War, according to the great Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz was most profoundly a conflict of wills through an admixture of policy with “other means”. But Clausewitz never fully defined “other means”. There was little need. For most of history, war was a contest between more or less like military forces. Defeating the enemy usually meant defeating his armies as a precondition for victory. Of course, insurgencies were as old as war. And, of course, insurgencies had relatively fixed geographic boundaries that, after the Duke of Wellington’s brilliant peninsula campaign during the Napoleonic Wars, became known as guerrilla or small wars. The American way of war remains firepower intensive. We won World War II, with the Soviet Army, literally blowing away the Wehrmacht with our superior firepower. As technology improved dramatically, so did mobility and manoeuvre. The Iraqi military was shattered twice by this onslaught first in 1991 and then a dozen years later. And the initial and stunning success in Afghanistan in late 2001 demonstrated the effectiveness of this technology in support of Northern Alliance ground forces in routing the Taliban, at least for the moment. Unfortunately, Clausewitz’s genius has been partially trumped by a critical question: how do even amazingly capable military forces defeat an adversary who lacks an army and uses insurgent, terrorist tactics, metastasised by a radical ideology in which suicide is a preferred weapon while possessing global reach manifested by September 11th and other attacks against the US and European allies? Two answers: one has been to allow the military to take on nation building missions designed to neutralise the attraction of the radical insurgents. Second is through a campaign of what the Israelis call targeted assassination by intelligence and special operations forces designed to kill the insurgent leadership. Unfortunately, nation building is better accomplished by government institutions other than the military that Washington has dismally and consistently failed to mobilise for decades. And assassinations often create more new enemies than are killed off. There is nothing new about killing top leaders in war as a means to shorten them. In 1943, Admiral Chester Nimitz approved a mission that shot down and killed Japan’s greatest admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto. In Vietnam a generation later, the Phoenix Programme assassinated tens of thousands of South Vietnamese suspected of being Viet Cong or agents of the North with mixed effects. Since September 11th, US strategy has relied heavily on CIA and Joint Special Forces Operating Command assets to hunt down and kill Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani insurgents and al Qaeda. The most visible programme is the drones that are being employed in half a dozen or so countries from Libya to South Asia. Many are controlled from Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada in the most antiseptic form of war imaginable with officers launching Hellfire missiles to kill human targets, hopefully “high value”, from thousands of miles away. Some worry about the psychological effects of depersonalising war. However, that is not the crucial issue. War in a technical age can be depersonalised. Writing in 1991, 50 years after the Battle of Britain, RAF Ace and hero Brian Kingcome coolly observed that he was fortunate to be stationed at Biggin Hill in the south of England, which was “ideally situated operationally and socially”, meaning his Spitfire squadron was usually first to take on the Luftwaffe and that London was not far away for a respite after the day’s fight. To some degree, the same situation existed in Vietnam and for the air force stationed in Thailand then. The larger and more perplexing questions are: to what degree has US strategy become dependent on this interface of intelligence and special forces operations and the use of targeted assassinations against suspects who are not traditional military forces and hence fair game and indeed have not been accorded any sort of due process or juridical oversight and what are the long-term consequences? Despite the best of intentions, CIA excesses and instances of misconduct by Special Forces in the past cannot be assumed away in the future. Clearly, covert operations must be kept covert. This complicates oversight and makes legal and moral imperatives difficult to define and implement. What American, for example, would argue that the killing of Osama bin Laden was illegal or immoral on our part? Yet, killing a 15-year-old “Taliban” based on dubious intelligence is a different matter. It is reported that in Afghanistan like Iraq before, between 10-20 raids a night are being carried out to eliminate Taliban and al Qaeda. No doubt the military has clear rules of engagement. However, the growing dependency on drones and intelligence/Special Operations Forces could become perverted with grave moral and legal risks. We must ensure now that such outcomes will not happen! The writer is Senior Advisor at the Atlantic Council and Chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of government and business