Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. It is a great honour, a privilege for me to be here addressing you today, especially on this subject,
and also as part of the change in character of war study, which I have to say I read a great deal about.
But this is the first time I've actually encountered any of you personally and physically.
Can everybody hear me? Good. Right. How this is going to work is I'm going to give you a very general overview of targeted killings.
This is about killing people. I am very aware that that's an emotional subject.
To my mind, it is inherent to war and warfare. And I am not here to tell you that killing is right or wrong.
I am an ardent follower, if that's the right word.
And I'm probably isn't even the right word of of Clausewitz.
And as we all know, Clausewitz never wrote about ethics. I am purely concerned with the instrumentality of this.
In other words, its service towards policy. Okay.
I just assume the policy is ethical because who would not be?
I am always ethical. I assume that any political view I hold has to be ethical because that is why I hold it.
My political views are an outgrowth of my personal ethics.
I am sure there are many in this room who would disagree with me and where I live in Israel, as many who violently disagree with me.
Unfortunate. But one of those things. The targeted killings really means it was best expressed by an American policeman who doesn't matter who he is,
but he's in a very succinct and annoyingly South American Southern states, the American Way said.
He said strategies about deciding who you're going to kill.
And he's on the Internet saying that if you want to go and find it, it's called the flat out theory of War,
and as such doesn't really have any intellectual credibility or standing.
But targeted killings is about killing people who are relevant to your policy.
The structure that Adam and I, who founded the Infinity Journal used for strategy is discussion as to ends, ways and means.
And we give those the following functional definitions.
I don't mean precise semantic definitions, I mean functional definitions in terms of a way to enable people to discuss and write about it.
Of being policy, policy, strategy and tactics.
So strategy is the linking of policy with tactics on the understanding of the interaction between the two of them.
That's not they were all there is to it. But that's that's how I'm talking to you today.
So how do you become relevant to policy in terms of Israeli targeted killings?
Now,
another other caveat I'd like to point out today is I am talking generally about the targeted killings process as practised by the state of Israel.
Adam will deal with the fine detail. But I'm dealing with a broad overview and it is relevant to what we have studied.
If you want to talk about other people who have pursued a strategy of targeted killings, including the British,
so we including the British Empire, various times in its development, including the Americans and the so-called the drone attacks in Afghanistan.
I can't really talk to you about that in the detail that would be necessary to understand it.
If I went away and studied it in detail, then I'd have a better understanding.
But if you want to ask me about the assassination of Heidrich or why drones keep killing so many civilians, I haven't the faintest idea.
Okay. You become relevant to policy if you are instrumental in the killing of Israelis.
So in other words, if you are a person who advocates it overtly in terms of getting other people to do it or you materially assist in it,
you come up on the radar of the General Security Service.
That doesn't mean anybody who stands on a street corner in Nablus, shame waving a sign saying Kill the Jews is relevant to policy.
You actually because of the amount of time and effort it takes to do this and because of its sensitivity to the policy,
you actually have to be a problem. You have to be someone with a proven track record in making this happen.
And what it will always come down to is an attack in which Israelis died.
That will be the chain of evidence.
And I'm using evidence more in terms of intelligence to say we are going after this guy, because now the wider policy, as in political end state.
Okay. Know, I know we can have a huge argument about what Clausewitz meant when he said policy,
but really and it's not it's not a brilliant choice of words.
But what we are talking about is the political behaviour or the behaviour which you want to force upon other people.
And in the context which I'm discussing, we are talking about a ceasefire, a cessation of violence,
which is about as good as the use of armed force against armed force can get.
It's not about winning the war. It's not about solving the problem.
It is about ceasing the violence in a way that supports the policy aim.
So in other words, if you want to have peace talks, if you want the situation to develop, in other words,
the first person the first thing you've got to do is stop the killing and you've got to stop it by force.
So you've got to get the enemy and I mean enemy to ask for a ceasefire.
Get them to beg for a ceasefire. Okay.
So you use you are using the use of targeted killings for that purpose.
You don't. This is not an attritional strategy in the widest sense of the terms attrition.
It is not about going out and killing anybody and everybody who is useful or instrumental to the enemy's use of force.
It is about precisely deciding who you are going to kill and why.
An adam staat will talk, will give you better examples about why you are killing people.
But the term terrorist,
as in someone who is committing a terrorist offence within the structure of law that your policy is supporting becomes a very operative term.
The killing has to be or has to balance precision, proportionality and discrimination.
Now, in the ideal technical terms,
and because my interest in studying this is to give precise and clear guidance to soldiers, I am not a true academic.
I don't pretend to be.
I am very much about trying to inform armies and discuss with armies how you solve these problems in terms of the conduct of warfare.
So I'm not really about studying war in that sense. I am not interdisciplinary.
I'm very much into one discipline. The precise, proportionate and discriminating use of force has to be balanced against effectiveness,
because if you are doing things which are not effective, you are not progressing your policy, you're not progressing the ends via the means.
In other words, you are failing. You are failing in the practice of strategy.
You can be carrying out an activity which is burning time, fuel resources.
And any of you've ever worked in an intelligence agency never,
ever underestimate that the physical wearing down that long term intelligence works takes on its operators.
And if all that results in something that's not successful, the the the the negative effect is,
is is substantial if not if not actually precisely measurable.
So it's about being able to gauge effectiveness versus efficiency.
Now, the efficiency would be only killing that person you want to kill and nobody else.
So in instrumental terms, everybody thinks of a sniper.
There are huge problems with employing snipers that most snipers aren't very good shots.
I don't care what all the television documentaries tell you. They and they they're very, very fragile.
You have to be able to get them into the right place at the right time and be able to pull them out again,
give them a weapon and take the weapon away from them. Huge technical problems, very, very difficult to do.
So when anyone ever tells you, well, you know,
that they shouldn't have used that car bomb or they shouldn't have used that missile, they should have used a sniper.
You are talking to someone who has a child like and I'm sorry to say it's a childlike understanding of the technicalities of the problem.
And if you really want to study this field, you actually have to go into quite deep detail as to how things like laser guided missiles work,
under what atmospheric conditions they can be used,
what are the characteristics of laser reflection of glass because that comes into play and all these things.
So there's a deep technical knowledge required to make judgements about the decisions used to inform how to progress a certain kind of attack.
Now what? The one thing that is not acceptable in terms of the people who are conducting the operation is a complete failure.
Now, a complete failure means the person you want to kill gets away and you kill people you didn't want to kill.
Targeted killing is very. The reason the word targeted is used is it doesn't mean just flat, as we used to say in the army,
flattening the Green Square to get the one rabbit or pigeon that you wanted.
It means applying force so precisely that people who were not involved in the prosecution of violence are generally safe.
Sadly, all military action conducted in and around a civilian population runs a substantial risk of killing civilians.
And amongst the more pragmatic and I'm not putting any judgement on that amongst the more pragmatic students of warfare,
most of us seem to accept that it's very it's very unpleasant.
It's not something I would say that civilian casualties don't matter.
Civilian casualties do matter because they are relevant to policy.
A lot of parts of the world where large amounts of civilians die in conflict,
where they're not relevant to policy, don't seem to affect any particular governments attitude to their deaths.
A large amount of civilians may or may not have died in a British hostage rescue operation in Sierra Leone, but they'd never.
The possibility of those civilian deaths never seems to have raised its head as concerns British policy with regards to Israel, Palestine, Gaza.
West Bank, Judea. Samaria. Every single civilian death has.
A huge. More so than anywhere else in the world.
Affect on people's opinions and policies. So the ideal aspiration is to be able to conduct an operation where only the person you're after dies.
There are very good examples of this. I've seen a photograph where only the driver's side of the car has basically been obliterated.
Everybody else in the car didn't walk away, but they are still alive today.
The there is a piece of gun camera footage shot in my watch here where it was shot in the West Bank.
All the tank fire being used where it only kills one person.
So anybody ever tells you, you know, tanks have no place in irregular warfare.
I'm sorry if you're trying to kill someone at three kilometres. Tank fire might be the way to do it.
If you want to do it in a way that doesn't kill the seven people standing three metres away from him also works.
I mean, again, a functional technical knowledge of how these things can and can't be achieved needs to be fact factored in at the end of the day.
If you have a policy which can be successfully advocate, that can be successfully set forth through killing,
and that is to get an enemy organisation to ask for a ceasefire and killing the
right people at the right time in the right place will get you there then.
Targeted killing obviously has merit. In instrumental terms, what do you have to be very careful of?
Standing back is looking at this and saying, oh, but targeted killing doesn't make a difference.
Attacks went up. Nothing really changed.
And this is because there's a very peculiar view in the post-modern.
That's the only nice work and say in the post-modern understanding of war and
warfare that somehow every action has to have commensurate an immediate benefit.
And it doesn't in this game. What you're talking about is a slow grinding down over time.
You're talking about times when you will be unsuccessful and the policy will suffer.
But you're talking about other times where you will be more successful than you progressed the policy.
So again, time and effort, because as we all know in the practice of strategy,
if your policy doesn't support the time and effort, then the policy was probably wrong.
But if your policy's right and you're prepared to stick with it, killing the enemy generally, generally based on 5000 odd years of evidence,
tends to work because it is that act that quickly and that most quickly and precisely stretched the will to fight.
And what you're looking to do is destroy their ambition or intention to carry on fighting.
Now, it might be that in real terms you have an organisation that says within its own gathering says We will continue to fight,
we will continue to struggle,
but right now we've got to ask for a cease fire because the last seven people that have stood here and talk to you have ended up dead.
And we know and Adam knows because he has actually talked to the people concerned that the continual killing of high level operators
within terrorist organisations has a substantially degrading effect on the people within their immediate vicinity and community.
The wider population may still believe in continuing the struggle and may believe that the actual attrition in course is worth it.
But the people who are getting killed actually suffer disproportionately.
Now that's very easy to understand because you can think of the amount of
engagements that Britain as a nation has fought over the last hundreds or so years,
where Will was broken at the tactical level within the military organisation.
But the nation believed you should go on fighting.
However, if the if the armed wing of your Trinity, people, people, government and army, if the armed wing ceases to advocate the use of violence,
then you've substantially degraded the enemy organisation's chance to advocate their policy via violence.
So just in closing, what I'd like to say is just remember that it isn't about solving the problem, it's not about winning the war.
It is about destroying the enemy. Armed wings, ability and desire to keep using violence to progress their military aim.
It's not any more complicated than that.