This paper examines how the different goals of terrorist group leaders affect their decision making calculus. This study uses a formal model and shows that terrorist group leaders who are more concerned with gaining concessions from the government are likely to use lower levels of violence. The empirical analysis echoes the results of the formal model and provides evidence for the external validity of the model. Taken together these results suggest that some of the variation in terrorist group lethality is due to variation in the terrorist group leaders' goals.