High Value Targets

I’ve delved into Mexico a bit in my fiction.  The deepest was The Devil You Don’t Know, which not only looked at the overall situation in Mexico, but also the consequences of focusing too much on High Value Targets. We seem to be obsessed with getting the “leaders,” the HVTs.  (Not saying that there aren’t people working on “going up the killchain,” but culturally, our focus is always on getting the guy at the top.  Whether it was the “Thunder Run” to Baghdad, that was supposed to end the war in days, in a repeat of Desert Storm, or the focus on getting Bin Laden, or al Baghdadi, or El Chapo.  The idea seems to be that if you get the guy at the top, then the bad guys will collapse. Except that it doesn’t work that way.  It never really has.  Capturing and executing Saddam didn’t end the insurgency.  Killing Bin Laden wasn’t the end of Al Qaeda.  And from the trial of El Chapo, it’s evident that he really wasn’t that important to the Sinaloa Cartel, either. As of this writing, the prosecution and defense have finished their closing statements and we don’t know how it will end.