Vox Suggests Widening the Roads

In his "IED efficiency" post, Vox stated the following:

One thing I've wondered is if it would make sense to widen the roads most often traveled by US forces to such an extent that anything planted offroad would have to be so large as to be easily detectable. I find it difficult to imagine that the explosives in the IED's are so powerful that they'd be undetectable if the roads were two or three times as wide.

This seems so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but asphalt and active road crews are surely less expensive than Humvees, military hospitals and long rehabilitations. And perhaps they've already been doing this; I doubt the media would see fit to report the fact that Highway Whatever is now thirty feet wider than before.

Though I do not know if any such program has been enacted, I doubt it would have a high success rate. There are several reasons that I question its success rate. The first is that US forces travel on most, if not all, of the roads in Iraq. In some cases this happens on the platoon and section levels during presence patrols and general interaction with the assigned community. A second reason it would not have much success is that if they couldn't put the IED alone a widened road, they would simply put it where the road returns to its normal size. The affect, in essence, would only be displacement, which leads me right into my third point. In the urban areas, there simply isn't room to expand the roads. Mosul alone has about 2 million people in it. For comparison, the 2004 Census has Houston, TX at about 2 million people. (Those of your interested in doing a map/satellite recon of Mosul, 36 degrees 20'06.00" N 43 degrees 07'08.00" E.) Another thing that many people forget is that we are dealing with more than simple roadside bombs. There are suicide bombers and Vehicle-born IEDs (VBIED) that we need to defend against. And most of all, never to be forgotten, is that the insurgency force is very adaptive and should not be taken lightly.

In quoting someone else's post, the statistics were also brought up which showed that more IEDs were emplaced (almost double), but fewer were detonated that injured people between 2004 & 2005. For these reasons, it can be said that the members of the US military are some of the brightest members of society in that they must learn faster than our enemies can develop new weapons and strategies. Our military must develop contingency plans before they even know what is coming. It is truly an amazing system when you see the inner workings of it all.

To all those deployed, Godspeed.

Crispy