[gojomo]

Also, consider that the greatest threat is not from people who hope to live and accept a strategic risk of death. Rather, the greatest threat is from people who believe that death is the ultimate success, for both their worldly and otherworldly aims.

While a one-in-a-twenty chance of success sounds good from a terror chief's perspective, no suicide bomber wants a 95% chance of winding up in captivity, famous only as a failure. Out of the twenty, they want to be the one!

So plans that allocate many participants to expected capture will have far fewer volunteers. And every report of a capture will decrease potential-volunteers' willingness to sign up, because they will adjust upward their expectation of embarrassing capture rather than martyrdom.

[tptacek]

What AQHQ knows about the odds of success for a operation are and what some shmuck is told about the odds of success are two different and unrelated things.

[gojomo]

Even granting that the bombers are gullible and unstable, and that "AQHQ" will oversell them on the chances of success, they can see the actual track record, and the mere act of training them sensitizes them to all the ways things can go wrong.

There's also a tradeoff between their naivete and effectiveness: a bumpkin who's never traveled internationally might believe whatever his handlers tell him, but is also more likely to draw suspicion or otherwise foul the mission.