In the past 12 hours Israel has demonstrated unique and extraordinary capabilities.
Last night the IDF took out the #2 (some say #1) terrorist leader of Hizbollah - Fuad Shukr aka "Sayyid Muhsan" in the center of the Hizbollah controlled area of Beirut at a time Hizbollah was on the highest alert. He was a founder of Hizbollah and its top military leader. He was responsible for the murder of 1000s of people over 41 years including:
This morning, the IDF took out the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, with a precise missile strike on his room in the Iranian Republican Guard Corp (IRGC) guest building north of Tehran at 2am in the morning. The missile was fired from outside Iranian airspace. Haniyeh was one of the architects of the Oct 7 massacre and one of very few senior Hamas leaders still alive.
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/en/news/393879
These strikes took extraordinary capabilities:
No other country on the planet has these capabilities. Not the US, UK, EU, Russia, China or India.
Israel is in a league of its own.
This is not the first time that Israel has demonstrated these capabilities.
To understand the full implications and ramifications of this capability one needs to step back and understand how nations have made war for at least the last 1500 years.
For all this time, political & military leaders have made decisions to pursue aggression and go to war, largely insulated from the consequences of their decisions, at least initially. Societies have used their least valuable human capital as foot soldiers while elites served as high ranking officers (much safer in headquarters far behind the front lines) or have avoided military service altogether.
Armies have defended their borders to protect the valuable national assets deep inside their nations.
The entire concept has been to use lower value human capital and national assets to defend higher value ones.
Historically, armies led by Kings and Princes could suffer devastating defeats but the Royalty and high ranking officers were treated extremely well by their equivalents on the other side. Quite often in European wars these elites and Royalty were related by marriage.
It was quite rare for political and military leaders to lose their lives on the battlefield or afterwards. The well remembered exceptions prove the regular rule that you treated your defeated enemy leaders well so they would do the same to you.
In modern times, political leaders of tyrannies and democracies alike have stayed far from the battlefields and assumed very low personal risk in making war. Only the most catastrophic defeats (like that of Nazi Germany) would lead to the deaths of the leadership. And this was only at the end of wars, after millions of ordinary soldiers and civilians had been killed.
The capabilities that Israel has demonstrated turn this paradigm upside down.
Now at the commencement of serious hostilities, the enemy leadership needs to face the almost certainty that should they chose to escalate, they will personally be killed early in hostilities.
As the Iranian leadership meets in Tehran and the Hizbollah leadership (what's left of it) meets in Beirut to decide how to respond to Israel, they meet with the sure knowledge that should they chose escalation, Israel can and will kill them, and there is nothing they can do to protect themselves.
Israel has deliberately left Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's political leader, alive because it wants him to make the correct decision to back down and withdraw Hizbollah force North of the Litani River, as required by the (never implemented) UN Resolution 1701.
Israel knows where he is and can take him out at any time.
Any time, the Iranian leadership and IRGC meets, an Israeli missile could fly in the window and kill them all.
They are utterly defenceless from Israeli capabilities and will bear personal responsibility for their actions.
But this is not just about the war between Israel and Iran & its proxies.
This is the start of something larger than a revolution in military affairs (RMA). This is an RMA which creates a revolution in geopolitics and warfare itself.
Regular people often complain about politicians leading them into wars they don't want.
This is often true because leaders (both democratic and non-democratic) have not been bearing the personal consequences of their actions. Worse, they often benefit from the suffering of their people, whether by kickbacks from the military industrial complex or by cementing their tyrannical power by focusing the people on an external enemy.
Israel's new capability, which will spread first to its allies and then to others, dramatically changes the risk / reward calculation for leaders and elites, especially those with ineffective air defences.
In this new world there should be less warfare because leaders will only engage in warfare if there is no other choice and there is a very large pool of replacement leaders that would continue the war if they are taken out.
This is the case in Israel currently where even (God forbid) Bibi was taken out by Iran, he would be replaced by a very long line of Israelis who would pursue this existential war to victory. Just as regular Israelis volunteer and over subscribe for Reserve service and risk their lives fighting monsters in Gaza, they would risk their lives defending their country in a leadership position that was risky to their lives.
The same cannot be said for Iran's leaders, where 80% of the country hates the regime and where they only maintain power by brutal force.
In these tyrannical regimes, taking out the top leaders is very effective in causing the regime itself to collapse. Most of those supporting the regime are motivated entirely by self interest and will not be willing to take the top jobs if they are death sentences.
The US & EU are somewhere in the middle of this equation. I will leave this debate to the comments, but note that only strong air defence can counter this risk to leaders. I forsee large sales of Israeli air defence systems to US and its allies.
Overall this is good news for regular people* who bear the brunt of most wars. Far better a that few leaders get killed early to stop a war than millions of citizens die and nations are destroyed by large scale warfare.
Of course Lebanon will face both if Hizbollah and Iran don't back down.
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