In Thomas More’s Utopia, a strategy of hunting down and then to either kill or capture the enemy leader was posited as the form of warfare to be pursued in More’s proposed ideal society and state. Later on, John Frederick Charles Fuller in his ‘Plan 1919’ had propagated a similar strategy of decapitating the enemy’s ‘brain’, essentially targeting and destroying the enemy leadership. This would render the rest of the ‘body’, or the frontline troops, without effective command and control, giving the attacking forces a disproportionate combat advantage. Although in a logical sense, the killing of the enemy’s leadership would essentially disrupt the enemy’s strategy, however, lessons from history had illustrated somewhat different perspectives. Leadership killing in today’s context had been called targeted killing; a new catchphrase for states engaged in such activities in the international arena since the last decade as a mean of securing the state. The contemporary practice of targeted killing had precipitated an increase in discourse on targeted killings’ effectiveness, legality and morality, culminating with the recent killing of Osama bin Laden. There is, however, a glaring lack of analysis of leadership killings’ effectiveness at the strategic and political levels; this paper served to remedy that. Rather than using contemporary arguments, historical lessons from World War II were used to evaluate the strategic and political effectiveness of targeted killings. Two successful leadership killings conducted by the Allies’ Special Operations units during World War II were discussed in this paper; the killing of Reichprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in Bougainville. These two case studies suggested that by using lessons from history, we can learn from hindsight that the key principles that guide successful leadership killing, resided in the eternal character of strategic theory.
