Content area
Full text
Introduction
The United States and its partners will defeat terrorist organizations of global reach by attacking their […] leadership; command, control [….]
—US National Strategy for Combating Terrorism 2003(emphasis in original)
Targeting terrorist leaders has become a commonly used US counterterrorism policy since September 11. According to the US National Strategy for Counterterrorism 2018, “targeting key terrorists” remains the number one priority action. This policy is also referred to as targeted leader killing or “cutting off the head of the snake”—implying that if one does so, the body dies. As illustrated by the above quote, the underlying goal of this policy is to undermine control within terrorist organizations: the ability of terrorist leaders to determine what others in the organization do.
Terrorist leaders are primarily targeted using armed drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. These unmanned airplanes can surveil and identify individual targets and kill them. There have been over 6,700 US drones strikes worldwide to date. 1 Drone technology is spreading rapidly: 28 other countries have acquired weaponized drones in the last 10 years. 2
The prominence of targeted leader killing and the proliferation of drones invite the question whether this policy works to decrease terrorist violence. This paper addresses that research question. More precisely, it investigates how drone strikes killing terrorist leaders, thereby undermining control within terrorist organizations, affect terrorist attacks. 3
The effect of killing a terrorist leader on terrorist violence is theoretically ambiguous, and it depends on whether terrorist groups are modeled as unitary actors or not. Theoretical models that consider the terrorist group as unitary—as a single organism as the snake analogy would suggest—predict that killing a leader decreases the capacity of the group to commit attacks, and thereby terrorist violence (Powell 2007; Sandler and Arce 2003).
However, other theoretical models predict an increase in terrorist attacks after a drone hit on a terrorist leader. A first family of models treats the terrorist group as nonunitary and subject to problems of control. Principal-agent models by Shapiro (2013) and Abrahms and Potter (2015) suggest that leader killing undermines control of the new leader over the organization’s operatives, which could lead to increased terrorist violence if operatives have a greater preference for violence than the leader. Other families of models...