The rise of the ‘leadership first’ strike — and why it’s so important in warfare

Imagine if Allied intelligence had located Adolf Hitler in late May 1944 and killed him before the Normandy invasion. Imagine that in the same hour, strikes eliminated Hitler’s designated successor; the head of the German Armed Forces High Command; the chief operational planner of the war effort; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, responsible for defending Western Europe; and the rest of Germany’s field marshals and senior commanders. 

Imagine that the officers publicly announced to replace them were struck within hours as well.

Before a single Allied soldier stepped onto the beaches of Normandy, the brain directing Germany’s war effort would have been destroyed.

The Wehrmacht would still have possessed tanks, aircraft and divisions. But it would have been operating without its central nervous system.

Imagine Hitler being killed by Allies—prior to the Normandy invasion. Getty Images

Leadership decapitation has existed throughout history. What is new today is the ability to do it simultaneously, precisely and at the opening of war.

That scenario was impossible in 1944. More importantly, it remained largely unimaginable even 25 years ago.

In 2003, the most powerful combined military force in the world invaded Iraq. The United States attempted to kill Saddam Hussein in the opening hours of the war and came close more than once in the first days of the invasion. 

Saddam survived largely because intelligence about his exact location was uncertain and he moved frequently between sites. After the fall of Baghdad, it still took nine months to capture him, and years to locate many other senior regime figures memorialized in the U.S. military’s “deck of cards.” In Afghanistan and Pakistan it took nearly a decade to locate and eliminate Osama bin Laden.

These outcomes did not reflect a lack of effort. They reflected the inherent difficulty of locating a single human target inside a complex state and confirming that the target is actually present at the moment a strike occurs. Intelligence rarely produces certainty. It produces probabilities.

Saddam Hussein was hard to kill, as he moved frequently between sites. Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

That remains true today.

Even the most advanced intelligence architecture combining human sources, signals interception, cyber access, satellite surveillance and real-time data fusion cannot guarantee that a leader is in a particular room or bunker at a particular moment. Targets move. Communications discipline improves. Deception is common. 

Sometimes successful strikes occur simply because a target misjudges the moment and fails to take protective measures.

What has changed is not the disappearance of uncertainty. It is the speed and scale at which leadership can now be targeted when intelligence and precision strike capabilities converge.

In the opening phase of the recent conflict with Iran, leadership decapitation was not a supporting action. It was part of the opening architecture of war.

It took the US nearly a decade to locate Osama Bin Laden; pinpointing his exact location was difficult. Sygma via Getty Images

Early strikes reportedly killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with the country’s defense minister and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as senior aerospace and missile commanders, key presidential advisers and over 30 other senior political and military officials. 

Within the first hour of the conflict, much of the regime’s apex leadership had been removed.

Leadership targeting has existed throughout history. What is new is simultaneity and precision.

Entire layers of political and military leadership can now be targeted nearly at once. Supreme authority, the general staff, missile forces and command nodes can be struck in coordinated waves designed to generate immediate dislocation at the top of the system.

This capability requires a rare combination of factors: deep intelligence penetration of an adversary’s political and military core, persistent surveillance, long-range precision strike platforms and munitions capable of destroying hardened facilities once considered sanctuary. It also requires the political willingness to employ those capabilities at the outset of war.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei readd the Koran as he sits next to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. AFP via Getty Images

Few states possess both halves of that equation.

The Russia-Ukraine war illustrates the limits. Despite years of missile and drone attacks since 2022, Russia has failed to eliminate any Ukraine’s senior political or military leadership. Long-range strike capability alone has proven insufficient without precise intelligence about leadership location at the moment of attack.

The question, however, is what leadership strikes actually achieve.

Removing senior leaders does not automatically paralyze a state. Governments often maintain succession plans, dispersed command structures and contingency procedures designed to absorb such shocks. If Iran’s leadership had dispersed into hardened bunkers before the strikes began, the results might have looked very different.

But leadership targeting can still produce powerful effects.

It can fracture decision cycles, disrupt command chains and introduce uncertainty at the apex of political authority directing the war. Even temporary disruption can complicate retaliation, delay coordinated responses and trigger internal struggles over authority.

Leadership targeting is sometimes more about creating major disruption rather than outright destruction. Getty Images

The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described war as a contest of wills between political communities. His framework assumed friction, uncertainty and resilient command structures under pressure.

What he did not imagine was a world in which the senior political and military leadership directing a war might be physically targeted in the opening minutes of conflict through integrated intelligence and precision strike.

The objective of these strikes is not simply destruction. It is disruption.

For decades, opening strikes focused on suppressing air defenses, destroying aircraft on the ground and degrading infrastructure. The goal was to weaken an enemy’s military capacity.

Today some states are experimenting with something different: targeting the leadership directing the war itself.

That possibility introduces a new dimension to deterrence.

If adversaries believe their political and military leadership could be struck in the opening phase of a conflict, the personal risks of initiating war change. Deterrence has traditionally relied on threatening damage to territory, forces or infrastructure. Leadership vulnerability adds another layer to that calculation.

This capability is not omnipotent. Intelligence can fail. Targets can escape. Succession structures can absorb the loss of leaders.

But the increasing ability to locate and strike senior leadership rapidly at the outset of conflict represents an important shift in how wars may begin.

For centuries, eliminating a supreme leader was usually the end of a war.

In the emerging character of modern conflict, it may sometimes become the opening move.

John Spencer is the Chair of War Studies at the Madison Policy Forum.