Largely unremarked amid the drama, risk and controversy of its reaction to the October 7 attack is that, over the past year, Israel has experimented with a new type of warfare: targeting its enemies’ entire command structures. The occasional tactical assassination is as old as time, of course, and in the modern age has been commonly practised not just by Mossad but also the US, Russia and India, among many other governments.
What’s new about the recent Israeli method, however, is that it doesn’t stop at one or two important figures. Rather, they’ve gone after leaders, planners, strategists, figureheads and key implementers, with the obvious goal of not merely slowing down the adversary but actually crippling them, ideally beyond repair, and turning the population against them by demonstrating just how damaging these leaders are to their quality of life.
It’s too soon to say if this will become a key tactic in Israel’s arsenal, whether it will prove effective in the long run, and what responses it might draw from their enemies. Yet what we can speculate on is this: might a strategy that emphasises the enemy’s decision makers turn out to be good news for civilians?
The goal of bombing across many previous conflicts, notably the Second World War, was to demoralise the citizenry through starvation and destruction. As late as 2003, meanwhile, the goal of the US bombing blitz in Baghdad was to cow the Iraqi population into a state of “shock and awe”. The current Israeli goal, at least in theory, is to eliminate the people and infrastructure of their sworn enemies. This is a significant difference, and is potentially epoch-making.
The unjust distribution of the costs of war have been one of its eternal features. Wars are declared by leaders, planned by generals, fought by often-reluctant footsoldiers — and endured in misery by the population at large. To put it differently, it’s always been ordinary people, the conscripts on the frontlines and the mass of civilians behind, who bore the brunt of any war, and this hasn’t changed. According to the Red Cross, a full 90% of war-time casualties remain civilians.
In theory, these civilian losses are “collateral” damage, unintentional and regrettable consequences of fights between armed combatants. But the evidence shows that most lethal action against civilians is either deliberate, or else represents a consequence that was known in advance and judged to be acceptable. You don’t bomb a city like Dresden without realising that you’ll be burying women, children and the elderly in the rubble, with an estimated 30,000 perishing in February 1945. 7,500 civilians died during America’s initial bombardment of Baghdad, and thousands more were traumatised and maimed.
It’s articles like these that make an Unherd subscription worthwhile. My compliments to the chef, by all means my compliments to the chef! 🙂
The young men march to war, while the old men (and women) plan, enact, and execute the actions of the battlefield. So it has ever been. If the leader in his comfortable armchair felt a small measure of the pain his people feel, he may not be so ready to send them off to die.
Nasrallah learnt this lesson, to his cost. Indeed, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, so I’ve heard …..
Israel has a local martial arts called ‘Krav Maga’, or ‘Close Combat’. It focuses on ending a fight in the shortest time, doing the unexpected, seeking an opponent’s weakness, and never giving up. I find it springs from the country’s character, which is formed by the people.
Whatever the thinking, the pager/radio strikes were spectacularly impressive.
Yes. All the more so because the (now deceased) Head Honcho of Hezbollah came up with the idea to use pagers for “security reasons”.
Thanks for this. Excellent essay!!
Taking out the leader in isolation may not work as well as intended. I recently read a view on the merits of the Allies killing Hitler during WW2. The view expressed was that while it may have made sense early in the war, it didn’t make sense later, because Hitler was such a terrible military commander, and always meddled in military decisions he should have stayed out of (eg. Stalingrad). Had he been killed in (say) 1942, he might have been replaced by someone who was more competent militarily, which might have meant the war went longer.
replaced by someone who was more competent militarily, which might have meant the war went longer.
Only if they thought they might win and they believed in the cause. I believe the Wehrmacht officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler were planning to make peace with the allies.
They might have been planning that, but all indications were that Hitler would have been replaced by someone who was every bit as much of a fanatical Nazi as he was. Plus, I think most of the “peace” proposals were with the Western Allies. Hard to imagine Stalin (an equally fanatical dictator) wanting peace.
There is, I think, a subtle difference between hitting the leadership of the opponents’ fighting forces and the civilian political leadership.
Kill a political leader and another, possibly more resolute (or deranged) will sometimes step forward. Kill the military leadership or disable their communications and those changes are likely to ‘stick’.
Unfortunately there is even more nuance… sometimes the military leadership and the civilian leadership overlap to some degree.
The enabling capability for targeting the leadership is deep rooted intelligence and the supporting technology. This is what distinguishes Israel from Iran and their proxy terrorists. It will be interesting to see with what and how they will strike the Iranians with in a way that they didn’t know what happened out how.
” The aristos never fight”? 20 percent of all VCs are Old Etonian and Old Harrovian, which is the senior SAS Squadron? ” G” as in Guards squadron.. who founded the SAS, The Commandos?
It’ll never catch on. Going for the top dogs invites retaliation in kind. Much more ego boosting to just send the cannon fodder.
I feel like the author vastly downplays the scale of civilian casualties inflicted by Israel. They aren’t exactly winning hearts and minds. They can kill as many enemy leaders as they wish, the civilians they brutalise will simply raise up more to take their place.
TL/DR Mossad are exceptionally intelligent, the IDF are idiots.
Hamas and Hezbollah do make a practice of “hiding behind civilians” though.
They aren’t exactly winning hearts and minds.
Which hearts and minds?
By that logic, the USA shouldn’t have bombed Japan; the UK shouldn’t have bombed Germany. It would have “raised up” more people to take up Nazism and Japanese imperialism, per you. Instead, we need an “immediate ceasefire” and a “negotiated solution”. The Nazis would still be around today.
How do you win hearts and minds? The Palestinians raped, mutilated and murdered, took hostages, paraded victims around Gaza, tortured grandmothers, teenagers and men alike from October 7th onwards, and yet there are still thousands of people turning out every week to march in support of them. Seems like they managed to win hearts and minds by behaving like monsters. The Israelis have made efforts to avoid civilian casualties yet are vilified by students, left-wingers and Islamists.
Haters gonna hate, as the kids have it these days.