Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Roadside bombs are killing more American troops in Iraq, as the frequency and sophistication of insurgent attacks may be outstripping U.S. efforts to increase protection for soldiers.

So-called improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, killed 302 U.S. troops between Jan. 1 and Oct. 7, compared with 165 in the same period in 2004, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an Internet site with statistics based on official U.S. casualty reports. The number of U.S. armored vehicles in Iraq rose during that period to almost 39,600 from 16,548, according to the Army.

``It's a losing game because they can always build a bigger bomb,'' said Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a defense policy research group in Arlington, Virginia.

The insurgents are no longer using simple munitions, said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who has traveled to Iraq and written about the insurgency. Instead, they're using stacked landmines, several artillery shells wired together or specialized ``shaped'' charges that focus the area of impact and increase force, Cordesman said.

``The insurgents are already learning to counter `up- armoring,' and the Army can't possibly convert every truck or Humvee'' into an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle or M-1 tank, Cordesman said.

Goure said the U.S. is ``at the upper limits'' of what it can do with armor. ``We've done a good job, because without the armor increases, the casualty rates would be five times as high,'' he said.

Most of the IED casualties appear to have taken place inside armored vehicles, said Michael White, an analyst with the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count site. The group assembles its statistics from Pentagon news releases on bombings in Iraq.

No Army Disclosure

Army officials don't disclose statistics on IED casualties, saying that aids the enemy, and they declined to confirm the Iraq Coalition Casualty group's numbers. They don't dispute that IED deaths have increased even as armoring has accelerated, and they acknowledge that armor alone isn't enough.

``The IED threat has changed,'' General Ben Griffin, head of the Army Materiel Command, said in an interview. ``We've taken increased casualties over time from IEDs. You do the best you can with materiel fixes.''

Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan, director of the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, said in an e-mail, ``There is a misperception in the media and the public that if you are in an up-armored vehicle you are impervious to the battlefield.''

Number of Attacks

The number of attacks also has increased, particularly within the past several months before Iraq's Oct. 15 vote on a new constitution, Brigadier General Carter Ham of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters in Washington last week.

Gary Motsek, who tracks the status of armoring U.S. military vehicles for the Army Materiel Command, said that while there are more attacks, the odds of living through one have improved. ``You need to look at the total number of attacks versus casualties,'' Motsek said in an interview. ``The survivability has improved.''

In the spring of 2004, almost every IED attack resulted in a dead or wounded soldier, Brigadier General Jeffery Sorenson, the Army's deputy for acquisition, told the House Armed Services Committee.

That rate has dropped to one in four because of a ``holistic approach'' that includes the improved vehicle and body armor, electronic jammers and better training, Sorenson said May 5.

New Armor

Congress since 2003 has appropriated about $2.53 billion to build new Humvees and $2.21 billion for armoring other troop transports and trucks.

Separately, the Army has fielded more than 4,200 vehicle- mounted IED jammers, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on April 30 ordered the Army to bypass the standard acquisition process to buy up to 10,000 hand-held ``Scorpion'' jammers that are designed to foil remote-controlled explosives.

The controversy over protecting U.S. soldiers in Iraq began months after the U.S. invasion as wounded soldiers and their families complained of inadequate protection against remote- controlled roadside bombs.

Rumsfeld brought the issue to a boil with his response last December to a Tennessee national guardsman who complained that his unit had ``to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles.''

``You go to war with the Army you have,'' Rumsfeld said during a meeting with troops in Kuwait. The U.S. was producing all the armor it could as fast as it could, and providing more was ``a matter of physics, not a matter of money.''

Increasing Production

The day after Rumsfeld's comments, Robert Mecredy, president of Jacksonville, Florida-based Armor Holdings Inc.'s aerospace and defense group, said his company was able to increase production of heavily armored Humvees by 22 percent, or 100 vehicles a month.

Armor Holdings now turns out 550 armored Humvees per month, compared with 30 in May 2003, and the company expects production to increase to 650 in December. A total of 10,194 armored Humvees are now fielded in Iraq, compared with 5,910 in December, according to Army statistics given to Congress.

Through Sept. 16, Houston-based Stewart & Stevenson Services Inc. and Radian Inc., based in Alexandria, Virginia, also delivered new armor cabs or ``crew protection kits'' for about 4,262 trucks and other tactical vehicles. Only 479 were in the field last December.

Buffaloes and Cougars

Force Protection Inc., a company with 270 employees in Ladson, South Carolina, saw its revenue grow to $24 million in the first six months of this year from $2 million in 2002, based in large part on orders of specialized ``Buffalo'' armored mine- clearing vehicles and ``Cougar'' IED detection-and-jamming vehicles, Vice President Michael Aldrich said in an interview.

The armoring of U.S. troops has ``improved in terms of numbers,'' said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. ``We are almost there in terms of finally getting everybody who goes out from their post to have an armored vehicle.''

Even so, ``it took too long,'' Levin said in an interview. ``It was a massive failure of planning for a violent aftermath, which led to a lot of these problems.''

To contact the reporter on this story:
Tony Capaccio at acapaccio@bloomberg.net.