Was wondering: what would happen if a country announced that it was scaling back its armed forces in favor of developing an Assassination Corps, and that any announcement by national leaders that the country should be invaded would be met with a drastic increase in said leader’s life insurance payments?
Would this tactic be more morally reprehensible than using tanks and bombs? Do we have the technology? Most of all, would it work?
Perdonally, I feel this is a lesser evil than going to war, and turning thousands or millions of citizens into cannon fodder.
However, the restriction “should the country be invaded” is too limiting. For one thing, most countries in the world are quite small, and an invasion could sweep across them in a matter of hours or days, especially if they reduced or eliminated their conventional military forces in favor of assassination squads. Setting up an individual assassination involves substantial intelligence gathering and careful timing. Of course, you could always throw a smart bomb onto the presidential palace or the legislative building, but that’s hardly assassination, and to achieve it might take substantial conventional military resources.
And the larger countries like to throw their military weight around to influence events that do not directly involve invasions. No one is going to invade the US, but it uses its military all the time.
There’s at least one sci-fi novel on this premise, the name of which I can’t come up with at the moment.
The net effect would be to encourage other countries to take over this hypothetical state. Without an effective defence force someone else will jump in and overwhelm the existing leadership. Even in the event that the invader’s leadership is assassinated, that country has still been overrun; it’s a pointless tactic.
Didn’t the CIA used to do this?
How about we generalize it slightly? The hypothetical country scales back its military, away from useful offensive weapons (tanks, landing craft, paratrooper corps) towards useful defensive weapons (artillery, tanks, well co-ordinated defensive structures). At the same time, it develops the capability for surgical strikes (assassination included), and announces that any aggression against it will be met, not with counter-invasion, but with the relentless targetting of the enemy’s leaders.
That leaves open assassination, but adds smart bombs dropped on presidential palaces. It would probably include a large emphasis on intelligence gathering and black ops. It wouldn’t mean an ineffective defense force, but it would exclude offensive capabilities like the ability to invade an island.
The crux of the issue is that the country shifts its offensive threat from invasion to assassination (in all its forms). How would this affect a country’s world standing?
The difficult question is whether CIA assassinations were effective policy. Overall, the West won the Cold War, while avoiding a nuclear war. Maybe CIA assassinations helped produce that happy outcome
However, I do not know any way to prove what would have happened under some other policy.
yojimboguy: perhaps you are thinking of “The 4 lords of the Diamond”, by Jack Chalker? It’s about a futuristic space-age society where the government does have a bureau of assassins for the negative-albedo ops.
hansel, I believe most nations would agree with a primarily defensive military; even the UK has only limited ambitions in terms of force projection. I don’t think the scenario you put forward is at all unrealistic, and in fact is fairly representative of what budget constraints force nations to do militarily.
The problem is that an unconventional military is still very costly, but not multipurpose; if you spend the money on infantry and helicopters (hypothetically) you have a force that can defend, attack, take part in peacekeeping and humanitarian aid and even act as a police force in emergencies. If you spend it on stealth fighters and cruise missiles you can’t do much else with them other than pour money into maintenance.
The question is “is this an effective means of waging war”. I would have to say the answer is no. It assumes that there is no one to take over in the event of a leaders demise and that the nations army will simply scatter in confusion at the loss of their president/dictator/whatever.
I think in some cases that would be a safe assumption, such as with Iraq, in which you have a dictatorship centered around a cult of personality. Not to mention the deterrent effect an assasination policy would have on a succesor…presumably that person would want to live, and hence would not take actions that would make him or her a target.
JFK tried to assasinate Castro, and look where it got him. There are some who still think Castro got away with it, and covered his role well.
Israel is trying, and all they get is a nearby populace almost permanently pissed off at them.
The Cold War when the US government spent themselves into massive debt for defense, and Russia spent themselves into ruin.
The last paragraph should have said:
The Cold War was won when the US government spent themselves into massive debt for defense, while Russia spent themselves into ruin.
That presumes he believes you can actually take him out. He may choose to go underground - hide in bunkers, change his location frequently, etc. Then of course there is the issue of the army in the field. What would have happened to Saddams army in Kuwait had Saddam been killed? Would they have returned to Iraq or would they turn into roving bandits armed with circa 1970 Soviet tanks and APCs?
Presumably, if you were able to take out the last guy, you can take out the new guy. At the very least, the possibility of assasination will weigh on his mind and affect his decision-making.
I think they would have either retreated or surrendered when confronted with superior US firepower, no matter what the situation back home. And an army without a leader isn’t an army, it’s an armed rabble, much easier for an organized military force to deal with. Even if you are replacing a competant leader with a less competant one, it is an asset, that’s why the US targeted Yamamoto in WWII.
After reading the thread, and having my own military experience to fall back on the simple answer here is no. Assasination could never be an acceptable political option for making war, because anyone can do it. You do not need to be The United States with a massive military budget, or Afghanistan with a group of religous zealots to make it work. Put simply you just have to be willing to trade your own life for your targets. Once you make that decision stopping you becomes exceedingly difficult.
As far as the examples in history, and the citing of Kennedy, assasination has worked in the past only if the government sanctioned it and was willing to pursue it to fanatical ends. For examples of that policy feel free to look at Stalin or Hitler.
Chris
But you still require a large army to physically go in and remove them, thus invalidating robertliguori’s theory of a quick and easy victory by cutting off the head.
Destroying an army’s command structure (aka killing the country’s leader) is an effective tactic, but it must be used with conventional tactics. Even then, it assumes a very organized and deliberate aggressor. Assassinating the leadership would do little good in the small-scale ethnic conflicts that have become the norm of modern warfare.
I think you also presume too much regarding the ease of locating and killing someone who does not want to be found and has the military assests of an entire nation at his disposal.