Decapitation as a Strategy

SEE HERE Today I bring you a Delancey Place you should sign up if you'd like to get a provocative and interesting excerpt from various featured books that makes you think. Today's targets the counter-terrorism strategy of decapitation. The question is whether it is a successful and useful strategy and the data that is in says, probably not. I'm inclined to think that the strategy itself gives too much credit to the idea that organizations are motivated primarily by their leadership and so if you cut off the head the organization is less effect and likely to shrink. That's probably simplistic thinking based on the analogy of a group to an organism. Any organization worth its salt has many leaders and many wanna-be leaders and taking out one leader may well merely make way for a more engaged and motivated leader. It will certainly anger the followers. Moreover it is a policy of assassination and this alone makes it highly questionable. A collective enemy should be seen as the collective not the leader and rabble. I think it is a fallacy especially on the left, but increasingly a modern fallacy, that a collective cannot be effective without a leader. The Tea Party is an example of a rather effective grassroots driven movement that has no particular individual leaders but many individuals with initiative.