A little over a month ago, US President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed. He also added that many of the Iranian military and security forces did not want to fight and were looking for immunity. He also said that “Hopefully, the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”
A little over a month later, there is no evidence that the Iranian military or security forces lack the will to fight, as evidenced by the weekend downing of two US aircraft and the wounding of members of the team initially sent in to rescue the downed aircrew. If any merging between patriotic Iranians and the Iranian military has occurred, it has happened to oppose the American and Israeli military campaign launched against Iran, not to support it.
Therein lies the problem with conducting “leadership decapitation” operations, or as politicians and commentators are wont to say “cutting the head off the snake”. Such terms are great for a soundbite and, when successfully conducted, they can provide an immediate and easily publicised outcome for those who launched them. But the idea that killing a nation’s, or even an organisation’s leadership leads to immediate defeat is simplistic at best, and dangerous at worst.
In the case of the Trump administration, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and the subsequent replacement by his pliable vice-president Delcy Rodriguez may well have given Trump an unrealistic view as to how effective military power is, and how easy regime change could be. A weak military and a transactional political class is about as easy as it gets.
But the Middle East is an entirely different operating environment to South America, and Iran is certainly not Venezuela, not least due to its far more capable and experienced military. The first, and arguably the only rule of leadership decapitation is that you need to understand the society or organisation whose leadership group you are going to kill. Otherwise, you have little understanding of, or control over what will follow.
In 1992, the Israeli military targeted the then secretary-general of Hezbollah Abbas Musawi and killed him, his wife and son in a helicopter-delivered missile strike. The Lebanese civil war had just ended, and Hezbollah was strong, but still developing. Musawi was replaced by Hassan Nasrallah, who would lead the organisation for the next 32 years (until he too was killed in an Israeli strike) and oversee its development into a semi-state actor far more powerful than it was under Musawi’s leadership. Would they have become so effective under Musawi? Nobody will ever know for sure. What we do know though is that the death of Musawi did not “solve” the Hezbollah problem – indeed it may have made it worse.
The same principle applies to the air attacks against Hezbollah in Beirut from late July until October 2024 that killed Hezbollah’s chief of staff, operations chief and then the long-term secretary-general Nasrallah, and later his likely successor Hashim Safieddine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “historic turning point” while others claimed that it had set Hezbollah back by 20 years. Less than 18 months later, the Israeli military is back invading southern Lebanon, fighting against the same organisation and receiving incoming rocket and missile fire from the group whom it was believed had been set back by decades.
The current conflict against Iran is the most recent, and perhaps the most egregious example of the belief that leadership decapitation is sufficient to change a nation’s behaviour. Intense intelligence collection efforts led to the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as well as a large swathe of the regime’s senior leaders. And yet the Islamic Republic neither collapsed in on itself andnor did the uprising called for by both Trump and Netanyahu materialise.
More than a month later, rather than rejoicing in a clean and efficient mission to collapse a regime by taking out its leadership, Washington faces a dilemma. The United States and Israel have effectively destroyed Iran’s air force and navy, and severely degraded its air defence and military industrial capabilities. And yet Iran, which has deliberately invested in its aerospace forces due to their strategic reach and ability to impose economic costs, now effectively controls passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and it continues to launch missiles, rockets and drones against Israel and its Gulf neighbours.
Both the United States and Israel misunderstood the nature of the regime and of Iranian society more broadly. For the Shiite theocratic regime, the death of its religio-political leader, just as was the case with Nasrallah in Lebanon, simply added to the Shiite narrative of sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. And the 12-day air war with Israel in June 2025 taught the Iranians the need for decentralised control of military assets and reinforced the need to identify capable and ideologically committed subordinates well in advance, to replace those leaders who would inevitably be targeted.
As we have seen so many times in the recent past in the Middle East, you don’t kill your way to victory. That holds true for individual fighters on the ground as much as it does to senior political and military figures. Leadership decapitation sounds good and holds out the promise of quick success. But measured in the longer term, it rarely provides good outcomes.
In the case of Iran, what has transpired post-decapitation was readily foreseen by regional experts and many in the intelligence community. But Trump and Netanyahu both believe in their ability to bomb their way to victory, starting with their enemies’ leadership. Both history and the present show us how ill-founded that belief is.
