General Richard Cody, the army's vice chief of staff, nevertheless said U.S. casualties from so-called "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs, have dropped by 40 percent since a largely secret effort to develop defenses against them was launched 18 months ago.

"There's no silver bullet at this time," he told reporters. "We do have a combination of things we're doing. We are buying millions of dollars worth of jammers that are capable. So we're not waiting for the silver bullet."

Members of Congress have criticized the army for being slow to equip troops with jammers.

Cody said the army took money from other programs in December to buy 8,000 more jammers.

The army has checked out all commercially produced jammers, but they vary in effectiveness, he said, adding that few U.S. industries were making jammers before Iraq.

Statistics on every IED attack since October have been fed into a data base, yielding "great predictive pattern analysis," he said.

"We have seen a decline in effectiveness of the IEDs against us. But today or yesterday we lost two soldiers, and eight wounded. It's still out there," he said.

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