[04/25/03]Computer software that can help military commanders imagine and manage the risks of terrorism is likely being used in Iraq, the program’s Vicksburg-based leader said.

The software uses computer graphics to help users visualize where and how potential terrorist attacks could affect their military installations or armed forces in transit. And it guides users through a standardized method for planning to mitigate such effects.

“We’re trying to get it down to the field level, so each post has somebody trained to use AT planner,” said Col. Jerry G. Love, the Vicksburg-based director of the U.S. military’s Joint Antiterrorism/Force Protection Program.

Love and his full-time staff of about 10, based on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Waterways Experiment Station site, have been working on the program since before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he said. The program is based on research in progress at the site since at least 1983, when terrorists exploded bombs in Beirut, Lebanon, Corps public affairs officer Wayne Stroupe said.

Love’s team is due to deliver the full program about a year from now, but parts of it have already been distributed, in CD-ROM form, to military commanders for use on personal computers at installations at home and abroad.

“Cent Com grabbed this,” Love said, referring to U.S. Central Command, the unified combat command that recently brought about regime change in Iraq. The software program’s Antiterrorism Planner component is probably in use “in every palace in Iraq,” Love said.

“It’s one of the key blast-analysis tools,” Love said.

The program was in danger of being scrapped before the Sept. 11 attacks, Love said. A release from Mississippi State University, a unit of which has helped develop the program’s interface and other components, said it was quickly thereafter allocated $10 million over three years.