Wayne Johnson was fresh out of Vanderbilt University when he deployed to the Middle East as an Army combat engineer, landing in a relatively cushy post in Iraq that had a swimming pool. He had something else in mind for his tour of duty and insisted on a transfer to the most dangerous assignment the Army had for someone with his training.

That’s how Johnson, now a postdoctoral business scholar at the University of Utah, wound up leading a route-clearance platoon in eastern Afghanistan in 2010, whose mission was to detect and disarm the IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, that were killing and maiming so many U.S. troops along roadways.

“I went into the military and specifically volunteered for the highest mortality, bloodiest, worst job I could find,” he said, “because that’s where I felt I could do the best and also I thought that would be the way for me to understand suffering, to understand fear and misery and desperation.”

A trial by fire

It was a trial by fire. In his first few weeks on the new assignment, Johnson’s platoon lost four trucks, including a massive, heavily armored Buffalo, to roadside blasts. None of his men died, but Johnson, a 25-year-old second lieutenant, realized these engagements with the enemy could have been catastrophically worse had things gone a little differently.

He also soon realized the bomb-detecting tactics the Army was teaching, which were tailored to Iraq’s urban landscapes, were not right for Afghanistan, where the unpaved roads and terrain, mountainous and rural, resulted in a much different battle space.

Instead of trying to detect bombs from the seemingly safe interior of a Buffalo, Johnson theorized it would be more effective and safer to walk directly in the road where the bombs were buried, with eyes close to the ground looking for telltale signs of a concealed bomb, wires in the dirt, depressions in the road surface, dark spots that could indicate fresh digging, anything out of place.

From the battlefield to academia

“Some guys thought, ‘That’s really stupid’ and they had a point. The road was essentially a linear minefield; walking it greatly increased a known risk for an unknown potential benefit of increased ability to find and stop IEDs from exploding. One of my squad leaders said, ‘You will not survive two weeks if you do this,’” said Johnson, who retired from the Army as a major in 2022 after 20 years of service and joined the Eccles School of Business’s Department of Management.

But he did survive his tour in Afghanistan, as did all the Soldiers under his immediate command, even as their success in detecting bombs soared using methods that would have been considered suicidal and a violation of current military doctrine in Iraq.

By the time his tour ended, he and his Soldiers had developed new bomb-detecting tactics tailored to Afghanistan, which was completely different than Iraq where the vast bulk of training and doctrine was based at the time. These new tactics proved extremely effective, but Johnson was surprised at how difficult it was to persuade others to accept the change, even those who were sent to him specifically for training. It took five months to develop a new system, but five years to get that system widely taught and accepted. This experience was formative for him because he realized a key bottleneck for innovation may not be coming up with a solution so much as getting a solution implemented.

This wartime experience shaped his research interests at Cornell University, where he earned his doctorate, and now at the U. Earlier this year, Johnson published a study about innovation that looked at the dynamics surrounding the acceptance of novel ideas, such as those he developed to thwart IED bombers.

Between 2011 and 2020, IEDs killed 1,790 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq and 828 in Afghanistan, accounting for about half of American combat deaths that decade, according to ReliefWeb, an international information clearinghouse for humanitarian groups. The civilian toll was much higher.

Johnson’s life-saving insights were first sparked by witnessing an IED strike on a 25-ton Buffalo truck in Logar Province.

“When the bomb hit it, it went into the air and landed some distance away, 15 or 20 feet. Who knew where the tires went but we eventually found them,” he said. “One of the dangers about being near a vehicle when it gets hit with an explosive is all its pieces become shrapnel and, of course, the guys inside are hurt. The screaming of a wounded man is something that really grates on you. It really gets in your circuits.”

The human guinea pig

Johnson felt personally responsible since it was his job to detect the bombs that nearly killed his comrades. He set out to find a better way.

Combat engineers in Iraq were using techniques that made sense where the roads were paved and metal-bearing bombs were concealed in the trash or dead animals or walls. The crews remained in their vehicles and used blowers and other tools to expose IEDs.

“Iraq tends to have heavily paved roads and IEDs were made from traditional military munitions because Saddam was loose with his inventory. The bombs are rarely buried. And if they are, you could use the ground-penetrating radar to spot this heavy metal signature in the sand,” Johnson said. “But in Afghanistan, most of the roads weren’t paved, and the bombs were hand-packed fertilizer in plastic jugs and buried.”

So Johnson theorized the best way to find the bombs was to walk the roads ahead of the vehicles, eyes on the ground, rifle at the ready. That seemed like a great way to get killed. Accordingly, he wouldn’t order his men to do it, unless he was doing it himself. Basically, he became a “guinea pig” to test his theories.

“That wasn’t doctrine. If I force a man who doesn’t want to do something that greatly endangers him against military doctrine, if something happens to him, I get in trouble. I could get prosecuted,” Johnson said. “Maybe I go to prison because I was criminally negligent, irresponsible with my Soldiers. I said, ‘Well, they can’t put me in prison if I’m dead.’”

A better way was found. Now what?

Paradoxically, his practice of walking the roads, looking for visual cues and using hand tools to expose bombs turned out to be a safer way to do the Army’s most dangerous job.

“If a 500-pound bomb goes off underneath you, and you aren’t in an armored vehicle, you are pink mist,” he said. “That’s the reason, of course, why people stay in the vehicle. If they’re wrong, if they miss something, then they have some protection. But for me, I’d rather find the bomb than hamper my ability to find it, and then take my chances that my vehicle’s armor can protect me from the blast.”

When he started his assignment, he was told a “good” find-to-detonation ratio was 1-to-1, meaning that for every IED Army engineer safely neutralized, one explodes, exposing troops to potentially lethal harm.

“If you find half of them, that’s about average,” Johnson said. “I thought, ‘That doesn’t seem like a good ratio to me.’”

Under Johnson’s command, his platoon raised its find-to-detonation ratio to 23-to-one.

“We stopped losing trucks and we stopped having what they called strikes,” he said. “Then more people decided to join this because they saw it was safer.”

The Army summoned him to Kabul and to the Army Research Laboratory to explain his methods to researchers and teach others. Still, it would take five more years for that course to be formally taught across the globe. Johnson describes this experience as having five weeks to generate the idea, five months to refine it, and five years to persuade others to implement it.

Now Johnson is researching moral certainty and how it could be reinforcing the political divide pushing Americans apart. Again, his inquiries are guided by his experiences in war, where Soldiers are often forced to make split-second decisions of life and death, and then wrangle with the consequences. Stay tuned.