Just how effective, or not, is targeting for death the leaders of an enemy in warfare? Granted the enemy’s leaders should be captured or killed if the opportunity exists. But for example, would it have been worth the certain death of 500 commandoes parachuted into Berlin in 1942 to kill Adolf Hitler? Or his inner circle? Or targeting the low-key party leaders who actually handled the carrying out of day-to-day orders? One could make a case that killing 500 people in the right positions would have more impact than killing a million expendable soldiers.
In A Man To My Wounding, by Poul Anderson, all warfare is fought at the level of assassination, sabotage, and industrial espionage. His story revolves around the killing of some academician or scientist, if memory serves. Anderson underlines an important fact: leaders are more replaceable than original thinkers and innovators.
The “purging” of their own military echelons by Hitler and Stalin are often pointed to by historians as factor that reduced the effectiveness of their armed forces, on the other hand.
This thread gives me a change to use an aphorism I coined that I’m particularly proud of: “Assassination is the sincerest form of criticism.”
In some cases asassination can be counter productive in fact. Especially if you kill an incompetent but able politician ? I remember one of the dirty dozen films was about stopping a coup to kill Hitler and avoid his talented generals from taking over Germany !
More seriously though... killing leaders has a temporary effect. Eventually younger guys take over and bring the enemy group new leadership. Killing a general and not following through while the enemy is leaderless more or less defeats the purpose. Unless said General was talented beyond his peers.Good point. The Anderson story revolves around killing an up-and-coming, original thinker. If you were an enemy, you would want all the old-guard, conservative scientists and academics to stick around as long as possible, forming a deadwood logjam (oooh, metaphor overkill) in the progress of research and new ideas.
I don’t know, I suppose that depends on where your allegiance lies. Does your allegiance lie with some sort of notion of nationalism or is it merely a pragmatic response to a dictator. If we’d just assassinated Saddam, Uday and Kusay perhaps Iraq would have a much more moderate succession.
I think the reason assasination is frowned upon is because political leaders don’t want to legitimize it because that makes them legitimate targets, politicians like to be above the masses that are getting shot at. Personally, I like the idea of assassination as the way to wage war as opposed to raping the entire country side by rolling tanks across and carpet bombing civilian areas.
I’ve often wondered why Al Qaeda doesn’t just train people as snipers, and how to use the internet to research their targets, give them a couple grand and let them loose in the country they despise as free agents. Then the snipers could just go on capping politicians until they themselves get killed and are sent to Allah and their 72 virgins. This would cripple the United States military industrial complex without providing a target for recourse and without having to attack military targets.
Erek
mswas,
I agree that leaders would make for better targets than the populace… but to have effective snipers you need really good and extremely up to date inteligence. Especially to kill bureaucracy leaders like Rummy for example. Rummies schedule probably changes all the time. His security must be very hard to get through. Snipers are easily spotted when they are on roofs…
Add to the fact that must Muslim Terrorists in the USA would be isolated from other AQ agents. So they would be cut off from Intel unless they had an internal american source… something very hard to get. So its easier to blow up planes and trains.
Consider that the United States lost Franklin Delano Roosevelt before WWII ended, but that the American war machine kept going on. (“Oh no, the President’s dead! Guess it’s time to sue for peace.”) The same thing would probably have happened if Hitler had been assassinated.
Besides, killing 500 vital enemy leaders would probably require massive amounts of resources (intelligence in particular), such that it might be less complicated to just kill more of the other side’s soldiers.
By the way, 1 or 100 or even 1000 soldiers could be seen as militarily expendable, but 1 million dead soldiers is nothing to sneeze at, considering how much time and money went to each one to keep him fighting.
There’s a big difference between Roosevelt and Hitler in terms of what they meant to their country’s war effort. Sure, Roosevelt was important to the US, but Hitler was critical to Germany’s, especially in terms of retreat/surrendering. If Hitler had been killed there would probably have been enough of a resistance within the German Officer Corps/Army to have a major impact on the ending of the war. It certainly would be interesting to find out what would have happened if the July Plot had been successful.
You can use the internet for Intel, and what about not hitting such high level targets? Perhaps hitting a congressman when you know he’s going to be visiting his home turf. I think the internet and just plain old casing could garner one the advantage, and what about using the internet to post intel to agents in the field who could log in anonymously? Luckily for Bush and co, my generation that grew up with the power of the internet aren’t the ones gunning for them I suppose. Not that I’d shed much of a tear if he were to become subject to the twenty year curse.
To me it’s about class struggle. I am not so low on the totem pole where violence and martyrdumb are my only options, therefore I sit at home using the tools and the social systems in place to help maintain my position by organizing with those in a similar situation, rather than taking it to those outside of my class expecting a handout, or feeling the necessity to become violent, but then again if Tanks were rolling through the streets of New York, I would go out west and start honing my sharpshooting skills. The MPs in every subway station were bad enough and being that I have family and friends in the military, I wouldn’t wish to take the war to them if I could avoid it, but the Corporate fat cats that own the tanks and turned them on me, I’d have no problem taking up arms against.
What keeps them safe from me is that I don’t feel my life is threatened by them, I think that would probably hold true for Muslims if they could say the same thing, but since they can’t I completely understand why they are committing terrorism, I would just like to see a more effective political assassination campaign, even if it’s lower level officials carrying out policy who don’t warrant an escort, rather than our civilians, but then again, those civilians are propagating the system that takes and takes and doesn’t give back, so I suppose they aren’t exactly innocents.
Erek