Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Maybe it's because Wilf stopped posting, maybe for other reasons; I seem to sense that the craze about how killing leaders supposedly wins wars is largely over?
Who ever said that?

Seriously now that you are older and have time on your hands you will have time to read.

You may come across this gem from Liddell-Hart:

A plan, like a tree, must have branches if it is to bear fruit. A plan with a single aim is apt to prove a barren pole.
...but you can be forgiven if 'the plan' is biased towards special forces type operations because the senior commanders come from that background and seem incapable of conceiving operations which require more than one or two helicopter loads of 'men in black'.

Any appreciation on an assassination must have the most important question answered before the ops planning even starts and that is the effect on the enemy of the particular individual being taken out.

Now the killing of lower level military commanders is normal operations and the same appreciation requirement holds especially in terms of the return on the effort involved.

...but that gets confused when you have 100 odd SAS operators in theatre supported by a task dedicated battalion of paras and probably more dedicated air effort than what is available for the test of the Brit force in theatre. So you have to keep them busy, yes... and this is the (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) kind of 'black ops' stuff they do. For heavens sake don't ask them of the supporting para battalion to do some standard infantry soldiering... they are not into mundane 'green ops' anymore (you will be told). If you want infantry work you will have to find some armour units to do it (which they try to do after a fashion).

So at a tactical level it is not apparent that the strategy of killing Taliban leaders has worked to the degree anticipated... as the Brit have effectively been defeated militarily in Helmand and the US surge troops are withdrawing in an admission of failure to achieve the mission.

Even a casual observer will have seen that the US and Brit senior officers have failed due to political micro-management (I'm being kind here because I personally don't believe they have a f***ing clue).

At a strategic level I do believe that one of the (smaller) branches of the Afghanistan strategy should be to target the likes of Mullah Omar etc... who if killed will (hopefully) be replaced by an even less capable individual.

...but the smart question is whether the right people are being targeted at all? How come the US and the British have chosen to cozy up the warlords and the druglords? I would have thought that some of these guys would have been better targets for these 'black night ops'?