Imagine if Allied intelligence had found Adolf Hitler in late May 1944 and killed him before the invasion of Normandy. Imagine that in that hour, the strikes eliminated Hitler’s appointed successor, the head of the German Armed Forces High Command, the chief military planner, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had the task of defending Western Europe, and all other German marshals and high commanders.
Consider that the officials who were publicly announced to be replaced were also beaten within hours.
Before a single Allied soldier had set foot on the beaches of Normandy, Germany’s military mastermind would be destroyed.
The Wehrmacht would have tanks, planes, and divisions. But it would function without its central nervous system.
The beheading of leadership has existed throughout history. What is new today is the ability to do it simultaneously, directly, and in the opening of the battle.
That situation was impossible in 1944. More importantly, we remained unthinkable even 25 years ago.
In 2003, the world’s most powerful coalition military invaded Iraq. The United States tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the war and came close more than once in the first days of the invasion.
Saddam survived largely because intelligence about his whereabouts was uncertain, and he was constantly moving between locations. After the fall of Baghdad, it took nine months to capture him, and years to find other government officials recalled from the American military’s “deck of cards.” In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it took nearly a decade to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden.
These results did not reflect a lack of effort. They demonstrate the inherent difficulty of finding a single target within a complex environment and ensuring that the target is actually present when the strike occurs. Wisdom rarely produces certainty. It generates opportunities.
That is still true today.
Even the most advanced intelligence architecture that includes human sources, interception of signals, access to the network through a database, satellite surveillance, and real-time data integration cannot ensure that a leader is in a certain room or bunker at a certain time. The target is moving. The communications industry is evolving. Cheating is common.
Sometimes successful strikes happen simply because the target misjudges the timing and fails to take defensive measures.
What has changed is not the disappearance of uncertainty. It is the speed and scale at which leadership can be directed when tactical strike capabilities and precision combine.
In the first phase of the recent conflict with Iran, the beheading of the leadership was not an act of support. It was part of the construction of the first war.
The initial strikes reportedly killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the country’s defense minister and commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as top air and missile commanders, key presidential advisers, and more than 30 other senior political and military officials.
In the first hour of the conflict, most of the government’s leadership had been removed.
Pointing to leadership has existed throughout history. What’s new is accuracy.
All layers of political and military leadership can now be identified almost simultaneously. High authorities, regular staff, missile forces, and commandoes can be hit with combined waves designed to produce rapid displacement at the top of the system.
This capability requires a unique combination of elements: deep penetration of the enemy’s political and military intelligence, continuous surveillance, long-range precision strike platforms, and weapons capable of destroying strongholds once they are considered sanctuaries. It also requires political will to use those capabilities early in the war.
Few states have both parts of that equation.
The Russia-Ukraine war shows the limits. Despite years of missile and drone attacks since 2022, Russia has failed to eliminate any of Ukraine’s top political or military leadership. Long-range strike capability alone proved insufficient without accurate intelligence about the leadership position during the attack.
The question, however, is what leadership strikes actually achieve.
Removing top leaders does not automatically weaken the regime. Governments often maintain succession plans, decentralized command structures, and contingency procedures designed to absorb such shocks. Had Iran’s leadership dispersed into strongholds before the strikes began, the results would have looked very different.
But targeting leadership can still produce powerful results.
It can break decision cycles, disrupt chains of command, and introduce uncertainty at the top of the political authority directing the war. Even temporary disruptions can make retaliation difficult, delay coordinated responses, and cause internal struggles for authority.
Prussian military scholar Carl von Clausewitz described war as a contest of wills between political communities. His framework assumed conflict, uncertainty, and rigid command structures under pressure.
What he did not envision was a world where the top political and military leadership directing a war could be literally targeted in the first minutes of a conflict through a combined strike of intelligence and precision.
The purpose of these strikes is not just to destroy. It’s a distraction.
For decades, opening strikes have focused on suppressing air defenses, destroying aircraft on the ground, and destroying infrastructure. The goal was to weaken the enemy’s military strength.
Today, some states are trying something different: targeting the military leadership itself.
That possibility introduces a new dimension to prevention.
If the enemy believes that their political and military leadership can be defeated in the first phase of the conflict, the personal risk of initiating military reforms. Deterrence traditionally relies on threatening damage to land, energy, or infrastructure. Leadership vulnerability adds another layer to that equation.
This ability is not omnipotent. Intelligence can fail. The target can escape. Successive organizations can absorb the loss of leaders.
But the growing ability to find and strike senior leadership quickly at the start of a conflict represents a fundamental change in how wars can begin.
For centuries, removing a supreme leader was often the end of a war.
In the emerging character of today’s conflict, it can sometimes be an opening move.
John Spencer is the Chair of Military Studies at the Madison Policy Forum.
