Not entirely true. Suicide bombers are ineffective if they have to trade one for one. IOW, they'r only really effective against concentrated formations. The solution, then, is in how your troops disperse themselves over the battlefield. I'd guess if your troops generally tried to keep 12-20 feet between themselves, the most a suicide bomber could get was one and a few injuries.

I'm not sure how realistic this strategy is, though, because it comes from playing video games . I would have to know more about how the military actually operates to say how feasible this is. For instance, it would make them more vulnerable to conventional attacks or mob violence.

The other way is to make the price of doing it so heavy that no one else would consider doing it. I'm referring to the mafia like tactic of killing the family of the bomber. I doubt how effective that would be, though, because these cannon fodder are bread on the mentality of revenge. Killing more people only offers more people more of a reason to want revenge. Israel seems to be having trouble figuring this one out.

You're right, though, kill them all could theoretically work. The problem with that is that it requires a level of barbarity that would make any country that did it a pariah. Would you trust a nation willing to kill an entire people?

The last strategy is to just tough it out. Take the hits, and continue to try to stem the tide of bombers by winning over the population. If that's not possible, and it would take a lot to make it so, then you just pull out and leave them to their own devices.

It would seem that suicide bombers are a problem with a binary solution: you can go to one extreme or the other, anywhere in between does little to solve the problem.

BlackGriffen