Decapitation is a military strategy aimed at removing the leadership or command and control of a hostile government or group. The strategy of shattering or defeating an enemy by eliminating its military and political leadership has long been utilized in warfare. Genocide The deportation of Armenian intellectuals in 1915, considered the start of the Armenian genocide German AB-Aktion in Poland by the Nazis during World War II The Katyn massacre by the Soviet Union against Polish military officers. As Polish law required every university graduate to be a reserve officer, executing the officers among the Polish POWs allowed Lavrentiy Beria to stunt Polish science, culture and leadership. In nuclear warfare In nuclear warfare theory, a decapitation strike is a pre-emptive first strike attack that aims to destabilize an opponent's military and civil leadership structure in the hope that it will severely degrade or destroy its capacity for nuclear retaliation. It is essentially a subset of a counterforce strike but whereas a counterforce strike seeks to destroy weapons directly, a decapitation strike is designed to remove an enemy's ability to use its weapons. Strategies against decapitation strikes include the following: Distributed command and control structures. Dispersal of political leadership and military leadership in times of tension. Delegation of ICBM/SLBM launch capability to local commanders in the event of a decapitation strike. Distributed and diverse launch mechanisms. A failed decapitation strike carries the risk of immediate, massive retaliation by the targeted opponent. Many countries with nuclear weapons specifically plan to prevent decapitation strikes by employing second-strike capabilities. Such countries may have mobile land-based launch, sea launch, air launch, and underground ballistic missile launch facilities so that a nuclear attack on one area of the country will not totally negate its ability to retaliate. Other nuclear warfare doctrines explicitly exclude decapitation strikes on the basis that it is better to preserve the adversary's command and control structures so that a single authority remains that is capable of negotiating a surrender or ceasefire. Implementing fail-deadly mechanisms can be a way to deter decapitation strikes and respond to successful decapitation strikes. Conventional warfare, assassination and terrorist acts Decapitation strikes have been employed in as a strategy in conventional warfare. The term has been used to describe the assassination of a government's entire leadership group or a nation's royal family. Assassination attempts on Volodymyr Zelenskyy The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq began with a decapitation strike