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."

Do we know how to reason about that other information?

Certainly to an extent we would. If we looked in the data above and noticed a dramatic difference between African and Middle Eastern based terrorist data, we may want to add that variable to our model such that it considers (size, age, location). Data modelling techniques are generally useful. Random Decision Forests and that sort of thing. Humans are pretty good at generating hypothesis from sparse data because they have good 'common sense' understanding of the causality structure of the world.

I wouldn't claim that we'll have a particularly accurate resul... (read more)

0Nornagest16y

Well, we have theories about how to work with it. But the study of terrorism has one of the highest words:applications ratios I've ever heard of, and unambiguous successes seem thin on the ground despite a large volume of theory. Of course, it's also possible that the limits of information availability are distorting my picture of the field. The US Army's FM 3-24 on counterinsurgency operations might be the best summary of the mainstream perspective (whatever that means in this context) that I've read, adjusting for its authorship, age, and goals.