The JihadsonsTechnology lessons from the Iraq war.

U.S. soldiers at an IED blast siteLast week, in a four-part series, Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post detailed the U.S. military's struggle against "improvised explosive devices" in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, IEDs have killed about 2,000 U.S. troops and wounded 20,000 more. From January to July, Atkinson counts more than 20,000 Iraqi roadside bomb attacks—"one every 15 minutes." To the extent that we're losing the war, IEDs are a major reason why. What can we learn from this humbling experience? Here are a few lessons.

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1. IEDs shift the orientation of war from space to time. Last year, after being briefed on IEDs, President Bush described them as a weapon chosen by Iraqi terrorists "to attack us from a safe distance, without having to face our forces in battle." That's not quite right. Attacking from a safe distance was the idea behind the previous guerrilla tactic: sniping. A sniper is hard to hit because he's hidden and far away. But there's a tradeoff: The safer his distance, the harder it is for him to deliver his bullet to the right spatial coordinates. The same goes for any artillery.

IEDs eliminate this tradeoff. The killer delivers his lethal charge exactly where he wants it. He achieves this by being at the chosen spatial coordinates at an earlier point in time. The only coordinate he has to worry about is temporal: when to set off the blast. He can watch the spot and detonate his bomb manually, or he can set it to blow automatically when you drive over it. Insurgents have done both. Some use infrared sensors to detonate when the first warm object passes overhead. Others time radio signals to take out approaching convoys. As Atkinson puts it: "A bomb with 100 pounds of explosives detonating beneath an armored vehicle was equivalent to a direct hit from a six-gun artillery battery, but with an accuracy no gunner could hope to achieve."

You can't defeat IEDs in space. You have to fight them in time. You have to find the killer—the "emplacer"—at the time coordinate when he's planting the bomb. U.S. forces have gradually learned this lesson. They're dispatching aerial drones to catch emplacers in the act. They're planting bugs and surveillance cameras. They're analyzing audio and video recordings of dangerous areas before they go in, to make sure there's no time coordinate at which somebody has booby-trapped the relevant space coordinates.

2. Morality is expensive. It's easier to destroy things than to preserve or build them. You just plant another bomb, slink away, and let the Americans worry about finding the needles in the haystack. It's even easier when you don't care whom you kill. With an automatic infrared trigger, you can be hundreds of miles away when your bomb goes off. If it wipes out a school bus, so be it. Meanwhile, senior American officers have withheld IED-fighting equipment, at mortal risk to their own troops, in part because it might damage Iraqi gas or power lines. That's the price of being nice.

Our technology, unlike the enemy's, has to be safe as well as effective. That takes time and money. Atkinson describes a device called JIN that was rejected in part because each unit, which cost $800,000, would be destroyed by any IED it detonated. But that cost pales next to the political price of U.S. casualties. The purpose of IEDs has been to kill enough Americans with enough regularity to make the public demand that our troops come home. The insurgents are winning because they care less about death than we do.

3. Machines are crucial to defeating terrorism. The main advantage of machines isn't that they're brilliant. It's that they don't bleed. Four years ago, the United States had six working military robots. Now it has 6,000. One mobile model detects explosives from molecules in the air. Others inspect and defuse suspected bombs—or get blown up trying. We can't stand death, so we replace our soldiers with lifeless proxies.

Spatially, robots are a way to be at the bomber's target location without really being there. Temporally, they're a way to knock the bomb off its time coordinate, detonating it before humans arrive. Atkinson describes how American electronic warfare planes "burn the route" in Iraq and Afghanistan, flying over roads and beaming radio signals to set off IEDs before convoys pass through.

4. Simplicity beats complexity. We have $800,000 custom-made gizmos that take years to design, build, test, and refine. The insurgents have consumer electronics. They turn artillery shells into bombs. They use fertilizer compounds, rice bags, and gas and propane canisters to make explosives. They enlist egg timers, washing-machine dials, cell phones, car key fobs, walkie-talkies, wireless doorbell buzzers, and toy remote controls as detonators.

One advantage of their approach is that it's cheaper. They can trade IEDs for robots all day. Another advantage is that it's constantly evolving. They don't need high-priced military contractors to upgrade their technology. The toy companies and cell-phone makers do it for them, and U.S. military countermeasures can't keep up. The third advantage is that simple technology is easier to teach to new users. You don't need an engineering degree to become a bomber. You just need to know the basics of key fobs or ham radio.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Photograph of soldiers by Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images.

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