THE NEW FACE OF WARFARE: ASSASSINATIONS AND THE VIRTUAL NARRATIVE

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, coupled with the India-Pakistan military skirmish of May 2025, have shown that not only has warfare changed, but older forms of military attacks are once again back in fashion. Therefore, nations need to figure out the diplomatic, military, and technological implications of these trends

- AMIT GUPTA

Throughout history, assassinations of the political leadership have been used as a means to defeat the enemy or to try and get a change in policy in the targeted state—after all, there was a reason the term regicide was coined in the lexicon of political action.

However, the problem with this option has been twofold: decapitating leadership means you lose the people to talk to so as to bring about war termination or a political settlement; and there is the more obvious problem that the leadership that replaces them may be both more radical and far more dangerous to deal with.

Such concerns, however, have not stopped nations from carrying out assassinations, albeit with mixed results. In World War II, the United States successfully assassinated Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, who had masterminded the attack on Pearl Harbour. Yamamoto's assassination was a morale booster for the Americans because of the outrage in that country against the Japanese attack. But Yamamoto's death did not hasten the end of the American campaign in the Pacific. What was the overwhelming industrial advantage that the United States had over Japan, leading Washington to literally outproduce the Japanese and German war efforts?

Incidentally, Yamamoto, before the war, had been the Japanese naval attaché in Washington and had toured the country and seen its formidable industrial capacity.

In the Cold War era, assassinations were carried out by both sides against political figures and dissidents, and this approach was adopted by nations across the world who sought to assassinate their rivals, very often on foreign soil. In recent times, Saudi Arabia, with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the Iranians killing dissidents in Europe, has carried out such actions.