The coordinated U.S.-Israeli strikes at the outset of the war in Iran killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with other key regime figures. In doing so, the United States and Israel crossed what The New York Times and others described as “a new Rubicon”: the deliberate, overt killing of a head of state.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed their war not simply as retaliation or coercion, but as an opening for political collapse. Remove enough of the leadership, the logic ran, and the structure beneath it either breaks apart or becomes vulnerable enough for a public uprising to finish the job.

Yet as a former senior U.S. intelligence officer who held leadership roles at the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, I believe such triumphalist logic masks the strategic shortcoming of such targeted killings.

Disruption is not the same as collapse

Most scholars, too, have concluded that targeted killings or assassinations, often referred to as leadership decapitation, can disrupt operations and degrade organizational effectiveness. Under some conditions, they can even force the targeted side to capitulate. But they rarely lead to collapse.

The work of Jenna Jordan, a scholar of international relations at Georgia Tech, remains one of the clearest warnings against inflated expectations about anticipated effect of such strikes. Across a large body of cases of targeting killings of non-state militant groups, she found that older, larger, more institutionalized organizations are harder to break down through leadership removal than small, young, weakly structured ones.

Patrick Johnston, a former director of the Counterterrorism Center at West Point who has studied counterinsurgency campaigns, found more evidence that decapitation can help end conflicts than Jordan did. Other research has backed-up Johnston’s conclusion that some terrorist groups are vulnerable to leadership targeting.

But even these more........

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