I find it hard to believe that the insurgents have really placed IEDs everywhere they can. First of all, the number of IEDs observed has varied drastically over time -- are they finding new places to put them? Second, why not just place more IEDs near each other and give EOD more work to do?
I think it's more likely that at some point, putting more IEDs in the ground is just not all that worthwhile (which I think is very close to what you are saying). Are you really getting a whole bunch more bang for your buck by daisy-chaining a seventh IED into a string of six? It'd probably be better to use those resources for some other activity.
It's exactly that kind of behavior that would lead to a causal impact of IED countermeasures on non-IED attacks -- that you can get those effects when the benefits of placing additional IEDs are low relative to the costs. I think your interpretation fits in quite nicely with my theory -- the question is explaining why I get the statistical result that IEDs are inferior (the insurgents do proportionally more of them when their total resources go down). Why wouldn't a reduction in insurgent resources cause them to scale back IED and non-IED attacks equally?
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