Leadership Decapitation in Interstate War

Abstract

Is leadership decapitation an effective strategy for winning a war against another state? Over the past two hundred years, states have attempted to use decapitation with varying results, and scholars continue to disagree about its effectiveness. This dissertation aims to resolve these disputes by examining how decapitation produces benefits for a targeting state. To do so, this project uses a multi-methodological approach with datasets I have compiled, which consist of leadership decapitations and leaders lost through various means in interstate wars between 1823 and 2003. The third chapter proposes that leadership decapitation functions through a mechanism of strategic confusion, which exists when the remaining leaders in a targeted state struggle to make decisions and perform the critical functions of a state at war. I then use a natural experiment and large-n qualitative analysis to see whether the mechanism functions as theorized. The fourth chapter uses comparative historical analysis to examine when states select leaders for decapitation, while the fifth and sixth chapters use ordinal logistic regression with large-n models to study the effect of leader loss and leadership decapitation on the outcome of wars and battles. Overall, this dissertation finds support for the idea that decapitation creates benefits through the disruption of the targeted state. To obtain these benefits, states must target critical leaders that lead to significant levels of strategic confusion, then follow up with additional offensive action to exploit the window of vulnerability in the targeted state. Critical leaders are more likely to exist at more senior levels and in more autocratic regimes, but states must carefully assess the criticality of a potential target and consider the possibility for adverse outcomes on a case-by-case basis in order to determine whether a decapitation operation will be profitable. Finally, the loss of a leader tends to have the most disruptive effect at their level of command, and states can use this knowledge to alter other outcomes in their favor, such as interstate battles. As a result, these findings carry important implications for how states can mitigate the effect of leader loss and leadership decapitation in their own states in interstate conflicts. States that can decentralize command, diffuse executive power, create broad strategic alignment in the government, and train competent subordinates to act on their own initiative in the absence of direct orders can lessen the effects of leader loss and leadership decapitation within their own systems.