Improvised Explosive Devices (IED)

Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) are used since a humankind has invented explosives, but the term was proposed just in the middle of 1970s by British army men involved into military commitment with IRA insurgents. In contrast with conventional explosive devices IED usually have simple construction which includes such main parts as activator, fuse, explosive charge and optionally container, projectiles and power source. IEDs are used to kill and wound personnel, destroy tanks, APC, trucks and other vehicles and shake soldier morale. Currently IED is widely used by terrorists against civilians.

As a rule IEDs are manufactured by unexperienced low-educated persons. To prime such kind of bombs suicide operator actions are needed. But occasionally very complex and sophisticated though improvised devices are found.

IEDs were widely used by the Viet Cong fighters, IRA elements, Afghan mujahideens, Iraqi insurgents and Chechnya separatists.

IEDs may be classified by types of warhead as high-explosive, incendiary, chemical, biological and radiological. The first two are most wide-spread. The second type of classification is by delivery mechanism. There are IEDs delivered by suicide person, car, boat, animal. IEDs may be triggered by wire, radio or cell-phone (remote-controlled improvised explosive devices – RCIED) or by victim (victim-operated improvised explosive devices – VOIED).

Due to improvised nature of IED there are no silver bullet methods to find them. But some clues are known. Thus there are methods to detect semiconductor parts of remote activator, long control wire line and some others. The STT GROUP presents a wide range of improvised explosive devices detectors (IEDD), including non-linear junction detectors (NLJD), control-line-wire detectors, non-invasive parametric detectors and many other counter-terror devices.