> On Jun 3, 2016, at 8:17 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> The sniper carefully put a single bullet through the VIP's head, exploding it's contents all over the lined-up recruits, causing them all to run screaming.
>
> Attendance at that camp dropped to almost nothing immediately thereafter.

Rather more likely they realized the camp was compromised and absconded to a new location unknown to the UK forces, leading to more UK casualties, rather than terrorist recruitment falling off.

The VIP was martyred for the cause, which can be spun into support for the terrorists. “He’s important enough that the infidel had to kill him!"

I’m sure Sun Tzu has some quote along the lines of “The harder you close your fist, General, the more systems slip through your fingers”.

Now had they hit him with a barrage of cream pies, well, there’s little way to spin that and it MIGHT make people think that the VIP didn’t really have the kind of authority he projected. Humiliation is far more potent than assassination, particularly in a culture that values status, if only because the target is alive to dig his or her hole deeper in public.

Had Christine Keeler murdered John Profumo it wouldn’t have been a scandal, so much as a provocation to war.

As it was, Profumo taking up with an attractive young woman took down the British government, and caused internal strife when their focus should have been outward. (Note, to this day, it’s not clear that the Soviets’ knew of the connection; Keeler was most probably simply a call girl both individuals engaged with by sheer happenstance)

Overt force is not the answer to everything.

See <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB73m_OCSqU> for a classic example.  If you make you enemy a laughingstock, you can reduce or shatter their power over society.

A long time ago I read a story (it was in a magazine, possibly Astounding, possibly some others that a friend of the family gave me to read on a camping trip) about a politician who encountered a secret society of (iirc Swiss) assassin/secret service who didn’t kill their targets so much as demonstrate that they could if they wanted to.

The ending of the story is how he takes a particular ‘worry stone’ from his pocket, a stone he picked up off the beach when he was a child, something he always has with him, and it slides into two pieces with a small slip of paper within: “Bang you’re dead”. The point of the story was that force could be a very subtle thing, you don’t have to actually kill anyone to achieve your aims.

Now, in the end, the British sniper shooting the VIP in the field of combat was certainly the correct thing to do within his ordered mission, his capabilities and the rules of engagement; just don’t draw the wrong conclusions from the deed.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs