The report, written by Colonel William Adamson -- the former operations officer in the Defense Department's $4.4 billion-a-year Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO -- also heaps praise on the Pentagon for its "resilience, learning and adapting to the IED threat." It credits JIEDDO's chief, retired General Montgommery Meigs, with "vision [and] leadership." And the paper notes that "casualty rates per IED attack are down, indicating that the cumulative effort of training, better protective equipment, and improved intelligence [have] had a positive effect."

However, what the paper concludes, ultimately, is that the American effort against improvised bombs has been an "unsatisfactory performance [with] an incomplete strategy." What's more, the JIEDDO-led struggle against the hand-made explosives has a "strategic flaw" that may keep the U.S. from ever gaining the upper hand on the bombers, Adamson notes: The lack of authority to knock bureaucratic heads. He recommends instead establishing a separate, Executive Branch agency with a "laser-like concentration on the hostile use of IEDs."

Ideally, every element of the U.S. government would be teaming up to fight IEDs, Adamson writes. Spies would be uncovering rings of bombers; FBI investigators would be helping examine forensic evidence; diplomats would be applying political pressure to catch bombers; other countries could even be chipping in, offering their own experience with improvised explosives.

In practice, however, such coordination has been uneven, at best. The "IA [interagency] process lacks a comprehensive strategy for defeating the global IED threat." Outside of the military, few agencies have viewed bomb-beating "as essential to their collective or unilateral missions." So they have given the problem short shrift. For example, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms decided that, "due to resource constraints, [it] could not support greater involvement with DOD’s [the Department of Defense's] IED effort," Adamson notes. Same goes for the nation's spies. "Internal reform and mission overload in the IC [intelligence community] cripple[d] its capacity for additional effort."

In retrospect, the conditions which led to the formation of the JIEDDO reveal a strategic flaw in pursuing a military-centric approach... The consequences of the IA resisting a broader role against emerging IED threats reflects a continuation of unsatisfactory performance and an incomplete strategy capable of delivering only military-centric solutions.

...However, decision by committee or taking a team vote rarely optimizes organizational performance. Teams build franchises around key players. The US government needs an IA team of players with long-term focus and commitment, not sporadic involvement. The team needs 100% commitment from everyone for optimal performance. Preferably, an Executive Branch decision selecting a lead agency fosters agency-wide, laser-like concentration on the hostile use of IEDs. This lead agency must do more than coordinate meetings and forums for information exchange. The lead agency requires regulatory authority over a consolidated IA team...

Adamson's paper isn't the only military academic study to find fault with JIEDDO, and the way in which the Organization is set up. As Inside Defense first reported, a March report for the Joint Forces Staff College said that JIEDDO "possesses neither the structure nor the authority to effectively prosecute the war against IEDs. As a large, bureaucratic organization rooted in the technological approach to defeating IEDs, JIEDDO lacks the agility to quickly react to a changing enemy and has no legal authority to compel other DoD [Department of Defense] entities to act."

The paper, entitled "Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization: Tactical Successes Mired in Organizational Chaos; Roadblock in the Counter-IED Fight," recommended that JIEDDO be placed under U.S. Joint Forces Command, instead.

A JIEDDO spokesperson said that "We appreciate the efforts of those outside of JIEDDO in finding ways that the organization can improve its abilities to find and implement solutions that protect our troops in harm's way from the effects of IEDs." However, the spokesperson added,"we do not respond to specific student academic projects.