The pursuit of these "high value targets" is evidently embedded deep in coalition tactics.
An explicit account of the zero for 50 record in strikes on high-value targets was provided by Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the joint staff's high-value targeting cell during the war.
But ISIS, the Taliban, and al-Qaida have all successfully rebounded in the past after replacing senior leadership figures killed in "high-value targeting" missions.
As the war on terror nears its 14th anniversary -- a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen -- the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of "high-value targeting," our preferred euphemism for assassination.
In the same way, albeit on a vaster scale, high-value targeting failed in its stated goals in the Greater Middle East, where terror recruits grew and terror groups only multiplied under the shadow of the drone.
Two sets of slides focus on the military's high-value targeting campaign in Somalia and Yemen as it existed between 2011 and 2013, specifically the operations of a secretive unit, Task Force 48-4.
The secret study states that the number of high-value targeting operations in these countries was "significantly lower than previously seen in Iraq and Afghanistan" because of these "constraining factors".
"Reading the document, we know that the Mexico fusion center is focused on high-value targeting, but it's not clear at first glance who or what those targets are," Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive's Mexico project, told VICE News.
Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington's 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an over reliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and — due to a preference for assassination rather than capture — an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects.
This is hardly surprising, given that it not only undercuts the official rationale for the kingpin strategy in the drug wars of the 1990s, but strikes a body blow at the doctrine of high-value targeting that so obsesses the Obama administration in its drone assassination campaigns across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa today.
We don't know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon's former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, "the magic number was 30". That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush.
