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Tactical Prevention of Suicide Bombings in Israel

Yale School of Management; Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale School of Medicine; Yale Faculty of Engineering, Box 208200, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8200
IDC–Herzliya; Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843-4348
Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 68878, Israel
edward.kaplan{at}yale.edu
amintz{at}polisci.tamu.edu
mishal{at}post.tau.ac.il

Suicide bombings are the leading cause of death from terrorism in Israel. Counterterror tactics, such as the targeted killings or preemptive arrests of terror leaders or suspects, are meant to prevent such attacks. To investigate whether these tactics are successful, we estimated via maximum likelihood a family of shot-noise models from monthly data covering 2001 through 2003 to see whether we could predict the rate of suicide-bombing attacks as a function of prevention tactics over time. Although preventive arrests appear to lower the rate of suicide-bombing attacks, targeted killings seem to be followed by an increase in the number of suicide bombings. In addition, limited evidence suggests that the probability of intercepting a suicide bomber en route to an attack increases with the expected number of suicide-bombing attacks. Such an endogenous relationship could imply an upper limit on the rate of successful suicide bombings.

Key Words: military: tactics and strategy; probability: applications

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				D. Jacobson and E. H. Kaplan Suicide Bombings and Targeted Killings in (Counter-) Terror Games Journal of Conflict Resolution, October 1, 2007; 51(5): 772 - 792. [Abstract] [PDF]