What NATO's IED doctrine says the target is

I ran counter-IED electronic warfare. My corner of the fight was the part you can see: a jammer that keeps a radio-controlled trigger from reaching its receiver. It's a satisfying piece of kit to own, and it's a small piece of the picture. The doctrine I'm reading today is the Alliance's attempt to describe the whole picture, and it's worth knowing what it puts first, because the counter-drone conversation is now borrowing the same framework.

The document

AJP-3.15 is NATO's Allied Joint Doctrine for Countering Improvised Explosive Devices. Edition D, Version 1 carries a letter of promulgation dated 7 September 2026, signed by the Director of the NATO Standardization Office. It supersedes Edition C and is effective on receipt. The UK Ministry of Defence hosts a public copy, which is the one I read, cover to lexicon. NATO's letter says it charges no fee for standardization documents; the UK copy adds a Crown-copyright conditions-of-release page.

Scope matters here. The preface says plainly that AJP-3.15 does not cover explosive ordnance disposal, military search, or route clearance. Those are specialist capabilities that support the approach. This is the operational-level document above them: how a joint headquarters is supposed to think about the problem.

What the doctrine says the target is

The first paragraph of chapter one sets the frame. In the document's words:

C-IED activities are principally directed against adversaries (primarily their capabilities) and not only against IEDs themselves. C-IED treats the IED as a systemic problem and aims to defeat the IED system.

The definitions follow. An IED system is "the personnel, resources, and activities necessary to resource, plan, execute and exploit an IED event." An IED event is broad: the list includes explosion, attack, attempted attack, find, hoax, false, and turn-in. And then the line I'd put on the wall of any briefing room: "An IED event is only a single activity within the overall IED system."

The doctrine breaks the adversary's work into four areas: background (sponsorship, ideology, financing, migration of tactics from other theaters), resources and planning (leadership, recruiting, components, construction, storage), execution (planning, rehearsing, the attack, recording it), and exploitation. That last one is the part civilians rarely think about. After a blast, the document says, the adversary wants to assess the results, analyze their own effectiveness and our response, share what they learned, and promote the success through propaganda. The bomb going off is the middle of their process, not the end.

A roof, three pillars, and a foundation

The approach is drawn as a building. The doctrine's own words: "Its roof is supported by three mutually supporting and complementary pillars standing on a strong foundation." The foundation is understanding and intelligence, which gets its own chapter. The pillars are attack the networks, defeat the device, and prepare the force. The definition of C-IED itself is "the collective efforts to defeat an improvised explosive device system by attacking networks, defeating devices and preparing a force."

Attack the networks is named "the proactive pillar." It groups human networks into friendly, neutral, and adversary, and the aim is to reinforce the first, influence the second, and interdict the third. The doctrine quotes the line "it takes a network to fight a network." It also owns a side effect: attacking networks "may also have the unintended consequence of provoking changes in device construction or adversary TTP." I've watched that happen. Pressure on a network doesn't make the bombs stop. It makes the next bombs different.

Defeat the device is where my old job lived. The doctrine defines it as activities "aimed at detecting, neutralizing, and mitigating the effects from IEDs and enabling their TE," where TE is technical exploitation. Detection is "the procedure used to determine the presence and location of suspected IEDs." Neutralization is "the action intended to render an explosive ordnance either temporarily or permanently ineffective." A jammer is a neutralization tool. It doesn't find the bomb, and it doesn't remove it. It makes one kind of trigger fail, for as long as the truck is in range. I've written about the kinds it doesn't touch.

Two sentences in that chapter are the ones I'd want a procurement officer to read. First: defeat the device "relies heavily upon understanding and intelligence but is also the primary contributor of understanding and intelligence since first responders provide tactical and technical insight on IED events through reports." Every find and every blast is a collection opportunity. Second, on technology:

In a period where the technological superiority from NATO is not systematically obvious, it must not be reliant upon technology alone to secure an advantage and defeat the device.

That's the Alliance's own doctrine saying the gear is not the plan. The same chapter calls persistent surveillance "a desirable but expensive resource" that "is problematic for wide area coverage." Anyone who has priced a camera-on-every-culvert solution will recognize the sentence.

Prepare the force covers everything before and between operations: training, education, mindset, equipment, lessons. One line in it is about as plain as doctrine gets: "Learning from lessons in an IED environment saves lives by exploiting success and correcting errors." The chapter also asks commanders to work out whether an error came from poor execution, "which is relatively simple to address," or an incorrect approach, "which may require greater effort to remedy."

Exploitation: what happens to the pieces

The foundation chapter describes a three-level technical exploitation system. Level 1 is the field: weapons intelligence teams collecting material at the scene. Level 2 is a theater-level exploitation facility. Level 3 is reach-back to national laboratories "to provide in-depth technical and forensic examination and analysis using scientific and counter criminal capabilities." The lexicon defines technical exploitation as "a process of applying scientific methods and tools to derive results of value from collected exploitable material," and says it lets the defeat-the-device side "adjust their TTP as necessary to properly counter the IED's technical design."

This is the loop that made my jammer useful. A jammer is programmed against the triggers you expect. The only way to know what to expect is to take apart what the adversary actually built last week. The doctrine also notes that exploitation outputs can be used "in direct support of the judicial process," which is a reminder that the system it's attacking includes people who can be arrested.

The admission

Paragraph 1.23 says it directly: "It is important to accept that a C-IED approach cannot always decisively defeat the IED system." The stated goal is more modest, to reduce the threat "to a minimum or acceptable level" so that it "is no longer a significant constraint on the successful conduct of operations." The principles section adds that an "entirely reactive posture concedes" the initiative to the adversary, and describes the contest as "an iterative action–reaction process; it is competitive learning."

I find the modesty more credible than the alternative. A War on the Rocks essay from November 2025 by Andrew Tenbusch and Trevor Phillips-Levine opens with the claim that the United States lost the war against the IED, and argues that the current counter-drone strategy "borrows heavily from the counter-IED three-pillar playbook." Their conclusion is that "at least one of the three classic counter-IED pillars appear ill-suited for the drone challenge." The pillar they doubt is attack the network, on the grounds that the drone supply chain is global and largely outside Western reach. They'd keep prepare the force and defeat the device.

I'd read the doctrine and the essay together. The doctrine never claims the three pillars are sufficient; it claims they're the structure, and that the foundation under them is intelligence. If the network pillar transfers badly to drones, the question for a planner isn't whether to copy the building. It's what the foundation looks like when the adversary's "background" area, in the doctrine's four-part breakdown, is a factory in another country rather than a bomb-maker in the next valley. The Army's drone doctrine and the lineage of the drone jammer are both places I've worked that seam before.

What changed in this edition

The summary of changes lists the revisions. The edition incorporates NATO's 2022 strategic concept and the Alliance's multi-domain operations framing, updates definitions "especially around IED systems, C-IED principles, and technical exploitation," adds "greater emphasis on multi-domain operations (MDO) and cognitive warfare," and expands the three pillar chapters. The list of contributions a C-IED working group makes runs to twenty items. Two of them are my old lane and the newest one: item nine is support to the recognized electromagnetic picture and frequency deconfliction, and item twenty is cognitive warfare operations. A document about improvised bombs now has a line for the fight over what people believe about the blast.

The reservations are worth reading too

NATO doctrine is published with a record of national reservations, and this one is unusually candid. Germany's reservation says the document "remains heavily weighted towards deployments within the framework of International Crisis Management" and that applying it to national and Alliance defense "requires national supplementation and adaptation." The United Kingdom ratified it while recording "significant concerns over the number of editorial comments that have not been actioned prior to publication," and the United States says it will require the editorial and formatting revisions to be completed "prior to full implementation." Slovakia notes it does not yet have the full capacity for exploitation levels 2 and 3. Canada says its C-IED advice will come from its engineer coordination cell rather than a dedicated staff officer.

None of that undermines the content. It tells you the document was pushed out because the content was needed, and that at least two nations think the next version should be cleaner. I'd rather have that on the record than a glossy edition nobody argued over.

What I could not confirm

What Edition C said. I didn't read the superseded edition side by side, so I can't tell you which specific sentences are new beyond what the summary of changes lists. The three pillars and the system framing predate this edition; the War on the Rocks essay treats them as the standard playbook, and so did we in the field.

The figures. The PDF's figures (the IED-system timeline, the building diagram, the exploitation-flow chart) are images. I'm describing them from the text that references them.

Implementation. A doctrine describes how a headquarters is supposed to think. How any given force actually does it is a different question, and the reservations above are the honest hint that it varies.

Not my research. My published work is in microwave spectroscopy. My authority here is operational, from running counter-IED electronic warfare, not academic.

The signal

NATO's September 2026 counter-IED doctrine says the target is the system, and the bomb is one event inside it. The jammer, the robot, and the armor live in one pillar of three, and that pillar's own chapter says it must not rely on technology alone. The foundation is intelligence, fed in large part by taking apart the devices that are found. And the document admits the approach cannot always decisively win. If you're hearing the same three pillars applied to drones, the useful question isn't whether the building is the right shape. It's what the foundation is made of this time.