High Value Target HVT / Political Assassination

[davidbfpo]

Thread reopened.

A forthcoming book 'Targeting Top Terrorists:Understanding Leadership Removal in Counterterrorism Strategy'; the author's bio suggests it could be valuable:

Bryan C. Price is the founding executive director of the Buccino Leadership Institute at Seton Hall University. During a twenty-year career as an Army officer, he served in various command and staff positions, including combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2012 to 2018, he directed the Combating Terrorism Center and served as an Academy Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

From the publisher's summary:

This practice, known as leadership decapitation, is based on the logic that removing key figures will disrupt the organization and contribute to its ultimate failure. Yet many scholars have argued that targeted killings are ineffective or counterproductive, questioning whether taking out a terror network’s leaders causes more problems than it solves.

In Targeting Top Terrorists, Bryan C. Price offers a rich, data-driven examination of leadership decapitation tactics, providing theoretical and empirical explanations of the conditions under which they can be successful. Analyzing hundreds of cases of leadership turnover from over two hundred terrorist groups, Price demonstrates that although the tactic may result in short-term negative side effects, the loss of top leaders significantly reduces terror groups’ life spans.

Link:https://cup.columbia.edu/book/target.../9780231188234