**FILE ** U.S. military vehicles in Kuwait being returned to the U.S. The July 8 roadside explosion that killed six Army soldiers in Afghanistan has analysts worried that the Taliban are turning to bigger homemade bombs to take down the best armored U.S. vehicles.
What is particularly troubling to the military is that the enemy was able to penetrate the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, whose V-shaped hull disperses a blast away from the troops inside.
A military source said in an interview that the July 8 bomb likely was a huge fertilizer-based homemade device hidden in a culvert close to where the vehicle passed. An enemy tactic is to place a bomb underneath or alongside a road and detonate it with a remote electronic signal, such as from a cellphone.
The command in Kabul is generally tight-lipped about how the Taliban, al Qaeda and other insurgents use homemade bombs.
“It’s hard to discuss our estimates of the size of the IED [improvised explosive device] or other tactics used by the insurgents in public without giving the enemy valuable information, but I can say that our investigation leads us to believe the IED was considerably larger than the average IED used against mounted patrols,” said James Graybeal, a command spokesman in Afghanistan.
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