This week, IAVA is bringing two dozen Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from across the country to meet with more than 100 Congressional offices, to present our top policy priority for 2011: employing the next greatest generation.

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IAVA’s 2011 Policy Agenda is an actionable blueprint to address the most critical issues facing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. The policy priorities outline steps Congress, the Executive Branch, state and local governments, and the private and nonprofit sectors must take to ensure that troops and veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan receive the care and support they have earned.

LANDSTUHL, Germany - Stronger armored vehicles are preventing more servicemembers in Afghanistan from being killed by roadside bombs. But the bombs are still powerful enough to cause severe skeletal and spinal injuries, the worst of which are leaving some paralyzed, Army surgeons say.

Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, have V-shaped armored hulls, designed to protect riders from a bomb’s shrapnel and firepower. The bomb’s immense energy is also absorbed by the vehicle. But as insurgents try to counter the vehicles’ protections with bigger blasts, much more of this energy is reaching soldiers’ bodies, especially their spines.

This has led to a new type of broken-back injury called a combat burst fracture, said Army Dr. (Maj.) Brett Freedman, director of spine and neurosurgery service at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

The results can be devastating: limited movement, chronic back pain, even paralysis.

“Dead nerves,” Freedman said, “like dead people, don’t ever regenerate.”

A combat burst fracture occurs when a bomb’s pressure travels through the feet, legs or pelvis of any servicemember harnessed to a truck’s seats. Since the spine is rigid against the seat, the upward pressure pancakes the spine. With enough force, the energy cracks one or more vertebrae, Freedman said.

“This triangular fragment of bone,” he said, “then shoots out backwards, and that’s where the spinal nerves live.”

After examining data from August 2007 through October 2009, Freedman found that 33 servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan had suffered burst fractures in combat, and that 13 of those injuries occurred during a two-month period in the summer of 2009.

During those two months, Freedman said, servicemembers were seven times more likely to suffer this injury than in the previous two years. Of those 13 servicemembers who suffered this newly identified injury, five servicemembers were left paralyzed. “This is almost a pure vertical force,” he said. “That does not happen in civilian trauma other than a fall from height.”

Freedman and colleagues are waiting for approval to sift through the last year of data and patient CT scans, looking for more evidence of burst fractures. “We know it’s real and not a statistical anomaly,” he said.

With some combat burst injuries, the damage to the spinal cord causes paralysis. And more than 60 percent of Freedman’s subjects had some form of neurological impairment, including partial loss of movement, as well as loss of bowel and bladder control, and sexual function.

“This is a young healthy kid who is now permanently damaged,” Freedman said.

As the invasion of Iraq turned into an occupation, a new and deadly threat to U.S. troops emerged, one for which the U.S. was ill prepared: the roadside bomb.

This piece is a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers. Peter Cary is a freelance writer working for the Center. Nancy Youssef is the Pentagon correspondent for McClatchy.

So in February 2006, with casualties mounting, the Pentagon responded by creating a new agency designed to attack the problem by harnessing the full might of America’s technology community. The new organization was dubbed the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, and a retired four-star general was tasked to run it.

The launch of JIEDDO eventually turned what had been a 12-person Army anti-homemade bomb task force into a 1,900 person behemoth with nearly $21 billion to spend.

Yet after five years of work, hundreds of projects, and a blizzard of cash paid to some of America’s biggest defense contractors, JIEDDO has not found a high-tech way to detect or defeat these so-called Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) from a safe distance. In fact, the rate at which soldiers are able to find IEDs before they explode has remained mostly steady, at roughly 50 percent, since JIEDDO was formed. And while in the past few months the detection rate of IEDs has improved a bit, it is not clear whether this trend can be maintained.

JIEDDO’s outgoing director, Lt. General Michael Oates admits “there are no silver bullets that are going to solve this problem,” Indeed, the most effective IED detectors today are the same as before JIEDDO, and they don’t hum, whir, shoot, scan, or fly. They talk. And they bark. The best bomb detectors, Oates says, are still dogs working with handlers, local informants, and the trained soldier’s eye.

Oates nevertheless says that JIEDDO has scored numerous successes in the fight against IEDs and that its work has saved many soldiers’ lives. That is no doubt true. But objectively evaluating JIEDDO’s worth has been maddeningly difficult, its overseers say, as the secretive agency has violated its own accounting rules, failed to harness data on what works, and has often seemed loathe to disclose to Congress just how all that money was spent, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers. Critics say some of the agency’s projects were poorly chosen or managed. And not all soldiers feel they got tangible benefits from JIEDDO’s largesse.

One Marine who served in Afghanistan in 2009 said the only IED detectors supplied to his unit were hand-held devices similar to those used by beachcombers. He said whenever a convoy came to a place where IEDs might be buried, two Marines with detectors would walk up front and sweep.

“I remember thinking, ‘Here I am sitting in this quarter-million-dollar armed vehicle and we’re still out there searching for pennies on the beach,’ ” said Todd Bowers, a former staff sergeant and now deputy staff director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

An unexploded improvised device, found in a hole by an Army task force in Iraq.Bowers characterized the intelligence his unit received on IED emplacements as “very shaky.” He said the unit’s jammers designed to thwart radio-controlled IEDs were usually broken, and the dogs they were given were not trained to sniff ammonium nitrate, the key ingredient in homemade bombs in Afghanistan. “It was a struggle,” he said.