Present-day Insecticide Resistance Management (IRM) strategies have decreased, prevented or delayed resistance to insecticides, and in particular the synthetic pyrethroids (SPs) in major cotton pests of Australia, Zimbabwe and Egypt. There is however insufficient knowledge of the way treatment tactics within these strategies work and our understanding of the selection pressures exerted by different treatments regimes is still inadequate. This paper examines some approaches to increase this knowledge and to improve the long-term prospects of IRM strategies.