The airmen -- who gather information through the aircraft’s high-tech, on-board sensors -- are also “improving” the way they detect the deadly roadside bombs, Lt. Col. Doug Sachs, commander of the 763rd expeditionary reconnaissance squadron, said during a Jan. 5 telephone interview from the Combined Air Operations Center in the Southwestern Asian theater.

“We are offering a piece of the IED fight. We definitely contribute to that battle,” he said. However, the squadron commander would not disclose the process Rivet Joint airmen use in identifying IEDs or the device constructors.

Insurgent fighters have utilized the makeshift bombs for several years in Iraq to kill scores of U.S., coalition and Iraqi forces, as well as civilians there.

Mission crews aboard an RC-135 aircraft can “forward gathered information in a variety of formats to a wide range of consumers via Rivet Joint’s extensive communications suite,” to troops on the ground, according to an Air Force fact sheet.

“When we were fighting an organized military, you have standard analytical tools that you use to ascertain how a military is organized in deploying their forces,” Sachs said. “Now you have a non-traditional opponent who operates a different way. So, he evolves quickly and that’s where equipment doesn’t always do it.”

That is where the airmen on the Rivet Joint come in “because people are having to insert themselves into the process and perform analysis.”

“It’s a mater of great pride for some of the folks in the unit to have success in that, and to know that we have helped to find bad guys, and we have helped save lives,” Sachs said.

When asked to elaborate, he said, “as a result of information that we have, we’ve saved lives.”

In November, ITAF first reported the Air Force began using ISR aircraft in Iraq to help coalition units “round up” insurgent cells believed to be manufacturing lethal IEDs.

Military officials -- working backward using surveillance video -- were able to successfully trace insurgents placing IEDs using targeting pods and ISR aircraft like the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, Lt. Col. Clint Hinote, the Air Force strategy director at the CAOC, said during a Nov. 21 interview.

“You can have a security camera in the sky,” he said. “We actually have aircraft that have that capability of just taking shots of what’s going on.”

The service is also in the process of testing Lockheed Martin’s Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod on the B-1 bomber to determine whether fitting the aircraft with the system could allow Lancer crews to better support combat operations in Iraq.

Air Force pilots are using the aircraft-mounted targeting pods and infrared radar imagery to help spot devices -- and the people planting them -- along roadways in Iraq and Afghanistan, Col. Gary Crowder, deputy director of the CAOC, said in a separate Nov. 21 telephone interview.