Metal tubes with curved seals are packed with explosives and a fitted with a metal charge. These EFPs explode, as do IEDs, creating a tremendous concussion, but they also throw off a superheated molten round, usually either copper or steel, and it can tear through anything..

“We have no Humvee armor that defends against an EFP,” said Petty Officer and E5 Army soldier Josh Blair in a discussion of EFPs in Baghdad last week. “I have some video of an EFP going through armor, engine block, personnel, and right out the back end of a fully up-armored Humvee.”

Major Mike Pacheco, US Army echoes the sense of chill. “Mention an IED to a soldier and he almost shakes it off. A lot of them are poorly made. A lot of them miss. Some of them, we are armored for. IEDs are potentially survivable. But EFPs,” he shook his head. “Nobody likes to hear about EFPs on the road,” Pacheco said.

They are a steel pipe, usually less than a foot long, filled with explosives and sealed at one end. A curved steel or copper round is fitted to the other end, forming an oversized bullet that melts on detonation and kills everything in its path. Again, with a few thousand dollars, the insurgency has gone a long way toward making useless an expenditure of millions of dollars in vehicle and body armor in this increasingly asymmetrical war.

EFPs have caused the deaths of 50 soldiers and Marines in the last month. It’s the new way the insurgency has to kill us and it’s working. Examination of captured ordnance suggest that they appear to have been machined elsewhere and smuggled into Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

I'm no expert but it seems it would be a good time to clamp down on the border crossings between Iraq and Iran.

Here is an article from Boston.com about EFP's.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2007/02/11/us_officer_iran_sends_iraq_bomb_parts/

The use of these is so new that a friend of mine who recently came back from Iraq had not even heard of them.

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