The Economics of Roadside Bombs
http://www.wm.edu/economics/wp/cwm_wp68.pdf
Quote:
The U.S. military has been criticized for its failure to stop the Iraqi insurgency’s use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have caused most of the Coalition casualties. We use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the insurgent responses to U.S. military countermeasures. We find that the number of IED attacks (including unobserved attacks) goes up
when attacks are made more costly to conduct, suggesting that IED attacks are inferior and may even be a Giffen good. A major benefit of IED countermeasures therefore comes in reducing non-IED attacks. Evaluations of the U.S. military’s $13 billion counter-IED effort have thus significantly understated its success.
True. They don't want to engage in direct attacks
at all if the can avoid it; their loss ratio is way too high. They are putting a lot of effort into keeping the IED attack route alive and well.
Also might consider the value of IEDs planted to disrupt versus those designed just to create noise / confusion versus those designed to specifically attack high value targets with significant PR value. For example, an AAVP with 28 troops versus a HMMWV with 2; an M1 Tank versus a fuel tanker -- even though the tanker is more tactically important than the tank, the tank has a far higher PR value to them.