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This podcast is for and about soldiers of the Canadian Army.
Its primary goal is to provide them with useful information through thoughtful and open discussions that reflect their mutual interests and concerns.
Though soldiers are our primary audience, the topics covered on this podcast should be relevant to anyone who supports our soldiers or who has an interest in Canadian military matters.
[ Music starts ]
Captain Adam Orton: Hi, I'm Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. There are a surprising number of grenades without pins, improvised explosives, old bombs, and all sorts of other explosive hazards out in the world. That's where Explosive Ordnance Disposal, aka EOD operators, come in. They try to neutralize some of the most dangerous and unpredictable items on and off of the battlefield. MWO Marty Gratrix is an EOD operator from the Canadian Armed Forces Joint Counter Explosive Threat team, or JCET, and he's one of the people who's out there trying to put the proverbial pins back in the grenades. Welcome to the podcast.
MWO Marty Gratrix: Thank you very much. I appreciate being here.
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Capt Orton: So... Obviously, being an EOD operator is a pretty dangerous job. Why do people choose to put themselves in harm's way for this career?
MWO Gratrix: Why people decide to get into this trade? It's voluntary, so no one can be forced into this.
Capt Orton: [chuckles] That's good.
MWO Gratrix: So you have to—yeah. But I suppose it's people looking to make uh… [chuckles] make the world a bit of a safer place, you know, with what's going on in the world, and historical conflict zones, and even with the domestic threat, there's always going to be a need for this particular specialty skill set. At home and abroad. So people might just have a sense of wanting to assist with reducing that threat.
Capt Orton: I think people often underestimate the domestic threat because we haven't had a lot of warfare in Canada recently, but these things tend to pop up unexpectedly. And, you know, it's not necessarily that bad people are doing bad things. It's just, sometimes a grenade shows up out of nowhere.
MWO Gratrix: Well, you see a lot of that old ordnance that came back with our service members in World War II. Even World War I, they find stuff that soldiers had brought back. War trophies that are, you know, families finding some of this stuff in their basements. So I mean, there's a lot of that, for sure. So yeah, it pops up, and that's where EOD domestically really plays a huge part. And of course, with the improvised explosive device threats across the globe, even in a domestic context, it exists. So we have to be prepared.
Capt Orton: Maybe tell us a little bit about how this specialty came to be. At some point I guess, we started having a lot of explosives on the battlefield, and it seemed necessary to do something about it.
MWO Gratrix: Well, if you go back to, you know, even World War I, the use of artillery shells buried with the fuses facing up, the tanks could drive over them and initiate that. It was kind of the beginning of the evolution of like mine warfare. How do you get the target to the explosive? They have to put pressure on it. And that evolved to like, hey, maybe we could command-detonate this somehow. Maybe we can, you know, fire it from artillery. So there's a history of evolution to the explosive threat.
Capt Orton: Yes.
MWO Gratrix: When it comes to the IED side, to the improvised explosive device, it really was, you know, we don't have access to military ordnance. How do we build something ourselves? We don't have access to the fusing systems that we need to initiate these different explosive threats. How do we improvise that? So, as you branch off into the conventional munitions that we're dealing with on the battlefield, and here domestically, most of it was our own stuff from legacy ranges and legacy training. But then over to expeditionary operations or overseas operations where nefarious actors are building this stuff in order to fight.
Capt Orton: Big boom is always a pretty useful tool if you're fighting an enemy.
MWO Gratrix: It is, you know, and with the IED portion to this whole thing, it's cheap and easily accessible, easy to create. And you can target multi-million dollar machinery, along with personnel, for low cost and at low risk to yourself. So that's where terrorist organizations and, in some cases, state-funded actors are implementing this stuff on the battlefield. And that's why.
Capt Orton: Yeah, and it gets left behind too. So, what happens is, even we encountered an unusual situation in Afghanistan where we hit an IED that was… in the middle of nowhere, like there was no reasonable expectation that you would hit something there. And probably because at some point, that was a route or something from years ago, and it just happened to be sitting there waiting for forever. And then, there it goes. And so that stuff is littered across the battlefield.
MWO Gratrix: Oh yeah, and it migrates too with the weather, you know, water can wash this stuff downstream. Like if you're familiar with the Arghandab riverbed in Kandahar. That route washed a lot of the explosive threats and migrated them across that platform. So it can move, and it can be there for decades. It really never goes away. It's a big problem.
Capt Orton: So we've got IEDs, let's say, considered unconventional, and then we have conventional munitions. Can you explain the difference for people, please?
MWO Gratrix: When we compare what's considered conventional to unconventional, conventional very much being manufactured ordnance and/or booby traps and/or battlefield munitions that come off an assembly line that are mass produced with safe explosives inside, meaning like, a grenade would be conventional. But when I talk about unconventional, unconventional is anything outside of that. You know, IEDs, improvised explosive devices, those would be considered unconventional.
Capt Orton: Let's maybe start a little bit from like an operational standpoint. What does an EOD operator do on the battlefield? What does that look like when you're on the ground?
MWO Gratrix: EOD operators are just highly trained specialists in the explosive threat reduction space. Really, it's a mobility. It's a freedom of movement piece to the whole thing. IEDs are point obstacles. If you can't cross or get past a point obstacle, it slows you down. It gets rid of momentum. And the commanders don't like that very much. You know, all in all, it's about getting people where they need to go on the battlefield in order to defeat the enemy.
Capt Orton: And like, if you're maybe describing a little bit how that actually looks like as painting a picture operationally as like, a company is rolling out, a mechanized company is rolling out, you guys are loading up into an armoured vehicle, you have some sort of team, like, what does that look like?
MWO Gratrix: From a mechanized perspective, yes, there would be an EOD team there with their specialty vehicle and equipment and kit and their team, in close support to that manoeuvre element, whatever it is. If there was something found that's impeding mobility, the commander will make the call as to whether or not they mark “bypass”, depending on the mission parameters, and/or send EOD down there to get rid of that and remove it. There would also be combat engineer support there too. So if the plan was to just say, mark this, let's bypass or BIP it, or blow-in-place, BIP it.
Capt Orton: Yeah, bip it.
MWO Gratrix: Get it out of the way we need to move. That kind of falls to the engineers, probably with some oversight from the IED operator to where the best place or charge placement would be, and/or the IED operator would take care of that, and then they would move forward. So one of the big things with it is that when the IED or EOD operator is downrange doing something to a device, they're unable to protect themselves from any external threats. So, you know, snipers, enemy attacks of any kind. So they really do rely on the infantry to protect them while they're down there, trying to deal with that threat.
Capt Orton: Let's talk about maybe some of the different types of devices. Like there's all sorts of flavours. You're talking about artillery pieces, we got mines, we got bombs. Break it down for us.
MWO Gratrix: Well, there's several different categories of explosive threat on the battlefield. UXOs, so unexploded ordnance, is a big one. That encompasses landmines, artillery, mortars, grenades. Like this is stuff that's designed to explode on the battlefield, but fails to do so for whatever reason. Usually it's conventionally produced and whatnot. There's also booby traps. So manufactured booby traps, you know, coming off an assembly line, pressure released, tension released, those kind of things. Right now in Ukraine, there's a big problem with the ML8, ML7 booby traps that are being produced by the Russian army that are littering the battlefield. A huge problem. Booby traps are set to harm, kill or incapacitate soldiers by doing routine activities on the battlefield.
Capt Orton: Right.
MWO Gratrix: You know, bodies can be booby trapped. Doors, windows, pathways, like you name it. So yeah, you've got that threat as well. So you got UXOs, booby traps, then you've got your improvised explosive devices. Huge problem right now. A lot of the stuff that was happening in Afghanistan when the Russians were there, you know, in the 80s, is migrated to the battlefield in Ukraine. So a lot of the IED tactics are being used by the soldiers on the Russian side to afflict damage on the Ukrainians. It's a huge problem. You know, a quarter of the country is potentially untrafficable.
Capt Orton: So when you're looking at these things, like, what do you look at? Like, how do you break that down? You know, it has different bits. What are the bits?
MWO Gratrix: So there's really five components to an IED. So you would have a power source, a detonator, a main charge, a container that would enclose that main charge, and then you would also have the switch. Normally, I would say, you know, 99% of IEDs have those five components. And I would say that really falls into three main categories: victim operated, time, and command. Victim operated really means that the person who's affected, hurt, killed, or injured by the explosive, is actually the one that initiates it. So we're talking about things like trip wires, pressure plates, tension release switches, where the victim actually picks something up, opens a door, steps on something, and the IED goes off. So that's what we classify as a victim operated device. Time device obviously is very self-explanatory, but it could be things like mechanical timers, like there's solar, there's hydro.
Capt Orton: OK.
MWO Gratrix: There's all kinds of different things. But time-initiated devices just means that the IED is designed to go off at a specific time. The bomber is likely anticipating that the target is at that location when the bomb goes off. This is very common with things like venues, mass gatherings that are pre-planned, or things like that. You know? On that, it's quite easy to defeat a time threat on the battlefield by not setting patterns, not using the same routes, making it very hard for someone to set a timer and expect you to be there.
The last one is the command initiated. This means that the bomber himself, or herself, is in control of the device. They control when that device goes off. So usually it's planted somewhere in a choke point or a canalizing terrain where they expect the target to enter, and/or get close to, and they can detonate it at a time of their choosing. So, there's two subcategories to that. There's linked and separated systems. Linked systems would be something… picture a physical link from the actual device itself to the bomber. Something like a command wire, where if you could freeze time and you found the bomb, you could follow a physical trace all the way back to the bomber themselves.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
MWO Gratrix: You know, and then there's the separated systems. Think of something like a cell phone or a key fob, where an electronic signal is sent, a receiver picks up that signal and initiates the device. So those are the three categories of IEDs that we use. But it's the threat assessment from the IED operator to identify who's being targeted, by what, by whom, for what reason, everything comes into play to try to categorize that device.
Capt Orton: Yeah, basic mission analysis, right? Like, any other combat situation, you're looking at the five Ws, try and break it down a little bit to be able to intervene at the appropriate space for that thing.
MWO Gratrix: And you know, you also got to consider the fact that there could be more than one category involved here. Like when we talk about secondary and tertiary devices that are targeting the operator specifically, which happened quite often in Afghanistan.
Capt Orton: The old daisy chain.
MWO Gratrix: Well, you could have a time device that's programmed to go off when they expect the IED operator down there taking apart a VOIED that someone's found or identified or that they're looking to prosecute. So the questioning and the understanding of the battle space and the targeting criteria for the enemy and the patterns that have been set prior to arrival, like, these are all things that the IED operator needs to understand. You know, it's not a quick process to identify what the IED is, and it's definitely not a quick process to safely get rid of it when exploitation is the key objective. Bringing the parts back for biometrics and screening. But in an MCO, like major combat operations, what we're all focused on here now, what we're seeing across the globe with Ukraine and Russia, exploitation will not be the hinge pin. It's about getting that threat out of the way safely.
Capt Orton: Yeah, so you can move.
MWO Gratrix: That's right. Yeah, to move. Yeah, that's right.
Capt Orton: You know, that's the thing is like, you never really know what you're going to get. And it's all about the flavour of whoever decided to make that thing.
MWO Gratrix: Absolutely. It's really only limited by the bomb maker's imagination.
Capt Orton: That's right.
MWO Gratrix: But improvised explosive devices have evolved so much over the last 20 years that it's almost hard to follow and keep pace with it. The delivery methods is something that's very important for us here at JCET to try to wrap our heads around because, you know, you take an IED in a car.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
MWO Gratrix: Right? We call that a VBIED, a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. And it was very common in the Afghanistan era.
Capt Orton: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
MWO Gratrix: Now take that bomb out of a car, and place that bomb now on top of a drone.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
MWO Gratrix: Okay? It's still a delivery method. It's still a vehicle. It's still a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. Now, the problem with that is that this particular VBIED, the drone, has absolutely none of the geographical restrictions that a vehicle or a ground-based transportation method would have.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
MWO Gratrix: It's got first-person view. It can attack the target directly from miles away, not putting the bomber at risk at all.
Capt Orton: Mmm hmm.
MWO Gratrix: And it's first time hit every time.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
MWO Gratrix: There's no need now to draw the enemy into the kill zone. You can take the kill zone directly to them much easier with a drone.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
MWO Gratrix: And, you know, you talk about the scale at which this is taking place, you know. If we're talking about IEDs on drones, which I would argue 85 to 90% of what we're seeing in the FPV, like the first person view drones in Ukraine, are improvised explosive devices strapped to drones.
Capt Orton: Oh, wow. I did not know that.
MWO Gratrix: Yeah. It's an incredible number. But, and you know, just last year's stats, Russia was claiming that they can produce 8,000 FPV drones with the use of additive manufacturing, so 3D printers.
Capt Orton: Mmm hmm.
MWO Gratrix: Okay? Now 8,000 a month. Now picture 8,000 IEDs flying around the skies in Ukraine a month, just from the Russian side. Okay? Now take that number and probably double it or quadruple it for 2026. Like the capacity for them to produce this locally at the operational and tactical levels even, on the battlefield, is becoming insane.
Capt Orton: It's definitely having an impact on the shape of manoeuvre warfare for sure, I think.
MWO Gratrix: Absolutely. Defeating this type of delivery method is very complex and hard to do. The drones being used, in the way they're being used in Ukraine—I was told this by a Ukrainian soldier not long ago—it's akin to the invention of gunpowder, how it's reshaping the battlefields of today. And I think it holds true, like there's nothing really conventional about conventional warfare these days.
Capt Orton: [chuckles] Yes.
MWO Gratrix: Like it is changing so drastically and so quickly, that it's really forcing us to look at how we're going to deal with this. How we're going to manoeuvre around the battlefield in this context. Because this problem is never going to go away. It's too effective.
Capt Orton: And it goes without saying that, with all of that, comes probably a decent amount of training. What's the training like?
MWO Gratrix: Well, there's a bit of a path with regards to this specialty. So once you've established yourself in the clearance diver community, the combat engineer corps, ammo technicians and/or the air weapon systems technicians, then you can be recruited into EOD.
So, Conventional Munitions Disposal, Basic. CMD Basic, is really what the gateway is to becoming an EOD operator. So those core MOCs receive that as part of their trades training. So the CMD course is about a two-month course that teaches everything about IDing ordnance, how to approach, how to dispose of some of those different threats. Doesn't touch on IEDs or anything like that. It's mostly just the UXO and conventional munition that they deal with on that.
Then they move into the Improvised Explosive Device Assistant course, where they learn how to use the tools, equipment, the robots that the EOD team will utilize in order to render safe an IED.
After completion of the IED Assistant course, normally what happens is that a soldier will go back to their home unit and conduct OJT, which is on the job training, usually about a year. So that OJT package is critical for the next step into IEDD Operator.
That course, it's held out on the east coast. They'll go out there, learn everything about how to operate inside of a bomb suit, use all the different tools, equipment and ROVs that are part of the EOD teams and IED teams. And then once that's done, they'll come back. And obviously operate, either in a domestic role, and/or for expeditionary operations.
However, the final piece to that is the Conventional Munitions Disposal Advanced course. Now that gets into the render safe procedures of all types of different munitions across the battlefield. So land, air, and sea munitions focused on, you know, everything from landmines to torpedoes. How to identify that, how to approach, how to do the explosive ordnance reconnaissance, come back with that information and develop a render safe procedure for that. So that course specifically is about eight months long. That's down in the U.S. Once a soldier has acquired all of those courses, so CMD Basic, IED Assist, IED Operator, and CMD Advanced, we consider them what we call a uh, a full spectrum operator, meaning that you can go into the Improvised Explosive Device Disposal Operator, or you can move into the Conventional Munitions Disposal. Or you can do both.
Capt Orton: So let's talk a little bit about exercises. We have exercises in Canada. We have exercises outside of Canada. What does the training environment bringing people together look like?
MWO Gratrix: So all the sub-elements, so you're talking about the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army, all train specific to their elements. But there are platforms for a lot of cross-training. So like, one of the big exercises that we host through JCET, the Joint Counter Explosive Threat cell here.
Capt Orton: Mmm hmm.
MWO Gratrix: Our office is very focused on a particular exercise called ARDENT DEFENDER. We fund it every year. It's hosted usually in Gagetown, New Brunswick. It's an international exercise. So we bring in a lot of partners from NATO, usually upwards of between 8 and 12 different countries participate in this exercise. And it's very much focused on the tactical execution of improvised explosive device disposal. So it's really focused on the IEDD operators. Identifying, neutralizing, disarming, and then exploiting the IED threats. So there's a level two lab that's out there that's able to provide that forensics type function, analyzing things for biometrics, different things. And that whole target, the network piece is what they handle. So that's integrated into the exercise. What we're trying to do is really simulate an operational environment on that, and it's very successful. It's now become some of our NATO partners' go-to exercise every year.
Capt Orton: How many people, by the way, go on ARDENT DEFENDER?
MWO Gratrix: You know, roughly around 350 to 400 people. So yeah, it's a big exercise. It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to put that one together. So without our colleagues in 4 ESR and 6 CCSB, like it would be very difficult for us to execute that properly. So kudos to them if they're listening.
Capt Orton: Yeah. You got to give credit where credit is due.
MWO Gratrix: That's right, yeah.
Capt Orton: So, where do you see things going forward from now? You know, we talked a lot about the drone threat, a little bit of 3D printing, like, what does the future hold for us in this space?
MWO Gratrix: Well, it is, like I said, it's evolving extremely quickly. You don't need to be an electronics guru or years of schooling to build some sort of sophisticated electronic device that could set off a bomb.
Capt Orton: Right.
MWO Gratrix: You need AI. So you can ask AI to do things for you that normally would have taken someone six years in university to learn how to do. So what that does is that opens the door up to nefarious actors to be more complex in this space. So we really need to keep up with that. You know, the technology side of things, it's no longer just a pressure plate with a jug of HME somewhere.
Capt Orton: [chuckles] That’s right.
MWO Gratrix: Like, we're talking, we’re talking switches that can sense the magnetic signature around them and program themselves to go off when that magnetic signature changes. For instance, in this room, there's a ton of metal. You put this thing down, it calibrates to this room. Open the door, it senses that and goes off. That technology is not necessarily new, but it's, your average Joe or average Jane on the street can now produce this stuff easily.
So really what we're trying to do, you know, at JCET is identify how these threats are evolving. Obviously drones, this is something we're really paying attention to now. I'm trying to get a fleet of drones, which is really actually going quite quickly into the hands of the IED operators, with AI tools involved in it, to do reconnaissance on different things. To approach in different methods.
Additive manufacturing, being able to produce improvised switches with calibrations to the millimetre in order to execute whatever function you needed to do to print that kind of thing en masse. And not just back in some factory somewhere, but literally in the trench line. Mobile print factories have been reported on the Russian side, ripping up and down the trench line, asking troops, “What do you want me to print you? What do you need?” And not just IED components, but components for their weapons, you know. Different things for their MODs and their NODs. And like, the supply line piece to this is gone now with the addition to additive manufacturing and 3D printing. So, this is a space where we're really getting involved and we're trying to learn more about it. We're trying to field it.
For instance, on ARDENT DEFENDER, you know, we deployed a mech shelter running off a generator and had upwards of 15 3D printers in that room, 3D printing training aids and targets for the exercise, to just kind of showcase how easy it is to produce this stuff in austere conditions, right? So, those are the kind of things that we're really focusing ourselves on.
Almost nothing’s safe to touch. Almost nowhere is safe to go. So really what we need to do, and what we are doing, is trying to figure out what those threats are, how they affect our mobility on the battlefield, how we can close with and destroy the enemy, how do we get our infantry folks to close with and destroy the enemy if we can't get them there. So let's figure out what the threats are. Let's learn and try to develop new tactics, techniques and procedures to defeat that.
Capt Orton: All right. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to explain what EOD is all about.
MWO Gratrix: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's a great platform, and maybe we can work together again sometime.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that would be great.
MWO Gratrix: Cheers.
Capt Orton: That was Master Warrant Officer Marty Gratrix, who's an EOD operator from the Canadian Armed Forces Joint Counter Explosive Threat team, or JCET. And I'm Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton, out.