Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Perhaps a better comparison is how many of a deployed SF A-TEAM would you have to kill for them to loose their effectiveness.

Killing enemy leaders works. It may not be highly effective, but I cannot think of any good reason to pass up the opportunity. Also from an intelligence perspective identifying and tracking enemy leaderships, usually brings a host full of other goodies.
The junior man of any ODA is quite capable of leading himself, and determining if he has the wherewithal to accomplish the mission or not.

But this is not the point I hoped to make. This focus on HVIs is more to the point that I am working through in my "Full-Spectrum Deterrence" and "Deterrence of Irregular Threats" work. Certainly there is a degree of "Prevent" when a key leader is taken out. There will be a short period of sorting out who steps up next for that one particular actor. But what provocative effect does this have elsewhere across a broad range of actors?

Now, I recognize this following fact cuts both ways: 50 years ago to take out such a guy in a COIN effort may well lead to temporary peace in his zone of influence. Today, word of this attack raced around the world in minutes. Some may well have been deterred by the news, for fear of suffering a similar fate. Many more were probably outraged and provoked by the news. What is the net gain or loss?? Hard to say. Generals like assessments, but there is no way to assess that. One man dead.

My strong suspicion is that such temporal, tactical gains produce far more strategic downside than upside on today's global "battlefield." Bragging about these hits to show how we are being effective is what is causing the strategic downside.

We need to just shut up, and be quiet professionals. Do the job and let those who choose to speculate speculate, but the ones we're really trying to influence know exactly what happened.

We are slipping into the same trap with unmanned aircraft and their missiles that we fell into with our bombers and guided munitions. Some news is best delivered in person. Short, violent raids with no post-op clamoring for glory will be less likely to produce the strategic downside, and probably be far more respected by those we target and thereby produce better results.