Terrorists don't seem to have a high sortie rate.
Interesting:
An analysis of post-World War II terrorism confirms that terror attacks depend on support staff to succeed, and that most terrorist cells, after their first few attacks, can carry out one or more a month. Oddly enough, most groups do not carry out more than a hundred attacks before they are destroyed or disbanded. To stop these groups from getting anywhere near a hundred attacks, you want to find them early, ideally, before they carry out their first attack. On average, you have about six months between the first attack and the second. That's when you have your best opportunity to take down the cell, and put their leaders and technical staff out of action.
The rate of attacks is what I'm most interested in.
I tried to figure out insurgent numbers during the Iraq War. See here (it's a huge recovered "post" so go to '"Insurgent Effectiveness" (Posted September 14, 2004)), here, here, and here. This was back-of-the-envelope stuff and not rigorous analysis. In that first post I took a stab at insurgent "effectiveness" as part of it.
During the Iraq War insurgencies I assumed a much higher
rate of attacks, when I was trying to estimate how many insurgents we
were facing. Although to the best of my memory I never ventured into using the assumed number of attacks per cell to estimate insurgent strength.
The average size of the groups is also important. As is the breakdown of full-time versus part-time insurgents. Full-time insurgents tend to be 10% of the insurgency, I think.
One thing I was partly wrong on was the idea that killing insurgents wasn't nearly as important as choking off the source of replacements. Killing the existing insurgents is actually important, but the key is killing the existing technical staff. They can't be replaced nearly as easily as mere trigger pullers.
But the next time I have to judge an insurgency's strength, I have the attacks-per-month estimate to work with.
NOTE: Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
