[shadowtree]

Which is why taking out the political leadership is the better tactic.

You don't need to fight armies - just make it suicide to command them. Decapitation strikes work.

"What if you had a time machine and could go back to kill Hitler?" Well yeah, no need to fight all of Germany.

Would the Ukraine war still be going without Putin at the helm?

The logical conclusion of drone war is take out whoever controls the drones.

[TheCoelacanth]

Decapitation strikes work well in highly personalist regimes (e.g. Russia). They work poorly in institutionalist regimes.

Iran is extremely institutionalist. You could keep killing leaders for years and they will just be replaced with similar ones.

[Starman_Jones]

That doesn’t work if a nation has strong institutions and hierarchies of command. Russia and Nazi Germany (and Iraq) were organized around a strong central leader who personally granted authority to his subordinates, but Iran’s rulers are given authority by a process. If the new supreme leader is killed, they will simply elect another one. Imagine that FDR was visiting Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. Would the US government have collapsed? How many politicians and generals would the Japanese have had to kill before the US surrendered?

[venzaspa]

But that approach has demonstrably not worked in this instance because Iran has been planning for this exact scenario.