Quote Originally Posted by Rank amateur View Post
Excellent point. I came to the opposite conclusion based on the data: that insurgents believe IEDs are by far their most effective method of attack. They only resort to other methods - less effective methods - when they've placed IEDs everywhere they can. As soon as we render IEDs ineffective, they devote all their resource to avoiding our counter measures and making IEDs effective again.
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?