The Economics of Roadside Bombs

[Stan]

JIEDDO has asked me to do a follow-on study to confirm the results. They told me that nobody had yet studied the effect IED countermeasures have on non-IED attacks, and were quite interested (for fairly obvious reasons) in the possibility that this was an area in which nobody (including them) had previously recognized their contributions.

Sounds great ! Good luck with your presentation at the USCG Academy !

If someone's life, or hundreds of millions of dollars, rested on the question of whether the number of attacks made ineffective was 1,504 or 1,503, my paper would be of virtually no help in making such a decision. However, suppose the decision was about how much money to spend on jammers versus equipment that could reduce the effectiveness of non-IED attacks (say, more counterbattery radars). In that case, I think my paper would have something very interesting to say -- that we now know, with high probability, that you get a lot more bang for your buck than we have previously thought if you spend money on jammers. I don't think my paper has any direct applicability to anyone operating below the brigade level, but I think it has some interesting applications for assessing the relative merits of various systems that might be deployed.

I'm no economics expert, but have managed DOD budgets in excess of seven million and well below the brigade level. In short, your paper needed larger numbers to support an initially huge procurement. If we break those figures down to a single soldier's life versus the purchase of a single jamming device, the numbers quickly support the purchase:
Payment to soldier's beneficiary = $200,000 - $250,000
one each MILSPEC Signal Jamming Device = $60,000 - $85,000)

Now all we have to do is get a congressman's son into EOD and the rest of the procurement(s) will go like Sierra through a goose