In his famous book The Prince, the 16th-century Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli says that it may not be enough for a prince to “kill his opponents and wipe out their entire lineage” as long as the remaining nobles are capable of survival, persistence, and leading the opposition.
This is an early reference to what is currently known as the “decapitation strategy” in the context of armed conflicts. It also reflects the fundamental dilemma in this strategy: the distinction between the personalities of the rulers/leaders of a regime and the structure of that regime itself.
It is the dilemma currently facing the US-Israeli strategy in Iran following the attack on the country on 28 February.
The decapitation strategy refers to an organised process of using targeted military force to eliminate the enemy’s leadership, specifically that at the head of a state, an insurgent organisation, or a rival group, with the aim of paralysing that leadership’s ability to command and control and thus incapacitating it.
It assumes that the rapid removal of decision-makers will lead to collapse, chaos, or disorientation that results in defeat or surrender.
Theoretically, decapitation operations are considered to be high-risk, high-reward strategies; they may lead to a swift victory or to heightened risks in the event of failure. They aim to achieve victory by deploying the minimum amount of military force and avoiding costly conventional or unconventional battles.
The strategy treats the targeted regime as a body, and it begins by severing its political and military “heads” either sequentially or simultaneously, as well as by severing its “limbs” by destroying the communication system between the targeted leaders and the other parts of the regime. Sometimes this “decapitation” involves capture or abduction, but in most cases it is carried out through deliberate and targeted killing.
The strategy has a long history, as Machiavelli and those who followed him tell us. Its track record has ranged between success and failure, though it has tended more towards failure. But history tells us that the more centralised an organisation, especially in the case of non-state organisations centred around charismatic leaders, the more likely a decapitation strategy is to pay off.
The capture of Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path leftist group in Peru in 1992, for example, led to the fracturing of the group and its demise within a matter of years. Decades earlier during World War II, the killing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbour attack, by US intelligence led to the collapse of morale within the ranks of the Japanese Navy and the loss of the Pacific War by Japan.
In both cases, these leaders were irreplaceable; decapitation, therefore, was a high-reward tactic that led to strategic success.
The US has had a long love affair with decapitation. It can be traced back to the violent policies the US government pursued in the pacification and expulsion of the indigenous population of America in the 19th century and the frontier culture of the so-called “cowboys” in which killing “Indians” was integral to US expansion and the seizure of their lands.
During the Cold War, the CIA ran several programmes to eliminate the leaders of states that rebelled against US dominance in the Global South. The late Fidel Castro of Cuba survived hundreds of attempts on his life orchestrated by the CIA, for example.
The Israelis also developed a programme of this sort under the name of “targeted killing,” as they sought to eliminate the leaders of Palestinian and other resistance groups including the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
However, Israel’s use of decapitation as a strategy has been more driven by vengeance and a desire to intimidate its adversaries, as shown in the book Rise and Kill First by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US adopted decapitation as an integral part of its Global War on Terror, targeting the leaders of Al-Qaeda during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively.
However, the strategy largely did not pay off, and it even backfired. Over the following two decades, Al-Qaeda mushroomed across the globe, leading to the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) group even after the elimination of its founder, Osama bin Laden, in the infamous Abbottabad raid in Pakistan in 2011, an operation code-named “Geronimo” after the hunt for a leader of the Apache people, one of the indigenous peoples of what is now the southwest of the US, in the 19th century.
At the onset of the Iraq War, the US launched several “decapitation strikes” specifically targeting former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his inner circle using Nighthawks, a stealth attack aircraft, and cruise missiles. Despite this use of brute force, the operation was a stunning tactical failure, as not a single targeted leader was killed in 50 attempts. Instead, the strikes caused significant civilian casualties and failed to prevent the war.
Saddam was not captured until months later by US ground troops, and the “decapitation” of the Iraqi leadership did not stop the emergence of a years-long insurgency in the country.
Decapitation later did not leave the scene of Middle East conflicts, and instead it increased as a strategy in the unfolding conflict kicked off by the 7 October 2023 attacks. With a combination of US and Western support, intelligence penetration, technological sophistication, and even chance, Israel managed to eliminate the leadership of Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon, including Hassan Nasrallah, Ismail Haniyeh, and Yahya Sinwar.
This mass decapitation led to a significant decrease in the fighting capacities of the resistance movements, yet it did not result in the collapse of either Hizbullah or Hamas due to their replacement dynamics and decentralised structures.
The limits of decapitation were also shown during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June last year, as the latter targeted the elimination of the political, military, and scientific leadership in the Islamic Republic. But this mass targeting did not affect the fighting capacity of Iran, which showed resilience in hitting back against Israel without showing any signs of compromise.
In one of his brilliant observations, Machiavelli notes that it was easy for Alexander the Great to destroy the Persian Empire after the killing of King Darius III in 330 BCE due to his central role within the dynasty and the narrow bureaucracy of the expansive empire. The same logic is used in modern scholarship when it tries to account for the failure of decapitation today.
Researchers such as US academic Jenna Jordan have identified factors that make any group or state resilient to decapitation. First is an institutional and bureaucratic framework that lays out clear rules for succession and established hierarchies, regardless of whether it is a democracy or autocracy. Communal and social support can also provide targeted systems with sustainable sources of legitimacy, recruitment, and the regeneration of ranks. Ideology provides a cause to fight for within a group or regime.
Ignoring these factors often results in the failure of decapitation, particularly if it is used as a strategy for regime change by force. This ignorance is a reflection of a deeper failure to follow the strategic wisdom attributed to 6th-century BCE Chinese writer Sun Tzu that says “know yourself and know your enemy.”
In designing the ongoing Epic Fury campaign against Iran, Trump and others in his administration did not bother to know their enemy, and they underestimated its resilience.
Trump opted for decapitating the Iranian regime for many reasons; one was that he thought that by abducting president Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela earlier this year, he had achieved a quick, cheap, and clean victory. For him, this should have been the same sort of victory he would achieve in Iran by killing Ayatollah Khamenei and other Iranian political and military leaders. He was mistaken or was driven by hubris and folly at the same time.
The Iranian regime shows a great deal of institutional resilience, even within its system of theocratic authoritarianism and restricted democracy. Despite the absence of Khamenei and his 35 years at the top of the state, the country has not experienced a power vacuum, as its constitution, specifically Article 111, is designed to prevent this.
A Provisional Leadership Council and Secretary of the National Security Council of Iran were selected to be in charge of the country’s foreign and security affairs after the death of Khamenei. Military pressure on Iran since June 2025 has pushed the regime to create a semi-automatic replacement mechanism in every civil and military branch to ensure the resilience of the chain of command. The Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) has adopted a “mosaic defence” doctrine specifically to survive decapitation strikes, for example. As a result, even with the absence of the “head,” the “limbs” of the system, consisting of 31 provincial units, have not stopped moving.
A country under attack may be expected to unite, and this has been the case for the Islamic Republic, which has not shown any cracks so far despite far-reaching intelligence penetration. This unity has been cemented by the power of religious ideology, resistance, and Iranian national pride. These factors have secured the survival of the regime and the failure of Trump’s decapitation strategy.
However, the unknown factor is popular support. For various reasons, the Iranian people are fragmented, and the legitimacy of the regime is contested. Therefore, Iran’s adversaries have not shied away from stating that mobilising the domestic opposition and the country’s different ethnic groups will be the next step.
But this is the reverse of a decapitation strategy and a declaration of its failure.
*The writer is head of the Strategic Foresight Programme at Future for Advanced Research and Studies, Abu Dhabi.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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