Since Afghanistan came up, I'll drop a little something here. A absolutely MASSIVE chunk of "Taliban" casualties from both wars come from randos that didn't like the USSR, or US occupations and decided to find their way to Allah by shooting at a low flying AH 64 with whatever shitty weapon they had on hand at the time. The actual Taliban would very often score unreciprocated kills with IEDs, and ambushes set up with IEDs.
This led the US to start developing a whole fuck ton of countermeasures which didn't actually work in real combat. I'll list them as I can remember them
Didn't actually use this fucker in Afghanistan, and can't find shit about it online, but it was completely worthless. It was basically a really shitty mine sweeper that worked on ground penetrating radar. The thing just outright didn't work. Just in training, it took hours to sweep a patch of ground not even 25 by 25 meters, and it constantly got false positives. You also had to have it so close to the ground that you risked setting off the little toe popper mines the Taliban would set up.
Like the wolfhound, I can't find much online about this thing. It basically was just this stupid looking plastic thing which would detect command wires. Surprisingly, this thing actually worked fairly well and didn't weigh a ton. On the flip side, it was completely worthless. Why? Because, if you were in something like a squad wedge and on patrol, by the time you detected a command wire, someone was already standing on a command wire IED.
Don't know why bongs were talking about this crap, but here's a retarded video which basically shows off this worthless piece of shit.
Why is this thing worthless? Probably because the Taliban basically never initiated an attack with sniper fire, and by the time they did actually start attacking with small arms, you didn't have time nor a reason to look at a little screen to figure out where rounds were incoming from. Which even if you did... your guys are shooting too, and surprise surprise, the thing being mounted on a vehicle with at least a 240 firing on it might not be a good platform for something that uses sounds and vibrations to figure out where rounds are coming from.
I can't recall the names of all of these worthless things and don't care to try to search them, but here's my best recollection of them. The vehicle mounted CREWs were basically just a billion dollar solution, which had a ready to go 5 dollar solution to counter it. Tali basically just stopped using remote operated IEDs, and went over to either completely victim operated systems, command wire systems, or a slightly more complex version of remote operated systems which the US called "spider" I think, but was basically just a command wire connected to a receiver just out of range of this stupid thing.
The "man portable" versions of this were absolutely horrible, and by that I mean genuine torture for anyone who had to carry them. The things were heavy, they burned through ASIP batteries so fast that I think they were legit what prompted the US to develop rechargeable ASIP batteries. They had a tendency to rapidly overheat, and there were even some cases of them catching on fire. Infantry platoons really didn't have a good place for them. If you shoved them in a ruck, you'd just have a burning soldier after all the other shit he had in there acted like an insulator for the already overheated piece of
shit vital equipment. If you didn't shove them in a ruck and used the totally not shitty pack that came with them, the soldier basically had to shove everything in this tiny little compartment on the pack and hope it didn't cause something important or dangerous to catch on fire.
To continue on the "man portable" versions, there were two of them. One being long wave and the other being short wave. Neither actually worked. A random Afghan could carry on a cell phone conversation right next to the jammer, which of course meant he could also set of a remote operated IED. The things also had a problem with dust which would sometimes clog their exhaust fans and cause them to start cooking off either faster. Obviously not ideal in a country like Afghanistan.
Hide/Seek (not even memeing) systems
These were basically totally not 1984ish systems were you'd take some rando Afghan and then scan his information into a database so you could
spy on protect him later. There were basically two ways to use these things. You could either pry a dead nigger's eyes open so the scanner could read it, only to tell you whether or not he'd consented to a
not invasive™ scan weeks prior, or you could harass random Afghan young males that you'd caught smoking weed in an abandoned building while on patrol.
