Mateen’s high death tolls is rare-indeed off the charts-compared with the vast majority of Lone Wolves, who usually kill only a small number, if any before being killed or arrested themselves. Traditional groups with tight command and control “are easy prey for government infiltration, entrapment, and destruction of the personnel involved.” He admitted that “Leaderless Resistance is a child of necessity” but one that can create “an intelligence nightmare.”ĭespite these many advantages, most terrorist groups have shied away from using Lone Wolves-at least most of the time. “The concept of Leaderless Resistance is nothing less than a fundamental departure in theories of organization,” Beam wrote, using bold font to emphasize his point. In 1983, white supremacist Louis Beam pushed for “leaderless resistance,” arguing that the federal government was too strong for any citizens’ movement to oppose it directly and that like-minded groups should operate independently without central coordination. The Lone Wolf logic is tied to the terrorists’ weakness, not its strength, which is why so many diverse groups have embraced it over the years. Think of them really as lone-ish wolves-wolves who are either acting alone or in very small packs. An excellent New York Times report revealed that the Islamic State leaders operating remotely from Syria often exercise various degrees of influence and direction of many attackers at first thought to be acting alone. However, it is the rare Lone Wolf who is truly alone: the San Bernardino killers were married, and the Nice cargo truck driver was in contact with a range of radicals. A Lone Wolf is traditionally described as someone who operates on their own and is not part of a group, network, or directed by an outside organization. Precise numbers are difficult to come by, as it is often unclear how lonely Lone Wolves really are. T is the rare Lone Wolf who is truly alone. The scholar Ramon Spaaij found that although absolute numbers remain low, the numbers of attacks since the 1970s grew almost 50 percent in the United States and by over 400 percent in the other countries he surveyed. Lone Wolves, however, seem to be growing in number. In 2009, another right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, killed 77 people in Norway. soil before 9/11 occurred in 1995, when white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. ![]() Over a century ago, lone anarchists killed presidents and prime ministers in their campaign to overturn what they saw as oppressive governments and bourgeois society. Islamist groups, right-wing white supremacists, abortion foes, and separatists of various stripes have all used this tactic with varying degrees of success.
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