Among the dominant features of the ongoing military operations against Iran that have been launched on February 28 by the United States and Israel is the concept of a “decapitation strike”.
The capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, during an early-morning raid on January 3, 2026, and then extracting him from his compound at Fort Tiuna in Caracas to be flown to the United States to face criminal trial was the trailer for President Donald Trump.
But the real picture was released with the launch of Epic Fury, which went one step further by the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior officials.
The picture of “Decapitation” deals with “leadership targeting”.
As a strategy, it focuses on removing the top leadership of an adversary country or group to cause operational paralysis, confusion, and collapse.
Whether this will eventually result in regime change in Iran that Trump now asserts to ensure remains to be seen. But he has shown the American capability and willingness to remove hostile heads of government, thereby moving the concept of decapitation from theory to easy or regular practice.
In the process, “decapitation” is said to have generated fear among the leaders of other countries that the US considers adversaries. At least this is the case with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, if the Korean media reports are any indication.
“For a regime built around protecting the leader above all else, that makes the threat feel much more real in Pyongyang”, according to Go Myong-hyun, an analyst at the Seoul-based Institute for National Security Strategy.
American political scientist Robert Pape argues that an organization’s (country’s) leadership “is like a body’s brain: destroy it and the body dies; isolate it and the body is paralyzed; confuse it, and the body is uncontrollable.”
When a charismatic leader responsible for galvanizing the organization or the country is decapacitated/ eliminated, it reduces the enemy’s capabilities and increases the chances of a quick victory.
It is difficult to fill the void of slain leaders with equally experienced and competent colleagues. This, in turn, can handicap the group in making appropriate operational strategies and, over time, pose less of a danger.
Secondly, it has been seen that the assassination of a leader of such a group is followed by rivalries and confusion among his followers over who should be the successor.
Thirdly, following the assassination, the group often becomes defensive rather than offensive. It now devotes more time to avoiding becoming targets.
As a result, the group leaders minimize communications, change their locations regularly, and disperse their cells. All this adversely affects the building and expansion of their organizations to carry out sophisticated attacks.
According to Todd Turner of the U.S. Army War College, targeted killings ennhance national security (preemptive attacks on imminent threats); support no or limited “boots on the ground”; minimize casualties (military/civilian); lower financial costs; enhance citizen’s perception of action and increased security; avoid the detention dilemma; deny safe havens (non-permissive or denied terrain); and sustain pressure on the terrorist network.
The story of assassinations of undesirable individuals, officials, or groups of adversarial countries by the United States has a long history. What Trump has done now is to normalize the phenomenon in modern warfare. As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has written, “Decapitation is emerging as the American way of war”.
It may be noted that Moammar Gaddafi’s compound in Libya, Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace in Baghdad, and Osama bin Laden’s training camp in Afghanistan were targeted successfully by the US in the past.
An American drone had taken away the life of Qassem Suleimani, head of the Quds Force, Iran’s foreign operations outfit, at Baghdad’s airport in 2020.
The US seems to have learned from its close ally Israel how to use drones to target undesirable foreign enemies on foreign soil. Israel has consistently targeted its adversaries primarily through drones or airstrikes.
Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s book “Rise and Kill First,” published in 2018, says that Israel’s security services had carried out some 2,700 assassinations abroad till that year.
“After Palestinians began to target Israelis across Europe, notoriously killing 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, Mossad, the Israeli security service, was given free rein to hunt down such enemies (though Bergman questions whether the Munich attackers were ever killed). From then on, a string of attacks on Palestinian operatives in such places as Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates was carried out.”
Bergman’s book also revealed that US targeted killings of alleged terrorists rose from 48 under President George W.Bush to 353 under President Barack Obama.
It is noteworthy that removing America’s enemies, branded as terrorists, through drone attacks was mainly conducted by the CIA till the advent of the Obama Administration. This duty of the CIA was shifted to the Pentagon under Obama.
It is said that after President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” in 2001, the CIA’s skills in killing terrorists discomforted even some CIA officials. One such official was Elliot Ackerman, who wrote in The New Yorker magazine in 2014, “The discomfort of my colleagues, where it existed, didn’t stem from [targeted killing] itself. The discomfort existed because it felt like we were doing something, on a large scale, that we’d sworn not to. Most of us felt as though we were violating Executive Order 12333.”
Incidentally, assassination is forbidden for the United States if one goes by law. Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, states: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in Assassination.”
That order was issued by President Reagan in response to the Church Committee’s extensively documented findings on illegal domestic surveillance and plots to kill foreign leaders. It banned the US government from planning or carrying out assassinations.
Apparently, the order was originally issued by President Gerald Ford after the Church Committee investigation of the CIA in 1976, but that banned only “political assassination” and didn’t extend to those “acting on behalf of” the United States. The rule was tightened by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, and subsequently President Reagan reaffirmed that in very clear terms.
However, according to Jane Harman, a former Democrat Member of the US House of Representatives, the government lawyers do not interpret “assassination” as a synonym for “targeted killing” concerning terrorists, a distinction predating Washington’s conflict with al Qaeda.
And as the executive order notes, the intelligence community is charged with conducting “special activities” to protect national security, a category under which the drone program falls,” Harman wrote.
Apparently, when targeted killings arose after the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Lebanon, CIA discussions produced, as journalist Walter Pincus later reported for The Washington Post, “an informal agreement with the congressional oversight committees that if a covert action targeted a terrorist in his apartment plotting to blow up a building, he had to be detained. But if the terrorist were found and known to be on his way to blow up a building… he could be killed if that were the only way to stop him.”
In other words, the US has expanded the right to self-defense against attacks by non-state actors and states. This includes the right to “anticipatory self-defense,” allowing a country to use force to forestall an “imminent” threat of attack.
Incidentally, the Israeli and American authorities dislike the word “assassination” being applied to what they prefer to call “targeted attacks” because it implies a flouting of international law.
The Obama Administration has modified the legal framework that now says, “Using targeted lethal force against an enemy consistent with the law of armed conflict does not constitute an ‘assassination.’”
While noting that assassinations are unlawful as per Reagan’s executive order, Obama’s order said that there was now “a new and different kind of conflict against enemies who do not wear uniforms or respect geographic boundaries and disregard the legal principles of warfare.”
Notably, the modified legal framework under President Obama also permits “impinging on another state’s sovereignty” if the state is unable or unwilling to “mitigate the threat emanating” from its territory.
Viewed thus, Trump can always justify what he is doing in Iran. But the bigger question is what his decapitating strategy will achieve in the long term.
Will he be able to create a stable, modern, accountable, and democratic regime? As the Eurasian Times explained the other day, it is a daunting task. After all, there are what are called “martyrdom effects”, which can turn the situation worse and lead to the succession of bigger hard-liners.
Even Trump does not seem to have an answer. Last week, when asked who the United States would negotiate with when the bombing campaign ends, the American President answered: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead. … Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.”
His Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, also could not give a better answer to the members of the US Congress this week. “The United States would finish its demolition of the regime — and then gauge the prospects for political reconstruction”, he said.
That, as Ignatius has rightly concluded, is “a triumph of tactics over strategy —knock it down and then think about how to rebuild”. But then, tactics, unlike strategies, are ephemeral. Statecraft cannot be based solely on tactics.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
