Head Of Pentagon IED Office Sees Boston Bombs As Part Of A Pattern (From Forbes)

Lieutenant General Michael D. Barbero probably wasn’t as shocked as the rest of us when bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon on April 15. He has headed the Pentagon’s joint agency for combating improvised explosive devices over the last two years, and during that time 17,000 such devices have been detonated in 123 countries by over 40 separate organizations. Hundreds of them have been planted in the United States, although none got the media attention Boston did. General Barbero thinks IED’s have become the weapon of choice for an overlapping consortium of transnational networks that share ideas and adapt rapidly to U.S. responses. I have written a commentary for Forbes laying out some of the lessons he has learned combating IED’s, which you can read here.