Abstract
This chapter examines the effectiveness of leadership decapitation as a counterterrorism tool. Several States have put decapitation tactics—those that seek to kill or capture the leader of an organization—at the forefront of their counterterrorism efforts. However, most of the scholarly work on decapitation suggests it is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Using survival analysis to measure decapitation effectiveness against an original dataset, this chapter shows that decapitation significantly increases the mortality rate (the rate at which groups end) of terrorist groups. The results indicate that the effect of decapitation on terrorist group mortality decreases with the age of the group, even to a point where decapitation may have no effect on the group’s mortality rate, which helps explain the previously perplexing mixed record of decapitation effectiveness. Additionally, this work puts forth a theoretical justification for why terrorist groups are especially susceptible to decapitation tactics and challenges the conventional wisdom regarding terrorist group durability, showing that politically relevant terrorist groups last significantly longer than previously believed.
This is an updated version of the article, Price B (2012) Targeting Top Terrorists: How Leadership Decapitation Contributes to Counterterrorism. International Security 36(4):9–46 (reprinted and edited with permission of the author and the publisher).
The views expressed in this chapter do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army or the Department of Defense.
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Notes
- 1.
For this study, I defined terrorist groups as organizations consisting of more than one person that engaged in violence with a political purpose that is aimed at evoking a psychological reaction in an audience that extends beyond the targeted victims. My definition does not include ‘lone wolf’ terrorists (e.g., Ted Kaczynski) because my focus is on the organizational dynamics of terrorist organizations.
- 2.
E.g. Colombia (FARC ), Turkey (PKK), Russia (Chechyan groups), France (FLN in Algeria).
- 3.
- 4.
Byman 2006, pp. 103–104.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Miller 2011.
- 8.
Shane 2010.
- 9.
Mazzetti 2011.
- 10.
Byman 2006, pp. 102–103.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
David 2002, p. 8.
- 16.
- 17.
Cronin 2008, p. 27.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
Zald 1965, pp. 52–60.
- 27.
For an excellent review of the literature on this subject, see Carroll 1984.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 96.
- 29.
One notable exception is Carroll 1984.
- 30.
Langdon et al. 2004, for example, lump terrorist groups, religious organizations, guerrilla, and revolutionary movements into the same study.
- 31.
Pedahzur discusses how violent organizations such as terrorist groups and militaries share this unique cohesion built around dangerous missions, in his book, Suicide Terrorism. Pedahzur 2005, pp. 41–42.
- 32.
Grusky 1960, pp. 105–115.
- 33.
Max Weber referred to these means of authority as the rational (legal or formal) and traditional forms. See Weber 1947.
- 34.
Bahnsen 2001, p. 274.
- 35.
Chasdi 1999.
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
As one former Navy intelligence analyst noted, ‘[t]errorist organizations do not have organizational charts. They have relationships, and if you can understand those relationships you have gained valuable intelligence’. See Bender 2007.
- 39.
Iqbal and Zorn 2008, pp. 385–400.
- 40.
Galanter and Forest 2006.
- 41.
Kenney 2007, p. 145.
- 42.
Seale 1992.
- 43.
Clarridge 1997, p. 336.
- 44.
Harmon 2007, p. 57.
- 45.
This affects other clandestine organizations such as drug cartels as well. See Hyder 2004, pp. 40–46, specifically for the description of Pablo Escobar’s tenure.
- 46.
Janis 1972.
- 47.
McCormack 2003.
- 48.
Burns 1978.
- 49.
Ibid., at p. 20.
- 50.
- 51.
Aminzade et al. (2001, p. 152).
- 52.
House and Singh 1987, p. 686.
- 53.
House 1977.
- 54.
House and Singh 1987, p. 691.
- 55.
House 1977, p. 204.
- 56.
Shapiro 2007.
- 57.
Crenshaw 1988, p. 19.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Ibid. See also Crenshaw 1996, p. 263.
- 60.
Weber 1947, pp. 363–373.
- 61.
Dawson 2002, p. 83.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Terrorist Organization Profiles (TOPS) database available at: http://www.start.umd.edu/tops/.
- 64.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2010.
- 65.
Hyder 2004, p. 45.
- 66.
Price 2012.
- 67.
Carroll 1984, p. 6.
- 68.
The dataset, as well as all of the tables, figures, and appendices associated with this article, can be found at http://www.bryancprice.com/Data.html.
- 69.
Some of these groups were founded prior to 1970, but all were active for at least part of the period from 1970 to 2008.
- 70.
My initial criterion consisted of five attacks. Although my results were consistent with the finding using four attacks, my sample size was much larger when I lowered the attack threshold to four.
- 71.
Several datasets in political science employ similar filters. For example, many scholars studying civil wars use coding criteria that include conflicts featuring at least 1000 total deaths and 100 deaths per year. I felt that limiting my dataset to groups that have killed at least one person and have conducted four attacks would be a fair demonstration of organizational capability.
- 72.
Including leaders at all levels would be an improvement over this study, but it is too difficult to accomplish using open source material. I encourage other researchers, particularly those with access to classified information, to include all levels of leadership.
- 73.
For example, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) was one of several terrorist groups in El Salvador that joined forces to form the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 1980. Because the FMLN conducted attacks under its umbrella name, I included it as a separate group in the dataset with a start date of 1980 and an end date of 1991, when it signed a peace agreement with the government. Instead of coding the FALN’s end date at the time of the merger in 1980, I gave it the same end date as the FMLN in 1991.
- 74.
Two examples of these groups include the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. Both groups are on the 2005 US Foreign Terrorist Organizations list and the United Kingdom’s Proscribed List of terrorist organizations, but they did not have at least four attacks recorded in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) or MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB). Additionally, I utilized left-censoring for any groups with start dates prior to 1970.
- 75.
Supra note 68.
- 76.
The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is available at http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/.
- 77.
The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB) can be found at the TOPS database at http://www.start.umd.edu/tops/.
- 78.
Websites operated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, www.satp.org, and the Northern Ireland Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN), http://cain.ulst.ac.uk, as well as the dataset created by RAND scholars Jones and Libicki, were also consulted and cross-checked for accuracy. See Jones and Libicki 2008.
- 79.
It is important to note that starting in 2008, I assume the State knows about the group and therefore targets it even though the group may not have met all of the criteria for inclusion into the dataset in this first year (i.e., conducted at least four attacks and killing at least one person). Some, of course, do meet this criterion. I thank Kenneth Schultz for bringing this to my attention.
- 80.
Supra note 63.
- 81.
Supra note 68.
- 82.
Barnett and McKendrick 2004, pp. 535–571.
- 83.
Jackson 2006, pp. 241–262.
- 84.
Hutchinson and O’Malley 2007.
- 85.
Brian Jackson’s work on the difficulty of characterizing terrorist organizations as purely hierarchical or purely decentralized speaks to this point. Ultimately, it is a question of degree; rarely can one label a group as being purely hierarchical or purely decentralized. Instead, Jackson recommends examining the quality and quantity of a group’s command and control linkages to better understand the structure. This, however, is often difficult to accurately determine as well. For more information, see Jackson 2006.
- 86.
In addition to coding leaders and co-leaders, I coded founders and follow-on leaders in previous work (Price 2009). Although terrorist groups are 70 % more likely to survive when one or more of their founders lead the organization, there is no statistically significant difference between the mortality rates of groups with founders at the helm and those with successor leaders in charge.
- 87.
- 88.
Cronin 2002/2003, pp. 41–42.
- 89.
Hoffman 2002, p. 171.
- 90.
Richardson 2006, p. 48.
- 91.
Post 1990, p. 35.
- 92.
Crenshaw 1988, p. 27.
- 93.
For example, one could argue that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) advocates both nationalist/separatist and Marxist-Leninist ideologies. Hamas is both nationalist and Islamist.
- 94.
Jones and Libicki 2008.
- 95.
As a robustness check, I also ran a Cox model with the ideologies as they were coded in the TOPS dataset. Ideology in this dataset was coded as nine types: anarchist, anti-globalist, socialist/communist, environmental, leftist, nationalist/separatist, racist, religious, right-wing conservative, right-wing reactionary, and other. Because the results exhibited no major changes and because the RAND typologies are easier to comprehend, I used the RAND ideologies.
- 96.
- 97.
Gladwell 2002, p. 180.
- 98.
- 99.
Jones and Libicki 2008.
- 100.
- 101.
This method is consistent with other works in political science. See, for example, Fearon and Laitin 2003, pp. 75–90. While admittedly an imperfect measure, because no other studies of leadership decapitation have attempted to control for a State’s counterterrorism capability, I felt that using an imperfect measure was better than ignoring the issue. Fortunately, averages were only needed for 37 groups in my dataset (17 %), 11 of which include averaging the counterterrorism capacities of Ireland and the United Kingdom for many of the terrorist groups operating in Northern Ireland.
- 102.
As an example, for al-Qaeda, I used the GDP per capita of the United States, United Kingdom and Pakistan.
- 103.
In Resolution 1373, the UN developed evaluation criteria for State counterterrorism capacity, which obligated member States to revise laws and enhance their law enforcement capability. Additionally, the UN encouraged States to sign and ratify twelve counterterrorism conventions. UNSC Res. 1373, 28 September 2001. The UN’s counterterrorism program, however, suffers from several weaknesses. The resolution contains vague language (e.g., the resolution states that a member State must have ‘the administrative capacity to enforce various counter-terrorism mandates’) and no mechanism for evaluating compliance. According to a report, ‘[e]valuating whether states are actually implementing these conventions and complying with the requirements of Resolution 1373 is a difficult challenge. There are no agreed criteria for evaluating implementation capabilities, or determining what additional steps a state should take to achieve compliance’. See Cortright 2005. Therefore, I did not find compliance with these conventions to be a better measure than GDP per capita.
- 104.
- 105.
I thank Martha Crenshaw for pointing this out.
- 106.
Polity IV: Regime Authority Characteristics and Transitions Datasets, Integrated Network for Social Conflict Research (INSCR). Available at: http://www.systemicpeace.org//inscr/inscr.htm.
- 107.
- 108.
- 109.
Cronin 2008, p. 30.
- 110.
Hutchinson and O’Malley 2007, p. 6.
- 111.
Ganor 2005.
- 112.
Ibid., at p. 128.
- 113.
Ibid.
- 114.
The Cox proportional hazards model is the most widely used model in survival analysis, not only because it can accommodate censored data and time-varying covariates, but also because it is a semi-parametric model that allows researchers to use event history analysis without knowing the exact distribution function of failure times. If a researcher knew that the risk a terrorist group endures from a decapitation event would always increase or decrease with time, then parametric models such as the Weibull model or the exponential model would be preferable. If, however, there is any doubt as to what the distribution function of failure times is, as is the case with terrorist groups and decapitation events, the Cox model is a better choice. See Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, p. 21.
- 115.
Ibid., at pp. 13–14.
- 116.
Ibid., at p. 48.
- 117.
The standard errors reported below the hazard ratios are for the coefficients from which the hazard ratios were derived, not the hazard ratios themselves.
- 118.
This is because Cox models do not have an intercept term. All results are interpreted relative to the baseline hazard rate. For more information, see Therneau and Grambsch 2000.
- 119.
Kaplan=Meier (K-M) estimates are maximum likelihood estimators that allow researchers to approximate survival functions of populations over time, even when individual subjects drop out of the study. In this case, it computes the number of terrorist groups that have ended at a certain point, divided by the number of terrorist groups still remaining in the study.
- 120.
The mean survival time for terrorist groups in this study differs drastically from David C. Rapoport’s widely cited claim that 90 % of all terrorist groups survive less than a year, with nearly half of the remaining groups unable to survive more than a decade. See Rapoport 1992, p. 1067. Many scholars, including top names in the field, have referenced this estimate so much that it has become the conventional wisdom. Rapoport did not include any empirical evidence to support his claim, however. In his defence, his sentence reads: ‘Perhaps as many as 90 % last less than a year’ (emphasis added), which leads me to believe he never intended it to be taken as a bold empirical fact. Although it is possible that his estimate is correct if one considers the overly inclusive number of politically inconsequential groups that have committed few, if any attacks, or in some cases, only threatened attacks, this does not give policymakers an accurate assessment of the durability of politically relevant terrorist groups.
- 121.
Horowitz 2010.
- 122.
Jordan 2009, p. 727.
- 123.
- 124.
- 125.
Sheridan 2011.
- 126.
Ibid.
- 127.
Sageman 2008.
- 128.
Gorman and Entous 2011, p. 1.
- 129.
Sheridan 2011.
- 130.
Lahoud 2013.
- 131.
Wright 2006, p. 217.
- 132.
Jordan 2009, p. 754.
- 133.
Ibid., at p. 723.
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Price, B. (2016). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation Tactics Against Terrorist Groups. In: Ducheine, P., Schmitt, M., Osinga, F. (eds) Targeting: The Challenges of Modern Warfare. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-072-5_12
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