The Age of Special Warfare: The Medill Project on Targeted Warfare and the Law

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Make possible by funding from The Carnegie Corporation.
The World at Night

In an examination of Special Operations missions from 2001 to 2010, The Age of Special Warfare tracked and mapped 346 missions around the world based on first-hand interviews and documents. The project was part of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative.

Database Introduction | Launch Interactive Maps
Special Forces Lexicon
Targeted assassination

Military commanders say that special operators pursue terrorists, militants, and extremists – they are known as High Value Targets -- but the soldiers do not get involved in targeted assassinations. “High value is combat,” one former commander of a covert military unit explained to me. “Benazir Bhutto is assassination. We’re not into the Benazir Bhutto stuff.” Terrorism analyst Marc Sageman, however, disagrees with his terminology.

“Well, of course it’s targeted assassination. It’s targeted. It’s assassination,” Sageman says. “Otherwise it’s random killing. They’re so blinded by obfuscating words that they don’t see anything."
Learn more terms about U.S. Special Operations.
About the Author

Tara McKelvey is a Carnegie National Security fellow at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The author of Monstering: Inside America’s Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (Basic Books), she is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. For more on the project, visit the About page.
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