interesting stuff
Matt--its a very interesting paper (and data!). Reading it, I had several thoughts.Originally Posted by mhanson
1) You treat all direct, non-IED attacks as the same--and argue that IED attacks are an inferior good, since insurgents would, if they had the resources, prefer to engage in direct fire attacks if they could.
What if direct attacks, however, are two separate goods: sniper-type attacks which are intended to inflict harm but not capture territory, and attacks intended to overrun/control territory? The former, it seems to me, are substitutable with IEDs by your logic (from the point of view of insurgent aims, if not technical capabilities).
You don't have any option, given the way the data is coded, but to treat them this way--but a footnote raising the question might be appropriate.
On a related note, I suspect that the "direct attack" numbers conflate cases where the insurgents were the initiator and those where they responded with direct fire to an immediate threat from coalition or Iraqi military activity. The latter isn't really a rational resource allocation, however. (Put differently, the data would code a successfully emplaced IED as an IED attack, but a firefight between a US patrol and the emplacers caught-in-the-act a short while earlier as a direct fire attack.)
2) You've modeled the insurgents as the consumers, responding changes in the cost of goods and income (resource availability). Would you be led to similar or different conclusions if they were treated as competitive firms responding to high and price inelastic consumer demand?
3) You assume that all IED have similar costs. It might be argued that the cost of PP and and CW triggered IEDs was "lower" than RC, PI and CP triggers (in terms of material cost and technical expertise). Conversely, it could be argued that the cost of LPRC and CW triggered IEDs was "higher" (given the greater risk involved in deploying the trigger team closer to IED site).
4) PI and PP systems have less tactical discrimination than do command-detonated systems, and hence their utility may change depending on the nature of the fighting (maintaining a defensive perimeter in a Fallujah-type battle, compared to harassment attacks on commonly used public thoroughfares). Can "blips" be detected in their use that corresponded to the nature of combat operations at a given time? Similarly, it is my completely uninformed understanding that PI triggers have been particularly associated with EPF use, especially by Shi'ite militias (I could well be wrong), in which case fluctuations in their use might relate to broader political issues.
5) How sure can you be that insurgents measure "effectiveness" in the same way your data does? One can imagine that an IED detonation which creates a sense of insurgent presence and threat, but which fails to kill or seriously wound, might be considered a "successful" outcome.
6) You might explicitly identify other competing explanations as to why IED attacks have climbed and NIED have fluctuated--and suggest why your inferior/Giffen good argument gives a better explanation of the data. (One way of testing this would be to break the data down by region: your findings should be fairly consistent across locations, while arguments focused on say, insurgent politics or operational strategy would predict significant regional variation). At first, a stronger predictor or NIED attacks is the wave of sectarian violence that followed the February 2006 al-Askari mosque bombing.
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