Decapitation Wars: The Latest Strategy of an Empire in Crisis

EDITORIAL, 30 Mar 2026

#944 | Richard E. Rubenstein – TRANSCEND Media Service

Descriptions of the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah pay considerable attention to innovations in military technology – in particular, the relatively low-priced drones, mines, speedboats, and missiles used by the Iranians to achieve something approaching parity with the far more heavily armed North Americans and Israelis. Although these are notable developments, the intense focus on technology obscures other innovations that are equally important, disturbing, and revealing.

One of these is the rise of decapitation warfare: a marked shift away from the traditional goals of destroying the enemy’s military forces in battle and capturing its territory.  Decapitation wars are large-scale struggles in which attackers attempt to defeat an enemy regime by targeting and assassinating a substantial number of its civilian and military leaders. The current war in Iran, begun by the U.S.  and Israel during negotiations without any immediate provocation or threat by Iran or its allies, is one of the first such wars.

Targeted killing, of course, has long played a role in warfare.  In ancient as well as modern wars, hostile armies tried to kill or capture each other’s commanders, and enemy kings or sovereigns have also been considered fair game.  But modern states accustomed to fight conventional wars have had strongly mixed feelings about assassination, considered as a form of irregular or unconventional warfare.  In the U.S., following revelations in Congressional hearings of lethal CIA and Special Forces targeting operations, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders prohibiting those acting on behalf of the U.S. government from “engaging in or conspiring to engage in” political assassination. These orders are technically still in effect, but especially after the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, they were reinterpreted or ignored to permit American regimes to order the targeted killings as part of the U.S. “war on terror.”

Thus, the administration of President Obama used the “terrorist enemy” category to justify the killing of jihadists such as Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the latter an American citizen killed by a drone attack in Yemen in 2011.  Donald  Trump employed similar language ten years later when he ordered the assassination of an high Iranian official, Revolutionary Guard Major General Qasem Soleimani, also by a drone strike.  President Joe Biden ordered 77 lethal attacks against people considered terrorists in Africa and the Middle East.  But the most proficient practitioners of targeted killing have been the Israelis, who since the turn of the century have assassinated hundreds of leaders of paramilitary groups and political parties such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, as well as top civilian and military officials of governments deemed hostile.  From the 1970s onward, Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence organization, became the world’s most feared and potent source of targeted killings (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n06/andrew-cockburn/beware-the-mattress).  Recent wars have integrated the roles of Mossad and the Israeli Defense Forces in increasingly lethal decapitation campaigns aimed not only at top officials but those much lower on the leadership ladder.

A major escalation in this form of warfare occurred in 2024, when Israelis detonated explosives placed in pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah militants), killing 42 people, including 15 civilians, and wounding more than 4,000.  Lethal actions formerly associated with “anti-terrorist” campaigns were expanded and incorporated in conventional war scenarios beginning with the so-called 12-day war of June 2025, when Israeli and U.S. forces killed several dozen Iranian scientists and Revolutionary Guards officials as well as bombing Iran’s nuclear production facilities. The war against Iran initiated in February 2026 began with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, his family, and members of his cabinet, and proceeded over the next month to target scores of Iranian political and military leaders as well as scientists, engineers, and administrators.  This strategy, linked with efforts to incite a popular overthrow of the Islamic Republic regime, has obliterated the old distinction between irregular tactics such as targeted killings and conventional warfare.

What caused this pronounced turn toward decapitation warfare?  And what are its likely consequences and implications?

Causes:  The assassination of public officials has most often been a response by civilians to perceived tyranny.  Targeted killings by states have usually been a response to perceived rebellion (or what modern states have come to call terrorism).  In both cases, efforts to eliminate particular “enemy individuals” deny the legitimacy of a popular organization or regime (thus, the phrase “terrorist state”) and imply that if certain individuals can be eliminated, so can the organization, ideology, or regime.  This assumption – frequently erroneous, as it turns out – seems to have been a factor in the U.S.-Israeli decision at the start of the current war to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei.

Targeting specific individuals, as the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos points out,  “shifts the political arena from social conflicts between classes or social groups to the individual political entrepreneurship of leaders conceived as metonyms for collective enemies.”  Prof. De Sousa also notes the tendency of decapitation warfare to expand the range of targets to include “political leaders, military figures, scientists in strategic fields, or opinion leaders.”  https://savageminds.substack.com/p/decapitation-and-the-end-of-politics?

To understand this shift in military tactics, it helps to be aware of a key characteristic of the present historical moment: the crisis of the U.S. global empire. The great challenge for American rulers since the 1960s-70s has been to maintain and expand U.S. global supremacy while reducing the fiscal and political costs of fighting lengthy and difficult wars of repression or counter-revolution.  After their defeat in Vietnam, U.S. leaders eliminated the military draft and created an all-volunteer armed force.  After the inconclusive or counter-productive results of the costly Afghanistan and Iraq wars, they developed a strategy of relying on a combination of proxy states, special forces, and air power to achieve their military aims without committing substantial land or naval forces to battle.  Targeted killings (or, in the case of Venezuela, kidnappings) are a tactical corollary of the general strategy of “war without battles.”  Decapitation warfare purports to be a low-cost way of maintaining imperial control of subject regions such as the Middle East.

Consequences: The Iran War, at least to this point, gives the lie to the assumption that targeted killings reduce the costs of empire-maintenance.  Indeed, the costs imposed by Iran’s closing the Strait of Hormuz to international oil traffic affect the entire global economy and have weakened U.S. international alliances.  As a result, the Trump regime has been compelled to ship thousands of troops to the region and to threaten a return to more conventional forms of warfare. But the consequences of decapitation tactics go far beyond the immediate results of their use in Iran and Lebanon.

To begin with, most scholars agree that targeted killings of leaders are seldom effective to eliminate a political organization, regime, or movement, since mobilizations based on mass discontent or other compelling motives will find ways to replace lost leaders with new ones. (See https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-decapitation-will-not-solve-united-states-iran-problem.)   In the case of Iran, the notion that the regime in Teheran would collapse if the Supreme Leader and his colleagues were killed has been shown to be an illusion. This finding of ineffectiveness, however, has an alarming implication. Consider what happened in Gaza when the assassination of Hamas leaders proved ineffective to destroy or even to disrupt that organization. If an attacking force is determined to use decapitation tactics despite their initial ineffectiveness, it will move violently down the tiers of leadership to the point that it is targeting low-level as well as high-level leaders, then followers, and finally “collateral” bystanders. In short, “targeted” killings that continue indefinitely without destroying an organization or regime become genocidal.

This potential for genocide is in some ways inherent in the very idea of decapitation or group assassination which obliterates the distinction between irregular and conventional warfare. War is always ghastly, and industrial warfare frequently verges on genocide.  But whatever rules of war stand in the way of genocidal violence are washed away by the idea that it is acceptable to target individuals, including noncombatants, because they are members of some “enemy” group. When one party to armed conflict is an empire determined to sustain its hegemony by all means necessary the threat is particularly acute, since empire-builders consider those who resist their domination to be barbarians outside the law.

Whenever empire-builders make war on some targeted group, one hears an echo of Joseph Conrad’s villainous Kurtz in the story Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate all the brutes!”  Decapitation warfare will not eliminate organized opposition to U.S. imperial expansion or resolve the contradictions that have produced a crisis of the Empire.  While the crisis lasts, however, the tactic of mass assassination has the potential to do a great deal of damage to a great many people.

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Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Mar 2026.

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