Terrorist leaders are not about Terror

gwern

From "Academics Doubt Impact of Osama bin Laden’s Death":

"...Fifty-three percent of the terrorist organizations that suffered such a violent leadership loss fell apart — which sounds impressive until you discover that 70 percent of groups who did not deal with an assassination no longer exist.

Further crunching of the numbers revealed that leadership decapitation becomes more counterproductive the older the group is. The difference in collapse rates (between groups that did and did not have a leader assassinated) is fairly small among organizations less than 20 years old but quite large for those more than 20 years in age, and even larger for those that have been around more than 30 years.

Assassination of a leader does seem to negatively impact smaller terrorist groups: The data shows organizations with fewer than 500 members are more likely to collapse if they suffer such a leadership loss. But organizations with more than 500 members are actually more likely to survive after an assassination, making this strategy “highly counterproductive for larger groups,” Jordan writes."

From "Academics Doubt Impact of Osama bin Laden’s Death":

"...Fifty-three percent of the terrorist organizations that suffered such a violent leadership loss fell apart — which sounds impressive until you discover that 70 percent of groups who did not deal with an assassination no longer exist.

Further crunching of the numbers revealed that leadership decapitation becomes more counterproductive the older the group is. The difference in collapse rates (between groups that did and did not have a leader assassinated) is fairly small among organizations less than 20 years old but quite large for those more than 20 years in age, and even larger for those that have been around more than 30 years.

Assassination of a leader does seem to negatively impact smaller terrorist groups: The data shows organizations with fewer than 500 members are more likely to collapse if they suffer such a leadership loss. But organizations with more than 500 members are actually more likely to survive after an assassination, making this strategy “highly counterproductive for larger groups,” Jordan writes."

Cells are not so resilient that a bullet will simply separate them and leave them otherwise intact. It may or may not be possible in principle to tell "which cell goes where" if you were to separate them, but a bullet to the head doesn't even give you something that convenient to work with.

You're talking about a "creamed" brain - one in which the individual cells are separated from each other on an individual level. I was explicitly specifying a brain that is not creamed, but rather, we might say, shredded. I did admit that I didn't know the specifics, so I'm not 100% sure that a bullet merely shreds the brain. I'm no ballistics expert.

Remember paper shredding? We used to do this to hide secrets. Many people still do it. But it doesn't work any more. The shreds can be reconstructed. Now with scanners and computers the process can b... (read more)

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Terrorist leaders are not about Terror

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Terrorist leaders are not about Terror

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