Danger Room in Afghanistan: Hansel and Gretel vs. Roadside Bombs

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan — The Marines in southern Afghanistan have largely left the roads, to avoid improvised bombs. But they’re still getting hit as they carve tracks through the desert. Now a reporter-turned-lieutenant may have found at least a partial answer: off-the-shelf GPS units, combined with a British tactic from the counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Matt Pottinger came up with the answer earlier this year, working for the Marines’ Combat Logistics Battalion 3, based out of Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province. The battalion was driving as much as 110 kilometers off-road to resupply outlying bases. To keep from getting attacked, they tried to vary their paths through the desert. But the Taliban always seemed to know where they were going to be next.

So Pottinger hooked the battalion’s vehicles up with commercial Garmin GPS trackers, to record where they were driving. After a few runs, he plotted the routes on top of military-imagery databases. “You’d get this spaghetti network of track, and they’d converge in these places,” he says. Turns out the Marines weren’t changing up their routes nearly as much as they thought they were.

Small, almost imperceptible changes in the terrain were forcing the battalion’s vehicles into natural choke points. Near the town of Jamal Ghar, for example, there appeared to be nearly 3 kilometers between a mountain and an irrigation ditch. But Pottinger saw that all the vehicles were driving right on top of each other; most of those 3 kilometers was taken up by farmland. The Taliban had a natural point where they could plant bombs. And they did, attacking the Marines repeatedly.

Once the battalion realized they were going through ambush points, they began sending bomb-clearance teams to sweep the area for explosives. They found 69 percent of the bombs that were in their path. And they set up sniper teams, to target any militants looking to set an ambush.


Pottinger calls the tracks “honesty traces.” It’s a term he borrowed from the British. Troops on patrol in Northern Ireland used tracing paper to sketch out where their vehicles were driving — and getting hit by the IRA. By anticipating the patterns they themselves were making, they could anticipate the attacks, too.

“It’s simple, Hansel-and-Gretel-type s**t. Just leaving breadcrumbs. Amazingly, no one was doing it,” he says.

The Marines already had military-grade GPS terminals in their Humvees. But those “Blue Force Trackers” couldn’t record a vehicle’s route. So he turned to the commercial GPS units instead. Now, at least two other battalions have purchased similar units. They, too, are running “honesty traces.”
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