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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,

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and also as part of the change in character of war study, which I have to say I read a great deal about.

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But this is the first time I've actually encountered any of you personally and physically.

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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.

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This is about killing people. I am very aware that that's an emotional subject.

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To my mind, it is inherent to war and warfare. And I am not here to tell you that killing is right or wrong.

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I am an ardent follower, if that's the right word.

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And I'm probably isn't even the right word of of Clausewitz.

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And as we all know, Clausewitz never wrote about ethics. I am purely concerned with the instrumentality of this.

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In other words, its service towards policy. Okay.

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I just assume the policy is ethical because who would not be?

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I am always ethical. I assume that any political view I hold has to be ethical because that is why I hold it.

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My political views are an outgrowth of my personal ethics.

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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.

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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,

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but he's in a very succinct and annoyingly South American Southern states, the American Way said.

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He said strategies about deciding who you're going to kill.

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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,

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and as such doesn't really have any intellectual credibility or standing.

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But targeted killings is about killing people who are relevant to your policy.

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The structure that Adam and I, who founded the Infinity Journal used for strategy is discussion as to ends, ways and means.

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And we give those the following functional definitions.

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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.

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Of being policy, policy, strategy and tactics.

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So strategy is the linking of policy with tactics on the understanding of the interaction between the two of them.

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That's not they were all there is to it. But that's that's how I'm talking to you today.

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So how do you become relevant to policy in terms of Israeli targeted killings?

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Now,

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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.

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Adam will deal with the fine detail. But I'm dealing with a broad overview and it is relevant to what we have studied.

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If you want to talk about other people who have pursued a strategy of targeted killings, including the British,

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so we including the British Empire, various times in its development, including the Americans and the so-called the drone attacks in Afghanistan.

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I can't really talk to you about that in the detail that would be necessary to understand it.

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If I went away and studied it in detail, then I'd have a better understanding.

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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.

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Okay. You become relevant to policy if you are instrumental in the killing of Israelis.

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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,

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you come up on the radar of the General Security Service.

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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.

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You actually because of the amount of time and effort it takes to do this and because of its sensitivity to the policy,

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you actually have to be a problem. You have to be someone with a proven track record in making this happen.

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And what it will always come down to is an attack in which Israelis died.

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That will be the chain of evidence.

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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.

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Okay. Know, I know we can have a huge argument about what Clausewitz meant when he said policy,

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but really and it's not it's not a brilliant choice of words.

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But what we are talking about is the political behaviour or the behaviour which you want to force upon other people.

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And in the context which I'm discussing, we are talking about a ceasefire, a cessation of violence,

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which is about as good as the use of armed force against armed force can get.

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It's not about winning the war. It's not about solving the problem.

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It is about ceasing the violence in a way that supports the policy aim.

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So in other words, if you want to have peace talks, if you want the situation to develop, in other words,

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the first person the first thing you've got to do is stop the killing and you've got to stop it by force.

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So you've got to get the enemy and I mean enemy to ask for a ceasefire.

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Get them to beg for a ceasefire. Okay.

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So you use you are using the use of targeted killings for that purpose.

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You don't. This is not an attritional strategy in the widest sense of the terms attrition.

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It is not about going out and killing anybody and everybody who is useful or instrumental to the enemy's use of force.

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It is about precisely deciding who you are going to kill and why.

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An adam staat will talk, will give you better examples about why you are killing people.

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But the term terrorist,

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as in someone who is committing a terrorist offence within the structure of law that your policy is supporting becomes a very operative term.

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The killing has to be or has to balance precision, proportionality and discrimination.

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Now, in the ideal technical terms,

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and because my interest in studying this is to give precise and clear guidance to soldiers, I am not a true academic.

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I don't pretend to be.

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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.

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So I'm not really about studying war in that sense. I am not interdisciplinary.

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I'm very much into one discipline. The precise, proportionate and discriminating use of force has to be balanced against effectiveness,

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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.

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In other words, you are failing. You are failing in the practice of strategy.

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You can be carrying out an activity which is burning time, fuel resources.

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And any of you've ever worked in an intelligence agency never,

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ever underestimate that the physical wearing down that long term intelligence works takes on its operators.

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And if all that results in something that's not successful, the the the the negative effect is,

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is is substantial if not if not actually precisely measurable.

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So it's about being able to gauge effectiveness versus efficiency.

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Now, the efficiency would be only killing that person you want to kill and nobody else.

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So in instrumental terms, everybody thinks of a sniper.

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There are huge problems with employing snipers that most snipers aren't very good shots.

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I don't care what all the television documentaries tell you. They and they they're very, very fragile.

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You have to be able to get them into the right place at the right time and be able to pull them out again,

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give them a weapon and take the weapon away from them. Huge technical problems, very, very difficult to do.

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So when anyone ever tells you, well, you know,

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that they shouldn't have used that car bomb or they shouldn't have used that missile, they should have used a sniper.

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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.

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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,

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under what atmospheric conditions they can be used,

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what are the characteristics of laser reflection of glass because that comes into play and all these things.

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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.

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Now what? The one thing that is not acceptable in terms of the people who are conducting the operation is a complete failure.

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Now, a complete failure means the person you want to kill gets away and you kill people you didn't want to kill.

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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,

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flattening the Green Square to get the one rabbit or pigeon that you wanted.

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It means applying force so precisely that people who were not involved in the prosecution of violence are generally safe.

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Sadly, all military action conducted in and around a civilian population runs a substantial risk of killing civilians.

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And amongst the more pragmatic and I'm not putting any judgement on that amongst the more pragmatic students of warfare,

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most of us seem to accept that it's very it's very unpleasant.

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It's not something I would say that civilian casualties don't matter.

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Civilian casualties do matter because they are relevant to policy.

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A lot of parts of the world where large amounts of civilians die in conflict,

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where they're not relevant to policy, don't seem to affect any particular governments attitude to their deaths.

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A large amount of civilians may or may not have died in a British hostage rescue operation in Sierra Leone, but they'd never.

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The possibility of those civilian deaths never seems to have raised its head as concerns British policy with regards to Israel, Palestine, Gaza.

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West Bank, Judea. Samaria. Every single civilian death has.

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A huge. More so than anywhere else in the world.

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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.

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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.

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Everybody else in the car didn't walk away, but they are still alive today.

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The there is a piece of gun camera footage shot in my watch here where it was shot in the West Bank.

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All the tank fire being used where it only kills one person.

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So anybody ever tells you, you know, tanks have no place in irregular warfare.

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I'm sorry if you're trying to kill someone at three kilometres. Tank fire might be the way to do it.

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If you want to do it in a way that doesn't kill the seven people standing three metres away from him also works.

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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.

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If you have a policy which can be successfully advocate, that can be successfully set forth through killing,

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and that is to get an enemy organisation to ask for a ceasefire and killing the

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right people at the right time in the right place will get you there then.

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Targeted killing obviously has merit. In instrumental terms, what do you have to be very careful of?

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Standing back is looking at this and saying, oh, but targeted killing doesn't make a difference.

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Attacks went up. Nothing really changed.

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And this is because there's a very peculiar view in the post-modern.

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That's the only nice work and say in the post-modern understanding of war and

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warfare that somehow every action has to have commensurate an immediate benefit.

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And it doesn't in this game. What you're talking about is a slow grinding down over time.

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You're talking about times when you will be unsuccessful and the policy will suffer.

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But you're talking about other times where you will be more successful than you progressed the policy.

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So again, time and effort, because as we all know in the practice of strategy,

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if your policy doesn't support the time and effort, then the policy was probably wrong.

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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,

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tends to work because it is that act that quickly and that most quickly and precisely stretched the will to fight.

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And what you're looking to do is destroy their ambition or intention to carry on fighting.

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Now, it might be that in real terms you have an organisation that says within its own gathering says We will continue to fight,

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we will continue to struggle,

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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.

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And we know and Adam knows because he has actually talked to the people concerned that the continual killing of high level operators

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within terrorist organisations has a substantially degrading effect on the people within their immediate vicinity and community.

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The wider population may still believe in continuing the struggle and may believe that the actual attrition in course is worth it.

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But the people who are getting killed actually suffer disproportionately.

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Now that's very easy to understand because you can think of the amount of

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engagements that Britain as a nation has fought over the last hundreds or so years,

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where Will was broken at the tactical level within the military organisation.

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But the nation believed you should go on fighting.

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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,

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then you've substantially degraded the enemy organisation's chance to advocate their policy via violence.

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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.

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It is about destroying the enemy. Armed wings, ability and desire to keep using violence to progress their military aim.

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It's not any more complicated than that.