First off, thanks for all the comments! The more opinions I hear, the better I can make my paper.

Both my advisor and I got a kick out of this:
Quote Originally Posted by Stan View Post
I certainly never expected the Economics Department of William and Mary to cover IED and IEDD.
I admit, people usually look at me funny when I tell them I study the economics of national security. For the past couple of years, I have worked part-time for a DoD think tank in support of JIEDDO, collecting and organizing data on trends in the IED fight. However, this paper is entirely my own work, done on my own time, with no access to any data except what are available on the Internet. Anyone out there can replicate my study, down to counting the pixels on this JIEDDO PowerPoint presentation. (The data are also available from Rick Atkinson's Washington Post article on IEDD.) I wrote the paper because I think we have been measuring the success of countermeasures incorrectly, and that it is both interesting and important to do it right.

Stan, to respond to your comment: I agree that soldiers need to be taught more than the 9-line UXO in basic. However, my paper is not meant to be a survey of IEDD, it's looking at one relatively narrow issue: that jammers have done more than we previously thought to harm the insurgents. If we only look at the effect of jammers on IED attacks (as we have done in the past), we miss an important effect: that our using jammers reduces the resources the insurgents have to do small arms fire, rocket, mortar, and sniper attacks. My estimate is that we reduced the insurgents' capabilities such that they did at least 1,997 fewer non-IED attacks than they otherwise would have during July 2004-April 2007.

That takes me your point, Pat: in the paper, I estimate that at least 1,504 IED attacks that would have been effective were made ineffective by jammers during the time period, which is certainly an important effect. However, I don't think anyone has considered the effect above, on non-IED attacks -- that's where the value of my paper is. I am sure the insurgents switched triggers because of jammer use -- in fact, I use that switch to identify the causal link between jammers and non-IED attacks (since neither side can predict accurately what the other will do, the deployment of more jammers causes a random shock to insurgent behavior that acts like an experiment would -- obviously it is impossible to do a controlled experiment in this setting). I have no data on jammer use itself.

It's important to note that my estimates are lower bounds on the actual numbers. Jammers have probably had much more of an impact than what I measure. For one thing, I cannot measure how many additional attacks went unobserved as a result of jammer use (which is the jammers' primary effect).

I appreciate your taking the time to wade through my paper and make comments. I'd be interested in hearing any more thoughts that you have.

Matt Hanson