The chances that a religious terrorist group will collapse in the wake of a decapitation strategy are 17 percent. Of course, that’s better than zero, but it turns out that the chances of such a group fading away when there’s no decapitation are 33 percent. In other words, killing leaders of a religious terrorist group seems to increase the group’s chances of survival from 67 percent to 83 percent.
Makes some sense when you think about it. Kill off a leader and those that are left fight for the top spot, making the organization stronger.
Using that math, killing each successive leader increases the odds that the organization will collapse. Its not like we(or another government) take one shot at leadership, and then let the organization alone. So using that study alone, it supports the tactic of repeated hits directed at successive leadership in a terrorist organization.
Correction Mr. President, I DID build this, and please give Lurker a hug, we wouldn't want to damage his self-esteem.
You could look at it in the same fashion as when the FBI decapitates a stateside gang. Either the lower ranked people fight for the top spot and cause turmoil, or they splinter off creating smaller groups that are harder to isolate, but less of a threat overall.
If you read the linked report, you'll see the math shows that decapitating a long-lived religious terrorist group (Al Qaeda, Hamas, etc.) is 100% ineffective at causing the group to dissolve and has the side effect of increasing recruitment and popular support as well as increasing the rate at which the group can carry out attacks. This is markedly different to decapitating a young and non-religious group (such as the FBI arresting gang leaders) which frequently causes the groups to dissolve.
In short, historically it's not an effective strategy. Gary Hart's comments in the responses echo this:
As a veteran of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate the Intelligence Services of the U.S. (so-called Church committee), we discovered at least five official plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro with almost demented insistence. None of them worked, though the Diem brothers in Vietnam and Salvador Allende in Chile might argue otherwise. In no case did it work out well for the U.S. or its policy. Indeed, once exposed, as these things inevitably are, the ideals underlying our Constitution and the nation's prestige suffered incalculable damage. The issue is principle versus expediency. Principle always suffers when expediency becomes the rule. We simply cannot continue to sacrifice principle to fear.
Kill them, and their peers and relatives will take their place. That's the beauty behind it. The french resistance in WW2 didn't collapse just because the #1 bomb makers got captured/killed. These terr'sts aren't stupid. The knowledge and mission is spread to a large group of people who truly believe in it. If somebody drops the ball, another will be there shortly to pick it up. The harder we fight them, the more radical their sympathizers will get (as well). You can't kill a perspective.
Didn't your mama ever tell you not to tango with a carrot?
Sure you can. You just have to be brutal enough to do it. The Monguls did a great job of controlling a vast empire by putting down dissent with brutal reprisals. I'm talking like.....1 person from a village does something wrong so they would slughter every man woman and child in the village and then have surrounding villages come and witness the aftermath.
Yeah the Romans not only killed everyone, they spread salt in the fields so nothing would grow there. They not only killed you.....they killed your village.
Machiavelli said the same thing, and I'm not denying that total genocide doesn't do wonders for pacifying a nation. The point was really than anything short of that tends to unsatisfactory results.
The Romans didn't enage in genocide, nor did the Mongols. That would be bad for business. And salting the earth in the Roman times would be the same as "interdicting the supply chain" today. Gotta keep in proportion man.
Correction Mr. President, I DID build this, and please give Lurker a hug, we wouldn't want to damage his self-esteem.
The Mongols didn't kill entire villages, they killed all the leaders.
To clarify, if villages did not open their gates or surrdender, they would take out villages, but typically (from what I was recently reading in "Gengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World") they wanted to conquer and rule over them, not wipe out villages so generally they would kill all of the leaders and give the villagers the opportunity to be under Mongol rule.
