Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
I'll fully confess to not knowing the who said what or when, - but I cannot for the life of me work out how someone contends that killing your enemies (people who would kill you) is counter-productive because this breeds "more enemies," or "drones = cowardice" or any of the other "wonderfully insightful because it's counter-intuitive" twaddle gets peddled. If about end-state, not style!
Killing the enemy leadership is a sure fire proven, works 9 times out of 10, if done well, useful. The only time it could backfire is if you are killing people who are not your enemies.
IIRC some genius actually said, we shouldn't kill the enemies leaders becuase that leaves no one to negotiate with... seriously....
The world seems to be more difficult than that.

Let's take the leader assassination thing:
The paralyze effect is only temporary. It's in a long conflict only valuable if you can exploit is well.
The loss of competence effect is considerable, but you may also have the adverse effect if you kill a leader who's relatively incompetent.
You lose your understanding of the enemy's habits, preferences, ability and possibly even intent. You need to re-learn about the opposing mind because a new mind replaces the old one.

Finally one complication that should be very familiar in your neighbourhood; the replacement leaders tend to be more extreme, aggressive and young than the original ones.


So yes, killing an enemy leader may actually be counter-productive.
Imagine Alexander had killed Darius in the first battle; someone better, less cowardly, might have replaced Darius and bested Alexander in the next battle.


Killing leaders is no surefire thing to anything if the enemy organization has prepared for this contingency. Think of the thousands of officers lost in battle during the World Wars. Organizations can often replace such losses - and even raise the competence level while doing so.


Furthermore, I subscribe to the Hydra theory in regard to Afghanistan.
It's a bit complicated, though. I dislike the whole high visibility approach to the meddling in AFG. To have many troops in place, to let them patrol, fight and kill adds arguments to the enemy's arsenal.
It would be much tougher to agitate against infidel foreigners if the villagers had never seen a foreigner or a bomber's contrail.
The more we intervene the more troubles are added to the problem (and the more we become their enemy instead fo merely an exogenous influence) and the lesser the efficiency of our intervention.

To kill more enemies isn't necessarily leading to a significantly better end state anyway. Few (para)military powers of history seem to have lasted till their point of total destruction.
The German military of 1945 had more tanks, aircraft and submarines in its arsenal than in 1939. The tremendous attrition of almost six years warfare was often overestimated in its significance. The exhaustion of the important age group (young, healthy males) by late '42 (physical and psychical exhaustion) coupled with the enemies' superiority in material and personnel quantities caused the turn of the war (just as in 1918). The absolute power of the German military (measured in hardware and personnel quantity) didn't really decline significantly in 1941-early1945.

The exhaustion is linked to attrition AND replacements - any move that adds more to replacements than to attrition is not going to help.

The physical destruction of Taliban may be necessary for the mopping up phase, but it would likely be a minor contributor to a turn of the war's course.
Meanwhile, the troubles associated with pushing up attrition may very well prevent such a turn.