User blog comment:Griever0311/Ask A Marine Part Deux/@comment-1260687-20100317021127

I've been hit by 5 small IEDs and a stack of APERS mines (each time I was in a truck), and their strength depends entirely on their construction and how much explosives they use. The ones that hit me were 61mm and 82mm mortar rounds; not much explosive, just a lot of frag, and not too hard on an up-armored HMMWV, and little more than an annoyance to an MTVR. The problem is that the bastards will stack a bunch of the damn things into a the same hole; get enough of 'em, and it'll breach the HMMWV. A large enough platter charge can deliver mobility kills on an Abram, leaviing them vulnerable to follow-on assaults. EFPs can penetrate and disable just about anything except MRAPs (and sometimes those) and tanks. Anytime we found a suspect device, it was our TTP to call EOD to identify and neutralize the device. They'd show up, disable it, catalogue the device, and sometimes take it back for investigation so as to determine the proliferation of different types of IEDs and in the process tracking distribution routes and the people making them. Forensic as hell, dude. And I've never seen a neutralization gone wrong, but I've seen a few disruption blow up a little bigger than we thought they would.