of IEDs. Disrupting Improvised Explosive Device Terror Campaigns focuses on the human dimension of terror campaigns and also on improving the ability to predict these activities using collected and interpreted data from a variety of sources. A follow-up to the 2007 book, Countering the Threat of Improvised Explosive Devices: Basic Research Opportunities, this book summarizes two workshops held in 2008.