The point is that militancy is not all beer and skittles. It's not the magical cure-all that makes everything better that so many radicals view it as. I wish I was exaggerating, but I actually do know a number of radicals who really do believe that militancy makes everything better. Often there's some rationale about how their chosen form of violence is actually non-violence.

Militancy has drawbacks. Those drawbacks can in fact be measurable counterproductive. That's the hypothesis at hand.