The Team House - The Future of Counterterrorism w/ Dr. Bryan Price | EYES ON PODCAST

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseBryan served for 20 years as a U.S. Army officer, retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2018. He was a 3-year starter and captain of the baseball team at the U.S. Military Academy, earning Patriot League All-Decade team in the process. Bryan was commissioned as an aviation officer and flew the AH-64D Apache Longbow while serving in a variety of command and staff positions in the first half of his career, including combat deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.  The Army sent Bryan to Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D. in political science in just three years, before serving as an Academy Professor and the Director of the Combating Terrorism Center from 2012-2018. In this capacity, Bryan briefed the nation’s most senior leaders about the Center’s counterterrorism research, and in 2016 he was invited to testify in front of Congress about the lessons learned from U.S. counterterrorism since 2001. Bryan’s research focused on terrorist group leadership, and his book Targeting Top Terrorists was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. —————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:Ketone IQ ⬇️https://ketone.com/TEAMHOUSE for 30% off your first subscription and a free 6 pack!____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#smuBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Yo, what's up guys? Today's episode is sponsored by MyBooky. I don't know if many of you know, but I'm a bit of a gambler. I do enjoy a bit of sports betting, a bit of other types of betting on my downtime like I'm sure most of us do.

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Good morning, everyone. and welcome to another episode of Eyes On. I'm Jason Lyons. I'm Andy Bullden. I am on mute. I'm Dimitri. Hello, guys. Thank you.

We thought we'd started off a little different today with a different type of sexy voice. So that's your morning chocolate for you all. So we have a special guest that is always with us today and one that's near and dear to my heart. I always get this part wrong. So Dr. Brian Price, but also Lieutenant Colonel retired, correct? Brian Price.

He is currently, can we hold on one second? I got to kick this Roomba across the room. Hold on one second. Yeah, kick that thing. Hey, we can't hear it. I could hear it. Could you? Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, by the way, the background noise in the last one was not me with Jim LaPorter. I saw your notes afterwards. Oh, yeah, yeah. I couldn't hear it over my headphones, but it was not coming from my background. I could have been gym. Yeah, it could have been gym.

It's okay. The stupid Rumba. So you only just keep going or restart? You can start from the top. All right, you're ready? Yeah. Yeah. Good morning.

Although you did a great job first time round, but we've got. It was good. It was good. Better than Ains. We'll see you went for a dump. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to another episode of Eyes On. I'm Jason Lyons. I'm Andy Moulburn.

I'm Dimitri con tacos. And we have a special, special guest with us today. And I say two specials because this one is near and dear to my heart. We have a doctor and retired lieutenant colonel, Army Lieutenant Colonel, have to differentiate there. Brian Price, he is currently the founder and CEO, I guess, of Top Mental Game LLC. And we will talk about that a little bit, what that entails.

So before starting a top mental game, I'm reading here, paraphrasing a little bit, Brian served for 20 years as a U.S. Army officer, retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2018. He was a three-year starter and captain of the baseball team at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. And while he was there, he earned the Patriot League all-decade team in the process. He was commissioned as an aviation officer and flew the age 64D, a passenger. G. Longbow and served in a variety of command and staff positions. First part of his career, including combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was then sent to Stanford University and the Army sent you there, correct? Right. Okay. Where he earned a PhD in political science in just three years over a cheer achiever before serving as an academy professor and also, which is awesome, the director of the Combating Terrorism Center from 2012 to 2018. And this capacity, He briefed the nation's most senior leaders about the Center's Counterterrorism Research. And in 2016, he was invited to testify in front of Congress about the lessons learned from U.S. counterterrorism since 2001.

I'm sure that was so much fun. His research focused on terrorist group leadership. And your book, Targeting Top Terrorists, was published in 2019, correct? And that focused on, was that leadership, terrorism leader, terrorist leadership? Yeah, like leadership decapitation of terrorist groups and its effects. Okay. And then something that I did not know. When you retired, you became the founding executive director of the Buccino Leadership Institute, comprehensive four-year leadership program at Seton Hall University, known for innovative approach to experiential learning. Just a little something about your awards. You were given the Innovation and Teaching Award, which is presented. by the Mid-Atlantic Association of Colleges of Business Administration in 2021.

Awesome. So what did I miss? Well, first off, thanks for having me on this. And thank you for that little dose of chocolate. And the dulcet tones of Jason Lyons should wake everybody up. Or get you pregnant. Whatever. You went there.

I did not, Jason said that's good. But to Andy and Dee, thank you for having me. And Jason and I grew up together, so I'll put that out there at front. But he's always been someone I've looked up to a lot and not just his Marine Corps experience, but just how he carries himself as a person. So I'm thrilled to be on here. In terms of you got almost all of it. My joke is when I was in the military, I spent almost a large portion of those 20 years,

focused on the worst kind of leadership, which is understanding terrorist group leadership. And then after I retired, I've kind of pivoted towards trying to develop great leaders, right? And so part of that was at the Basina Leadership Institute at Seton Hall. And we were named the nation's number one leadership development program by the Association of Leadership Educators in 2022. That's one thing that was not in there that I'll just throw out there as a plug. and then since then I've been able to work as the founder and president of top metal game. And that organization is relatively interesting in terms of the development of leaders because it's in a couple different areas. It's eclectic. So I think of my business right now in thirds.

A third of it, I work with athletes on elite mental performance and how to perform under pressure and there's a little sprinkling of leadership development there. The other third is doing corporate leadership development. So speaking, facilitating, doing those things for Fortune 500 companies and the like. And then the last third is executive coaching. So I think I was talking to you guys in the pre-show. I'm an executive coach for a number of individuals in the C-suite in a variety of business industries, but I'm also an executive coach for senior leaders like general officers and S-CS leaders in the U.S. Space Force. So one day I could be talking to a two or three star general in the Air Force about leadership topics. And then I have a 15-year-old soccer player come in my office, talk about how

they want to perform better at PKs. So it's kind of a mix. Awesome. Awesome. And before we go any further, you got anything? Yeah, Brian, I guess it's just so much that we could talk about. that, you know, I want to turn over to, I want to turn over to you and see what's, you know, with your background in counterterrorism, I know that, you know, that it's been 2016 since you headed the center, but you've kept up to date. So we're just interested in hearing, you know, what your general thoughts are to begin with about what's going on now. Yeah. So when I first got to Stanford, first off it, I was a complete. fish out of water from just a cultural perspective because I had come from 33 months of

of company command, troop command, of the same unit across three different continents. It was a very, very weird situation to be. And, you know, most, most folks have the pleasure of commanding a unit for, you know, two years, you know, maybe two and a half years, max sometimes and to have that opportunity for three years was really interesting and just to kind of like talk about that that because it leads into the other content that I would like to kind of discuss but the unit that I took over was an Apache Longbow unit but we had not been certified yet so this unit which was normally stationed in Germany was actually going through an eight-month train up at Fort Hood Texas and so this was when I say a new unit imagine showing

up to a unit where nobody had been in the unit prior. It was just like literally a new unit. And so the old unit had flown a model Apaches in Iraq, and then they kind of put those Apaches, I think, to the guard. And so we were a new unit showing up on new aircraft. So we trained up for eight months, got certified. And then as I mentioned, our home base was in Germany. So we actually had to pack up all of our helicopters, put them on boats to cross the pond and then families and fish and pets and dogs and cats and move 700 plus people from Fort Hood, Texas all the way into Germany. Got to Germany thinking that we were going to be drinking beer for two years and having fun and that we got a deployment order about six months

in or eight months in to go to Afghanistan for 12 months. And so we put, we are the first ever unit to kind of put our Apache Longbo's on C-Fives and to deploy into country with. with those aircraft on C-5s. And that presented- What was this? Right. This was 2004. Oh, right.

Yeah. Very early on. Yeah. We were, the unit that I was with was a task force saber. I was part of 2-6 cab. And so we had R.C. East responsibilities. And so our home base was out of Bogram. But then when we showed up, my boss said, oh, by the way, just because of the mission

set, you're going to have to operate out of three different locations. And I was the aviation unit maintenance troop commander. So, you know, usually the max we were running out of two hard stands to do full-blown maintenance and now doing that out of three and then flying three times the amount of flight hours. And probably, as you know, Andy, you know, and others, like one of the most inhospitable places to fly aircraft in terms of heat, altitude, you know, dust, all that stuff. And so just a really interesting experience. And then while I was there, I got the word that I'll be able to go to Stanford when I came back. So leave that environment.

Go to Palo Alto, California, which is, I don't know if you're familiar, a lot different from Bogram, Afghanistan, in both culture and everything. And showed up in a cohort of 15 PhD students there. And again, trying to get my head wrapped around graduate studies in about a year. Herein, my boss from West Point, who is the head of the Department of Social Sciences, which is where I was going to head after finishing my time at Stanford to go teach at West Point. He said, so how are you doing on your dissertation? Hi to you all.

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And he looks at me like I was like in a, like I was extremely wrong. And he said, well, you got to be done by a time you get to West Point because there's not going to be time to finish your dissertation while you're here. So I heard that loud and clear and I needed the topic. And it just so happened to coincide with a woman named Martha Crenshaw who was doing some visiting initially, visiting teacher stuff at, I'm sorry, at Stanford. And she was like one of the OGs of terrorism research. She's from Alabama has a draw. So when you initially meet her, you know, she is not the, like what you would, you know, pipe and jacket, you know, professor that you would kind of picture. But she had a very distinguished career at Wesleyan and was one of the first people writing on terrorism topics.

And so I immediately attracted myself to her and said, you know, I'm interested in writing about this topic. So my topic was I had recently read something from another PhD student who put out an article that essentially said leadership to capitation. And when I say that, you've got to be kind of clear. Like, we're not talking about literally lopping the head off of people, although that happens in several terrorist groups like ISIS and others. But this is like when you take out the leader of a terrorist group, whether you arrest them, whether you kill them, you know, whether you arrest them and they get killed later.

But, you know, how it's like removing the head off of the snake, right? It's often referred to as the snakehead strategy. And so this individual said, she made the argument that, that, hey, it doesn't matter. And oh, by the way, when you do leadership decapitation against a terrorist group, the group actually becomes stronger and is more capable. And so this is just a bad strategy from a variety of perspectives. Well, honestly, when I heard that, you know, my experience in sports and in the military

told me that, like, leadership was important. And just like my understanding of leadership in the military, like, told me that it was important. and there was something missing here. So that was my topic that I literally dove into for the period of two years. And my wife likes the joke that she saw me about as often when I was at Stanford doing my dissertation as I was when I was in Afghanistan and she was back in Germany. So like I literally like buckled down and was able to complete my dissertation in in those three years and then went back to. Focused on, sorry to interrupt, but it, but the, but I think the topics really, it's. It's important, obviously.

But, you know, whether decapitation, essentially does decapitation work, right? Yes. And obviously, it's not a yes or no answer. Otherwise, that would have made your dissertation very easy. But we're all agog to hear a condensed version of what you found out. So the Reader's Digest version on this was, you know, everything told me that it was important. And so I actually did this kind of what I would say.

ask backwards. Normally you come into this with a with a theory, right, with a hypothesis of how things are going to work. And then you kind of seek evidence to, you know, to test out your hypothesis to see if it works or not. I actually went the reverse route. I went to the data first and then came up with a theory afterwards. So like for all you budding PhD doctoral students out there, this is probably not the recommended way to do this, but I got there. So what I did was I was very interested in understanding the population of terrorist groups. And so what I did in my initial search was I looked at the number of terrorist groups from 1970 to 2008.

And what I did was I took a look at those and I asked which one of those groups had experienced some type of leadership decapitation, again loosely defined as kill, capture, or capture and then killed. And then I also looked at which one of those organizations had ended. And what I found was that there was a disproportionate amount of groups that had ended that had experienced leadership decapitation. And in that two by two, the smallest population thing there was groups that had ended that had not experienced decapitation. So like automatically I felt like I was on to something. During that same time period, I was in an advanced math class that I had no business being in, but I had to have it.

in order to graduate. And they were talking about this thing called Cox Proportional Hazard Models, which in the business is usually kind of referred to as survival models. The best way I can explain it is it's usually how we test out the efficacy of certain medical treatments. So you have a population of folks that have a particular disease and you want to see if a treatment is going to extend the life of those patients. And so you have a control group and you have a group that gets the disease.

treatment and then you compare the survival rates of both of those. And if you come up with statistically significant results, you can then say, okay, well, giving this treatment to this individual is going to extend their life. Well, when I looked at my research, I wasn't worried about patients. My patients were my terrorist groups. And the treatment was leadership decapitation, right? So whether or not some groups experienced it or not, and then what were the effects of those on their mortality rate over time. So essentially what I was trying to argue was if my, you know, if what I believed about the importance of leadership in terrorist groups was going to be valid, then we needed to see that terrorist groups that were decapitated died sooner than those that had not experienced that

treatment. So once I found that I had the data, I was then kind of left to like figure out a, what's a theory behind this, right? And so I initially started off. by trying to come up with the two by two that described the two variables that I had was clandestine and violent, right? So my argument was usually speaking, in my experience, violent organizations are usually ones where the camaraderie is tighter than nonviolent organizations. Take military, take law enforcement, take, and even when I say violent, I loosely term this in terms of like exposure to danger. So fire firefighters.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, forest fighters like, you know, those types of things are going to usually be more cohesive and tied to the leader than if you walk down to your post office and talked about like how they feel about leadership and stuff like that. And no ding on the post office. I still want my mail being delivered on time. And so the second variable I had was clandestine versus not.

And the reason why I felt like this was an important variable in leadership succession, essentially, and the effects of leadership was that if you are in a clandestine organization, then the information flow isn't as readily available as it is into a public business or a firm or an economic firm. And so, like, I can go down to the library right now and find a thousand different books on how to start a business and how to, you know, operate. in a non-clandestine environment, probably not too many books at the library are going to tell me how to run a covert organization where, you know, opsec and information flow is not there. So like those two things I was really interested in. When I tried to populate this two-by-two with archetypical firms, I'm sorry, archetypical organizations that would fit in there, I was onto something because like take your non-clandestine, non-violent, archetypical organization, and that would be like your economic firm, right? Everything has to be public for the most part. You can walk into

their doors. You can see their business meetings or the minutes of their business meetings, so and so forth. But my other, the category I was most interested about was my violent clandestine. And I had two organization archetypes that were in that. One was cartels and the other one was terrorist groups. And so I was like initially flustered because if you are familiar with our battles with cartels over the years, you know, think about back to the 1990s when we had planned Columbia, right? And, you know, the kingpin strategy was a, was a pillar of that particular counter drug, you know, kind of approach. But what we saw in that, when we, we were very successful, relatively successful in taking out leadership of cartels and kingpins. But what happened was,

like, we got the exact opposite policy result that we wanted. So you'd think, think like if we take out the cartel leader, that would lead to less drugs and, you know, less cartel operations. And what happened is once we start taking out these individuals, the actual flow of drugs actually increased because it opened up more competitors. And so it actually had like the reverse effect of what we wanted to have on it. So I was stuck. And I was like, oh, I can't have cartels and terrorist groups in the same two by two. What is another variable that might separate those two? And the variable that did that for me, was values-based versus profit-based.

And so cartels at the end of the day, even though some of them are starting to dabble in, like co-opting judges and politicians, they don't care about policy or governance. They care about profit. And when you remove a cartel leader from the organization, or from the organization, because it's so profitable, there is a slew of people ready to take.

take up that mantle and drive the train. But terrorist groups, I felt like, are more values driven, right? And when we're talking about terrorism, we're talking about political ideologies, political causes, you know, at the root of some of this stuff. And so those, they can be profit-driven or they can mix, but generally speaking, they're going to be care way more about the values of the organization, the values of their cause than a, than a cartel. And then I had this three by three, this cube, that kind of told us that terrorist groups are going to be more susceptible to leadership decapitation than these other organizations. And so let me hit the pause, pause button there because I'm sure either blood is squirting out your ears trying to think of

a three by three cube or I've said something that it's confused somebody at some point. So let me hit the pause button. So Brian, no, I wanted to hear this because it's, you know, it's a C, sent a point of so many discussions about terrorists. And I've never heard a conclusive argument either way. And so it's fascinating to hear the data. Intuitively, I've always felt that it was of limited use when you look. And you're going to get frustrated at me because you probably typically hear these anecdotal comments, you know, Zakawi, al-Qaeda in Iraq after Zikawi.

shit, look at Hamas, you know, look at Hamas of the Muganir, look at Hezbollah. Sorry, I'm not Hamas, Hezbollah, who was Nazrallah's predecessor. Begins with them, right? I mean, the Israelis killing him was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes they ever made, but they didn't know as unintended consequences, you know. So I'm kind of steeped in all these anecdotal stories that tell me there's a limited very limited, at least, very limited effects. So let me talk about the results and kind of like the end of the, like the so-what findings from this hazard model.

And then I'll talk about some of these kind of anecdotes. It was interesting because in the book, one of my chapters is on Hamas. And obviously Hamas is in the news today. But so here's what I found. And you started this off by saying it's not really a yes or no question. Otherwise, it would have been easy. And your answer is right, right? Like, so here's what I found.

First off, the timing of the decapitation matters. So what I found was if you're able to identify a terrorist group in its first year of existence, and you are able to take out the leader, either kill or capture, that group is more than 8.7 times more likely to end than a non-decapitated group. But here's what's interesting. If you, that effect decreases over time. So that at the 10-year mark, that effect is now halved. Right. So it's not 8.7 anymore. It's half that. And at the 20-year mark, if that's the first time you are decapitating the leader, then it's almost the 95% percent. conference interval is unable to conclude whether it's either going to increase or decrease the

mortality rate of that organization. So what does this mean to policymakers? Is like, first off, if you are interested in the destruction of the group earlier is better, I still think you're going to get effects long term. And like one of the interesting things about leadership decapitation is especially, and I'll speak to the U.S. I'm not familiar with Europe and how they view this. it's got a lot of bipartisan support. At some points, like, so U.S. politicians are going to get a bump if they're able to take out a terrorist group leader, right? Because it's tangible. It works with both parties.

I think it was polling at 68% positivity rate for a period. And it's also been very consistent amongst presidents, right? Even presidents that have been critical of the previous of their predecessor, whether it was like, you know, Obama critical of Bush. Well, Obama had more drone strikes than Bush did. And even Trump and Clinton talked about like, yeah, let's pump the brakes on this. Well, what you've seen is like a steady, you know, like an increase. So this is, it's not about politics.

It's about, you know, the effects that you get from this. Another interesting finding that came across this was size doesn't matter. Right. And so I think, well, let me just ask you this group. based off of if you were going to take out the leader of a terrorist group, you think you would have more of a negative impact on that group if it was a smaller group or a larger group? What would your gut tell you?

Well, gut would tell me smaller group. Yeah, same. And just curious as to your logic for that. And by the way, that's exactly what my logic was. Well, you think about our own lessons in small unit leadership, you know, and the hardest rank I ever had was corporal. But I can tell you the effect I had, the immediate effect I had on the people around me was greatest when I was corporal. You know, it was, that is just the nature of small unit leadership.

Totally. And you're where the rubber meets the route. For me, sorry, for me, it was, I'm thinking if I'm in a room full of 10 people and all of a sudden at the change of command ceremony, the number two, who's taken over for the number one that got schwacked, number two gets swacked. well now I'm thinking, shit, I just moved up. When's my turn to get swagged? Yep. A thousand percent. Like, you know, I would tell like the cadets when I, and by the way, I'm able to go up to,

I'm still a non-resident fellow with the Combating Terrorism Center. So I still go back to West Point every semester, twice a year to go talk about this. And what I tell them is like, okay, if you show up to formation that day and your team leader, you know, to your point, Andy, is not there. you're going to, like, it's going to be very identifiable. You're going to know that. I said, if the superintendent isn't on campus that day, the train moves right along, right?

You don't even notice that. But what was interesting was that didn't play out in the data with terrorist groups. Like, size didn't matter, big groups, small groups, and so that was kind of interesting. Another thing that was interesting in the research was, I was not just, so once I found that, like, when you said, sorry, Brian, when you said size didn't matter.

So can you talk about some of the things that did matter? Yes, yes. So this is what I was about to share, which is any type of leadership removal increases the mortality rate of terrorist groups. And what I mean by that is, so once I found out that like decapitation is going to increase the mortality rate of terrorist groups, you know, on average, I was also then interested in terms of like, methods, right? Because like there's some people are argue that like killing is better than capturing. Our intel brothers and sisters might say, well, no, you know, like capturing them will provide you potentially with intelligence about that organization that you can then, you know, use to roll up and, you know, infiltrate the group. So I was interested in like, is there statistical

differences between the kill versus the capture? And then what I found in my research was, and this often happens with a lot of South American terrorist groups is they will capture, they will torture and interrogate the crap out of that guy until they get their utility and then they kill them. So I was also interested in, I used that as like a third category. And what was interesting was those were statistically indistinguishable from each other. And so you get the same benefits from all of those, but you couldn't say that no, capturing is better than kill. But when I say any type of leadership removal, increased the mortality rate. This is also what I mean because I looked at other methods. So I said, like, what happens if the group fires their leader and removes them from the

organization? Or what happens if your leader dies of a chronic disease like cancer or dies on a car crash or an accident? And regardless of what that was is any type of leadership removal is going to increase the mortality rate. Now, you know, some are bigger bangs than others. But what this was, I think, so like some organizations in the U.S. government were attracted to that also because you didn't necessarily have to kill a leader in order to get those effects. You could do some sci-op stuff to inject uncertainty in that leader in the organization, had them infighting and have them remove that individual, and you would get similar effects than if you would, if you killed or captured that person.

The other thing that was interesting was the difference between religious groups and nationalist groups. And so, again, I'll just throw this kind of question at you guys. Which one of those groups do you think would be more susceptible to leadership decapitation? A religious group, whether it's, you know, Slophe Jihad, whether it was, you know, Christian nationalist, whatever that is, or a nationalist group that is like fighting for their homeland and those sorts of things. What would your gut tell you about which one of those terrorist groups would be more susceptible to leadership decapitation and the negative effects that come with it?

I would say religious. Yeah, I would say religious, but I'm trying to think of it really, it's not, I suppose what I'm trying to think is, does the religious group, is a religious group more likely to work in a hierarchical or a cell manner, right? Because isn't that the real question? You know, it's for instance the IRA, a secular, you know, neo-Marxist group, cellular structure, killing leaders in the IRA, the British acknowledged didn't really do them much good because of the cell system. And I'm trying to think of a hierarchical. Your religious organizations tend to be more hierarchical, thinking of the Islamic State. And therefore the removal would have more of an effect. That's that's ostensibly yeah, but you're about to surprise this, I'm sure.

No, again, this was like the beauty of like research, right? Like I went in with my own preconceived notions and then kind of like what pops on the other side is usually interesting. So on the religious front, some people might think like because the benefits of religious terrorism are often in like the martyrship of that, like, you know, your benefits are in the afterlife, life, if you will. Some people said, well, that might lead more people to be more devoted to the cause, if you will. And so those groups are going to live longer. And because religion goes back for so long, those are some arguments for why leadership decapitation, you know, might be tough in religious groups. But on the other side, you know, you have organizations that are fighting for their homeland.

And it's very tangible. It's very like, you know, like look at, uh, you know, like, look at, uh, in Serbia and those types of places like where these things go back like millennia. And so, you know, the argument there is like, well, no, leadership decapitation wouldn't work really well there because of the tangible benefits of like it's their homeland. That's never going to change. And so what I found was religious groups are more than five times more likely to end after a leadership decapitation than nationalist terrorist groups. Now, you know, I don't necessarily have like all the reasons why.

But again, that's like good food for fodder for other researchers to kind of go out. and tackle. So to kind of end where we started, then we can talk about some of the anecdotes. And it might be helpful if I share a little bit of the Hamas background. Yeah, yeah, we'd love to hear that. Like the interesting thing here, I think, you know, when it's funny because when my, the article that was, so my dissertation came out, but no one reads dissertations. I was able to get an article in, I was like the first article I wrote was on international security that's run by the Belfour Center out of Harvard.

I think it's still called the same title, targeting top terrorists. And so when that piece came out, there was an op-ed that got picked up by, I think, the Christian Science Monitor, some news outlet. And the headline was like, you know, author says, kill all leaders, you know, kill everyone. And obviously, I'm a military guy, so it played well into their narrative. But actually, you know, if you read the book and you read the article, like my argument is, more nuanced, or at least I hope it's more nuanced than this. And kill them all. Like the mowing of the grass strategy, right?

So, but like what I would argue is previous researchers that had come out and looked at the and leadership decapitation and its effects, in my opinion, only focused on very short-term results, right? So one of the ones that kind of drove my research was a woman who talked about, because leadership or terrorist groups don't end within two years of a decapitation, therefore leadership decapitation doesn't work. And I was like, whoa, like timeout. Like we don't evaluate other policies, you know, and I'm not talking about defense policies. I'm talking about like health care policies, economic policies. We don't say like, okay, if this tax cut or this healthcare

thing doesn't work in six months, we're going to scrap it. Like, no, of course not. You have to have like a longer timeline on this. So my argument was like, yes, how do I think our politicians should choose counterterrorism policies? I think they should look at both the short term, but also the long term effects of policies like leadership decapitation and then make a determination as to like, you know, what do we do? And so when I would, you know, I was invited to the CIA to talk about this. I was invited to talk to State Department. I've obviously briefed people like the Secretary of Defense and numerous combatant commanders on this. What I would usually tell them is like, look, if you're asking me, like, you know, like how we should do this, in my opinion,

we should invest more resources early to go decapitate terrorist leaders than later. And so like from a resource perspective, I think it is worth to go try to go after like the Abadabad raids, but early on in an organization, not so much, you know, later on. So let's talk a little bit about, any questions real quick before we talk about. Not for me. No, no, this is great. So one of the things that popped up was when bin Laden got killed. Right.

And everybody in 2011, you know, this didn't come from like counterterrorism scholars, but this did come from some folks in the media. And it was very pie in the sky of like, all right, well, now this signifies the end of al-Qaeda, right? And, you know, for all of us that are in the know, I was like, no, this is going to be a little bit longer than that. And what was interesting was when I mentioned, if you kill a terrorist group leader in their first year, they're 8.7 times more likely. After 10 years, it's half. After 20 years, it's like, you don't know if it helps or hurts. Well, guess what? Then Laden was killed essentially 20 years after the formation of Al-Qaeda.

And so when I saw that number, I was like, well, we'll be interesting to see where this goes here. But this is where I think the benefits of leadership decapitation and might be telling for today are, we haven't seen the best fruits of these moving forward. So let me talk a little bit about Al-Qaeda before 9-11 and then Al-Qaeda post. And you can tell me which, if you were the leader of that organization, which leader would you rather be a part of? So before 9-11, they essentially could train, operate, move, spend money without a lot of eyeballs on. Right?

And so they could move from the Sudan to Afghanistan and Pakistan. and back and forth. And like we were essentially left to occasionally, I think like Operation Infinite Justice, great name, by the way, like lobbing 72 cruise missiles into, you know, Sudan in the 90s. It was like, that was like the most that we could do. But after 9-11, I think there was some counterterrorism scholars

that would come out. And if you recall this time period, they were talking about franchisees and how decentralized the organization was and how it's going to be so difficult for us to, you know, to go at the group because of that decentralization. But I looked at it and said, you know, wait a second. You know, bin Laden now has to run an organization where he has to be super clandestine, right? And they can't train out in the open and do the monkey bars and all the, you know, the obstacle courses, right? They have to learn how to communicate and pass messages.

And what you saw was like, even though they. it was al-Qaeda 2.0 and they were decentralized, much more difficult to run that organization. And what you saw with different factions to include al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI at the time, there was fractions, right, between Zarqawi and bin Laden, that, you know, riffs that started to open up that made the group, in my opinion, less overall capable in the long run. So like, if you ask me, would I rather lead al-Qaeda before 9-11 or after, you know, all the folks that said, oh, 2.0 is more dangerous. And, you know, it's a bigger challenge now. I say, yes, it might be a bigger challenge for us to go get everybody, but it's also a bigger challenge for those leaders to

run those organizations effectively. So I, one of the, when I wrote my, my dissertation, and I brought it to my dissertation advisors, I had what I thought was like really solid quantitative data, right, that showed kind of the story that I just told. And then I had my theory and the three variables I talked about and each chapters for each of those. And I was like, I'm good. And my dissertation advisor said, well, you don't have a case study. Like, you need to go find a case study where this is applied. And so I coincidentally fell into Hamas.

And I didn't know much about Hamas, you know, prior to, you know, writing that chapter. And I do not portend that I am an expert on Hamas today because as I mentioned, it's, It's been a minute since I've been in the weeds. But what was interesting about that organization is they had suffered leadership decapitations over various points of their career. But you also had some good data on their frequency, their lethality, the number of attacks that they had over time. And so, you know, one of things that makes Hamas so challenging as opposed to a quote unquote traditional terrorist group is that they also started out, very early as a service provider to the population. Right?

So this wasn't just a bunch of violent thugs coming in. These are folks that were actually helping people at the grassroots level in terms of education, food, health care, all those sorts of things that then became, had a terrorist wing of that party. So very complicated organization to kind of go after. But they were led for a long period of time, at least ideologically, by an individual named Sheikh Yassim. You see.

And so, and again, not the prototypical, what you'd consider as like a bond villain when it comes to terrorist leaders. If you saw a picture, if you can Google him right now, you know, like, he looks like an elderly grandfather, right? And part of that was because he was confined to a wheelchair in his early teenage years after a swimming accident that left him a quadriplegic. but he became the ideological leader of Hamas. And what happened in 2004 was, you know, the Israelis also buy into leadership decapitation. And so Sheikh Yassin was popping out of mosque on a Friday and two hellfire missiles from an Apache ended up taking him out. What was interesting was his immediate successor at that time popped up, which was an individual name ran Tisi. So they named him very early on as the replacement for Sheikh Yassin. And he also met his demise,

I think three weeks later with two Hellfire missiles. And so what was interesting was Hamas then hit the pause button on announcing who their next leader was because they were fearful of that same thing repeating. But what you saw in the attack data that that organization had done, you know, during and after, like the befores and after of these things, I found in my book that their lethality and their effectiveness were reduced because of that of that leadership kind of of turmoil. And so that doesn't necessarily say it happens to every group. And obviously Hamas is still around today. So it wasn't like those, you know, the leadership tocapitation strikes on those leaders were, you know, finished the job, so to speak.

But just to give you some kind of food for thought as to how this operates and how leadership affects some of the efficacy of the organization, you know, post decapitation. Awesome. The other, but there's another part, too, that I recognize must have been very difficult to quantify because it's intangible. But that is that, you know, the effect of leadership itself. So the data is there about leadership decapitation, but the unknowns are the quality of leadership, right? So the effect, that's one thing we can never really determine. It's the guy who comes next going to be a better leader, going to be a more effective leader. So you're spot on.

And so trying to find the, so in order for my like theory to hold that decapitation is going to be ultimately effective against terrorist groups. I felt like there was two things that had to hold true. The first was, does leadership matter to organizational performance? And I was able to kind of definitively say yes, I think it is. And again, I'm not just talking about, you know, terrorist groups, but, you know, think about just leadership in general. Do you think leadership is important to how the group performs? I think the answer to that is yes. The second one is a more difficult question. And as you just mentioned, almost impossible to, to determine. And I'm sure we have our best analysts looking at like what the bench looks like on these organizations to see.

But ultimately, the second one is, is replacing leaders difficult in terrorist groups? That's the other one that has to hold. I was just going to say that, you know, how must it feel to be number three or four and then get that phone call? I'm like, hey, man, Brian got popped last night. You're up. you know, how many of them are like, well, I don't want it. I got a wife and kids, you know, so, and especially if it's like, boom, number two got popped, three weeks later, number three got popped. Well, now you're up. How many people actually want that job?

Well, this was the joke in Iraq, right? Which is like the number three card, you know, had a really bad track record. Like, they were like, you know, I think we killed like, you know, dozens of these number threes. And so no one wanted that number three spot. But to your point, you know, I think. think what's interesting is to compare like how the U.S. military trains its leaders and then how and the problems that are associated with how terrorist groups are going to develop their leaders. So I had a former army colonel that told me before Gulf War won.

He was a new, he just pinned on his full bird. And so, but he was not in a command in line for command any time soon. And what happened at Fort Hood before the first Gulf War was they had like an emergency pre-command course where they brought in like 500 to a thousand 06s to come into this pre-command course. And the reason why was because they thought they were going to suffer so much more fatalities in combat that they wanted people on the bench ready to go, ready to fill in. And I don't know how it's like in the Marines. Both of you guys can tell me like what this looks like.

But in the Army, what we usually preached in, you know, from small units on up is, you know, as a, when you're the leader, you should be developing individuals two levels down to take your position. Right. And so that's why in field exercises and stuff, we always practice. Like, you know, okay, go silent on the radio if you're the commander and see how long it takes for your organization to kind of. of like, you know, pop up. Or you just say like, hey, jazz, you're number three, you know, you're in charge. And we do that specifically designed in order to kind of prep people for those moments. But in terrorist groups, again, where, you know, there is a tactical and operational danger to you prepping people two levels down to know everything about the organization

to take over. Because if you get rolled up by the law enforcement, dude, it might be game over for your organization. So there's a lot of secrecy that takes place in those types of organizations and paranoia, right? And this gets back to why I think it was difficult to replace leaders. One great anecdote. Have you guys ever heard of the terrorist group in Japan called Amshin Riccio? Yeah. Fascinating organization. And they were led by this. First off, the tenants of the organization were really weird. Right? They took like Christian, you know, Earth stuff and all these different religions kind of morphed into this also like apocalyptic kind of narrative. And it was run by this very eclectic leader who Asahara was his name. And he was like a, he ran a video store like a blockbuster or something beforehand.

And so he takes over, literally creates this cult of personality. And he was like literally only one that understood this cobblower. of different values and stuff in the organization. Well, guess what? When he died, number two was like, I can't do that. Right? And so they shrunk by 95% because he didn't have the wherewithal, the chutzpah, the charisma, the knowledge to kind of carry on the organization.

So, you know, Andy, long way of saying this to your point of like, there really is no way of knowing, is the bench going to be better than, you know, the stars. And I do have one more quick anecdote on that, but I'll, I'll let, if you have a question on that. No, go, go, go. So this is, I love this anecdote because when you looked at bin Laden's replacement, and there was, you know, a lot of speculation early on as to like who was going to replace bin Laden if he was taken out.

Iman al-Zawahari was, you know, by most, you said that, like, he was going to take over. But this is really interesting. When Zawahari was in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the P.I.J, he had a mentor. that kind of brought him up in that organization. And then he got to the point where Zawahiri was like, you know what, I'm going to leave to go to Afghanistan and join bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. And so his mentor, who knew Zawahiri better than anybody,

pulled him aside beforehand, and before he left and said, listen, if you are going to be a part of any organization, you can't be its leader. Because he felt like he didn't have the skill sets necessary to lead. And so Zawahiri goes off to Vidalden, the line gets taken out. So I hear he takes over.

And so to your point, like my recommendation or my gut tells me is like the bench is not going to be as good as the real deal. But I'll leave that that. Yeah. And it, which is a great point. I mean, that Nazrallah is perhaps the exception that proves the rule in that, you know, now you, here's a guy who is a very unusual type leader. and whose existence is perhaps more closely affiliated to the organization as Bola than as usual, you know, just simply through longevity and a factor of who he is. And I think probably statistically you could argue that would happen sooner or later,

you know, but it doesn't disprove that, right? Yeah, and again, you know, my study was large N, right? So we're talking about things on the average, not necessarily like unique things to specific organizations. Your point about Hezbollah is spot on. And it is possible that the successor can be better than, you know, his predecessor, for sure. Yeah. And, yeah. And of course, if the Israelis got really lucky and took out Nasrallah, it could prove your point, too.

Because I do believe Hezbollah would be reeling from that. But I'm sure, I'm sure the Israelis are doing their best in that department. So I wanted to hear just some thoughts. I know we're coming up to closing time, but you've mentioned adaptation too. You know, you've mentioned the fact that as an organization becomes targeted, if it knows it's subject to targeted killings, it changes its motivation. this operandi or it ceases to exist. And Hamas is a great example in the lead up to Gaza, right?

Do you have any thoughts about that generally? From your research? In terms of groups adapting? Adaptation, the ability of an organization to adapt to ensure its continued survival despite targeted. Yeah, I think, you know, first off, like the bad news on Hamas, you know, and you can say arguably Hezbollah is like, those organizations are going to, unfortunately, I think, survive for a long period of time, regardless of what kind of happens to,

you know, its current leadership or what's going on in the current military operations against them. I'll share another analogy that may or may not resonate with you all when it comes to the adaptation component. I wrote a piece called Terrorism as Cancer that was in a peer-reviewed journal a while ago. And it was trying to make the point that the best way to see terrorism is not as like an infectious disease, like, you know, COVID or something like that, where we're going to be. we can like, if we can just eradicate the host or control certain vectors or those like, you know, some of the, I looked at it as a chronic disease, right? So that it's always going to be

with us. But how do we, you know, how do we cope? And one of my, and the funny part was, is when I first wrote this with my colleagues at the Combating Terrorism Center, they were making fun of me. They're like, dude, that's a pretty abstract article when you write terrorism as cancer. and I talked about the causes, the behavior, the prevention, the treatment, all that stuff. And then they weren't laughing when the CIA invited me down. They had some obscure analysts read it and then brought me down to talk about it at headquarters. And so, but to your point about adaptation, I think the analogy here between cancer and terrorist groups is terrorist groups can metastasize.

very similarly just like cancer can. But what we need to do from a counterterrorism perspective is we need to keep finding ways to better diagnose these groups and then let that diagnosis drive our treatment. And so, you know, if you, my mom passed away from leukemia a while ago. So I got really into understanding about cancer and how it how it operates in bodies. And so if you looked at like the early days of oncology, it was very grotesque, right? Like we were cutting this stuff out. And if, you know, the joke was like, if this doesn't kill the cancer, the treatment will. Right.

And so I think there's elements that you can see this with countries that are taking very heavy-handed approaches to taking out terrorists and thinking that that is going to be the final solution. And I think that like what we need to do is better diagnose, okay, what are the root causes here? And then how do we go after them? Kinetic strikes is always going to be, you know, needed in these, in these things. But what is that other combination of, you know, I mentioned Hamas is a service group organization. So, okay, you take out Hamas, what is going to replace those services and other things? And that's where it gets really difficult. Taking out people, there's nobody better at this than the United States.

in Israel, right? I mean, like, we have, you know, we are really good at what we do. But no, like, I've never had a senior leader come in that I was briefing that said, like, you know, if only we could just kill more of these people, then the answer is going to be solved. You're always going to have a kinetic component to this, but what are those other elements that can help you deal with the adaptations that you're inevitably going to see in those organizations? That is, that's a, kind of a a great closing comment. I think, you know, as far as guidance for policy, and I don't envy you.

You must be asked some impossible questions about this, Brian. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about on this topic that we haven't covered? Just to look to the future and what we might expect, I think the use of drones and terrorist groups, we haven't even begun to see what might be possible. So that keeps me up at night. Well, I was just thinking that I would definitely love to have you back on to talk about the future specifically. Yeah, yeah, but be more than happy to.

And also just like I'm interested in things like, how is China going to deal? I think China is going to see a lot more terrorism. I don't know if you saw the 60 minutes last night on the Philippine Navy and what's going on in the South China Sea. But when they, you know, are they going to approach their counterterrorism like they do the Uighers or are they going to come up with another, are they going to be more Russian-like? Are they going to be more, you know, European-like in their approach to counterterrorism? So anyways, but again, the bad news about terrorism is, It's, you know, it ain't going away anytime soon. And I'd be happy to come back on and talk and bore most of you with some of those topics.

This is awesome. Do you got anything? No, this is awesome. I want everyone to know that you want to find Brian. I'll have links in the description for his book and everything else. Of course, Andy Milburn, everything's down in the description. Patreon.com slash the team has the best way to help support the show. Andy Melbourne was recently just on Andy Stump's podcast cleared hot, so check that out.

I'm excited to watch that. I'm sure it was a good conversation. Yeah, that's all I got. Yeah, thanks, Brian. Thanks everyone, Brian. Thanks much for coming on. I appreciate it. See you on a few days.