US must kill and capture terrorist leaders as soon as possible. It works.

In this case, my “patients” were 208 terrorist groups that were active from 1970 to 2008, and “leadership decapitation” was my “treatment.” The findings were robust and consistent. Killing or capturing leaders of terrorist organizations significantly shortened the life span of these groups.

This holds true for groups of different sizes and ideologies, although relative differences exist between types of groups. For example, religious groups are 80 percent less likely to dissolve than nationalist groups based on ideology alone. However, religious groups were almost five times as likely to collapse as nationalist groups after losing their leadership to a targeted killing or capture.

Moreover, the earlier in its life cycle that a terrorist group loses its leadership, the more likely it is to collapse. Killing or capturing a terrorist leader in the first year of a terrorist group’s existence makes the group more than eight times as likely to crumble as a group that retains its leadership. The detrimental effects on a group from loss of leadership diminish by 50 percent in the first 10 years, and after 20 years, killing or capturing a leader may have no effect on the group at all.

Therefore, states that choose to employ this method of eliminating leadership as a counterterrorism tactic should allocate their resources accordingly, concentrating their time and money on killing and capturing leaders of terrorist groups as early in their existence as possible.

Additionally, contrary to a widely cited claim that 90 percent of all terrorist groups last less than one year, I found terrorist groups to be much more durable. The mean lifespan of the groups that collapsed some time during the period of 1970 to 2008 was approximately 14 years.

If terrorist groups last longer than previously believed, then tactics such as killing or capturing leadership, which can increase groups’ mortality rates, deserve special attention. Politicians may ultimately determine the short-term costs associated with this strategy outweigh the benefits, but my findings suggest that the long-term implications of targeted killings need to be part of the decision-making calculus.

It has been said that terrorism will never end, but that terrorists groups do. Getting rid of their leadership makes them end sooner – a fact that policymakers should consider when crafting counterterrorism strategy.

Bryan C. Price, Ph.D., a major serving in the US Army, will serve as the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point this summer. His article, “Targeting Top Terrorists: How Leadership Decapitation Contributes to Counterterrorism,” appears in the Spring 2012 issue of International Security.

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