A little more than three years after the essay was published, the strategy produced what was, for a time, considered to be its most notable success, the Oklahoma City bombing. But that plot, carried out by a small cell superficially similar to what Beam had described, served in many ways to highlight the strategy’s weaknesses.

The first discontinuity related to the “leaderless” part of the equation. While Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators (at minimum Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier) were never proved to have taken direction from an organization, they were hardly independent and unconnected. McVeigh communicated with many white supremacists and anti-government extremists as he advanced his plot, including traveling very near to Beam himself and communicating with several of Beam’s associates. He also repeatedly reached out to an even wider assortment of leaders, activists, and organizations, although most of these efforts appear to have been unsuccessful. If McVeigh was not connected to an organization or leader, it was not for lack of trying.

The nominally leaderless strategy did work in one key respect—only three people were convicted for the worst domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history: McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier (who turned state’s evidence and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge). Despite this, the bombing provoked a backlash among domestic right-wing extremists, who feared it would lead to exactly the sort of government crackdown Beam’s leaderless strategy was intended to inoculate against. In this fearful environment, what Beam had optimistically called “a thousand points of resistance” could not and did not emerge.

Lone actors continued to surface periodically and carry out ideologically motivated attacks in the years that followed, but few of these succeeded on a scale large enough to attract national attention. Meanwhile, widespread adoption of the “leaderless” paradigm helped further erode a domestic right-wing extremist scene that was already deeply enmeshed in egotistical leadership competitions and ideological infighting. Leaderless resistance successfully created a low-profile attack surface for government countermeasures, but it also led to quiescence in the movement itself. None of this deterred extremists from taking up the leaderless paradigm. While the resistance part fell short of Beam’s expectations, the leaderless part did help keep people out of jail and out of the spotlight.

The idea eventually spread to extremist movements abroad. Notably, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadist ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri proposed a somewhat similar decentralized strategy that came to be referred to as “leaderless jihad.”

Here, too, the concept fell short. A first wave of “lone” jihadist plots and attacks did provoke much discussion and agitation among analysts and policy makers. Some of these were committed by genuine lone actors, but many were actually directed by al-Qaeda, or by the FBI posing as al-Qaeda. The relatively few attacks that were clearly self-directed were unambitious and prone to failure. Despite these caveats, law-enforcement agencies assessed “lone wolves” and leaderless resistance as the day’s “greatest threat” to U.S. national security. The reality was much more complex.