Israel’s decapitation strategy is working, but comes at a heavy cost, RUSI DG Michael Clarke

[TonyGosling]

Israel’s decapitation strategy is working, but comes at a heavy cost

https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-e ... -kmfvs9l69

Mossad has cashed in its assets to kill Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. But its intelligence base has been sacrificed and many in the wider world are angry at the civilian toll

https://archive.is/Qq5Da

Michael Clarke Saturday October 12 2024, 6.00pm BST, The Sunday Times
In the year since the Hamas atrocity on October 7, Israel has engaged in the widest and most determined decapitation strategy witnessed. Decapitation strategies are based on a seductive idea — go for the leadership and cut off the organisational head of your enemy; kill it quickly from the top down.

On this basis Israeli forces spent nine months working through their list of Hamas terrorists, killing them at a high cost in innocent lives with the grim determination of a country believing itself fighting a war of survival. Only Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza, is still unaccounted for among its senior leaders.

For the past three months Israel has been doing the same to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Not only has it finally assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the leader since 1992, it has now also eliminated all bar one member of the top two echelons of Hezbollah’s command structure, along with many others lower down. Hezbollah fights the Israel Defence Forces in southern Lebanon and launches scattered missile attacks into northern Israel, but so far, it’s a broken-backed and unco-ordinated response to Israel’s fourth invasion of Lebanon.

The defence and intelligence forces of Israel, a state founded in 1948 amid enemies who swore to destroy it, have a long history of targeted strikes and assassinations to cripple the adversaries they regard as terrorist. But it’s different this time. Taking on all its enemies simultaneously — proxy forces established or backed by Iran — Israeli leaders have gone in for a wholesale decapitation strategy as part of the multi-front war they have now embraced. The strategy is an integral part of Binyamin Netanyahu’s response to the horror of October 7. And the Israelis appear to have cashed in some of their most valuable intelligence assets to do it.

Israeli intelligence operatives, from Mossad (foreign intelligence), Shin Bet (internal security) and Aman (military intelligence), are the most accomplished assassins in the world. Their reputation for relentless pursuit is regarded by the Israeli government as a deterrent in itself. These days, none of Israel’s enemy leaders doubts they live under assassination threat and may now count themselves lucky to die natural deaths.
It wasn’t always like that. There have certainly been failures and political embarrassments since 1948. Mossad pursued Nazi war criminals from the 1950s, though less doggedly and successfully than is generally supposed. Mossad was more successful chasing the Palestinian Black September group, responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972; it immediately identified 11 individuals involved and had killed 14 Black September terrorists within a year.

From 2002 to 2010, the near-legendary Meir Dagan ran Mossad and turned it into an even more efficient machine. His success also demonstrated the need for patience, persistence and an ability to grab the lucky breaks when they occur.
After Israel’s failure in the 2006 Lebanon war, Nasrallah was accorded hero status across the “axis of resistance” as the leader who had humbled the IDF. Three times the Israeli air force bombed buildings where their intelligence could place him, but each time he escaped injury.
During 2006, Israeli intelligence located Hezbollah’s technology chief, Hassan al-Laqqis, using his mobile phone. An F-16 fired a missile accurately into his room. But he had gone out, leaving his phone behind and his son was killed instead.
For years, Israeli assassination squads went after Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s influential chief of staff, finally getting an explosive into the Mitsubishi SUV he drove around Damascus. But the bomb would be effective only when he was standing in the right place just behind the vehicle. The Mossad team reportedly lined him up 32 times over a tense six weeks in 2008 before the lethal instant arrived.

These operations, and many others like them, were all deniable and targeted at high-profile people. But Israeli decapitation activities have clearly moved into a different era since the October 7 atrocity.
Intelligence “assets” — agents, traitors, devices, malware — are usually left to sit quietly until they can activate something significant. Israeli intelligence chiefs seem to have been prepared to cash in their healthy balance of intelligence assets this year to create an unrivalled picture of the movements of individuals in Hamas and Hezbollah.
That process has been turbocharged by artificial intelligence. Two programs, “Gospel” and “Lavender”, scrape information from a vast array of sources to place Hamas or Hezbollah individuals at a particular location, even for a few minutes. A former IDF chief of general staff claims that Israeli intelligence now identifies far more targets in a day than Meir Dagan’s Mossad would find in a year. And as the targets come up, the bombers and missiles are ready.
That was given another twist on September 17 and 18. Mossad had long had the idea of supplying booby-trapped electronic equipment to its targets. But the pager attack that killed 42 and injured more than 3,000 Hezbollah members — including some innocents — has already gone down with intelligence analysts as a technical triumph.
Mossad had been quietly selling Taiwan-designed pagers through BAC, a shell company in Hungary, supplying genuine pagers to innocent clients and booby-trapped ones to Hezbollah. The pagers were even engineered to require both hands holding the instrument to receive a message — ensuring it would cause maximum injury as it detonated.

The overall effect on Hezbollah’s organisation was debilitating, and the Israeli air force immediately began a systematic bombing campaign across Lebanon. As in Gaza, the associated civilian death toll in this decapitation strategy is regarded by Israeli chiefs as regrettable but acceptable — at least to them.
AI-fueled intelligence is not infallible. Nor can it solve the problem of well-constructed terrorist bunkers deep beneath existing buildings. Last Thursday it appears Israel totally destroyed a building in central Beirut where Wafiq Safa, Hezbollah’s great international ‘fixer’, was reportedly placed by real-time intelligence. But the early indications are that he either walked away from the destruction above him or was never there at all.
Decapitation strategies are not foolproof. The attempt of the western allies to catch Saddam Hussein and his inner circle in one dramatic attack on the eve of the 2003 offensive against Iraq was based on faulty intelligence and was a failure that blunted the impact of the real attack when it began. Vladimir Putin’s attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership at the start of his 2022 invasion of Ukraine was based on some incompetent assassination squads who were summarily gunned down on the streets of Kyiv in the opening hours of the war.
And even successful decapitation has to be translated into something politically tangible. The western allies conducted highly effective decapitation campaigns against the terrorists of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Both organisations are now on to their third and fourth-generation leaders but they are nevertheless still operating. Decapitation can certainly throw an enemy backwards. But it’s only a strategic manoeuvre; not a victory policy in itself.

And if it’s based on blowing valuable intelligence assets, decapitation tends to be a single shot. It takes time to build up the intelligence picture to do it again.
It is hard to estimate how much of its valuable intelligence base Israel may have sacrificed for this year-long and accelerating campaign of decapitation against its local enemies. Many in the wider world are very unhappy at the civilian cost of it and wonder how it can translate into a political endgame. But for now, Netanyahu seems to want to park that question while he works through his kill lists.
Professor Michael Clarke is a fellow of King’s College London and a distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute