And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme

What a surprise.  The US policy of assassination makes extremest groups more extreme and more dangerous:

The elimination of Taliban leader Mansour will only increase the danger to Afghan civilians, a US terrorism analyst, whose research focuses on the impact of targeted killings, predicts.

Dr Max Abrahms, from Northeastern University in Boston, said the US Government does not look carefully enough at the strategic implications of its strikes on extremist leaders.

He said he had done a number of studies on leadership decapitation of a militant group and he had not found a statistically significant reduction in the amount of violence perpetrated by the group after a leader was removed.

"In fact these decapitation strikes can actually be counter-productive, because one of the assumptions of the targeted killing campaigns is that the replacement of the leader that you killed will be more moderate," Dr Abrahms said.

"And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme.

"So for that reason, in the immediate aftermath of a successful targeted killing, like over this weekend, the group's violence tends to become even more extreme, in the sense that it's even more likely to attack civilian targets."

………

"What I've seen is that the younger people to emerge in the Taliban are actually even crazier, if you will, than the old guard."

And then Abrams says that, "He did not think the US Government very carefully studied the strategic implications of taking out Mansour."

Gee, you think?

The problem here is that there are way too many people out there who think that our "Freedumb Bomz" will make the world a better place because they are our weapons.

Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.

H/t Empty Wheel.