Imagine a high-tech remote control device that can destroy roadside bombs with high-powered electric pulses - "man-made lightening."
The military did. It created the Joint IED Neutralizer (JIN), to destroy the makeshift bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that are responsible for more than half of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq.
You would think that such a device would be rushed to Iraq to see if it can do as well in the field as it did in tests, in which a prototype destroyed about 90% of the IEDs laid in its path.
But 10 months after Army Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of a Pentagon task force in charge of finding ways to combat IEDs, endorsed development of the JIN not one has been shipped to Iraq.
The Los Angeles Times reports the military bureaucracy said that the JIN required further testing, and decided to delay deployment.
The Marine Corps has decided to circumvent the military's bureaucratic testing schedule and will send JIN units to Al Anbar province in western Iraq.
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