The January 2026 extraction of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his transfer to U.S. custody showed the West how to confront Islamist terrorist organizations in the 21st century.
The United States, Israel, and their allies must stop relying on bombing campaigns that level cities, generate propaganda for the enemy, and erode Western political support. They must instead seize and prosecute senior terrorist leaders. This approach creates psychological crises inside these groups, breaks command chains, and produces the internal fractures that lead to demilitarization and territorial concessions.
Post-9/11 bombing and invasion campaigns have cost the U.S. more than $8 trillion. The Global Terrorism Index recorded 5,582 terrorism deaths in 2025, with Islamic State affiliates still active in 15 countries. Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack killed 1,200 Israelis and seized over 250 hostages. Israel’s subsequent operations triggered International Criminal Court actions, United Nations condemnations, and a measurable loss of support in Western capitals.
Large-scale strikes now carry prohibitive political costs. Hamas and Hezbollah absorbed the damage and have been rebuilding with Iranian help. Two decades of bombing left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, yet the networks persist and adapt. The approach failed because it allowed adversaries to turn losses into propaganda victories and imposed unsustainable political pressure on Western governments.
In my assessment, SOF captures could produce a different outcome. Unlike airstrikes that manufacture shahids (martyrs), live seizure allows intelligence exploitation, public trials exposing corruption and Iranian direction, and removes heroic narratives.
The 1992 capture of Peru’s Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman destroyed the group’s operational capacity within a few years. Key arrests contributed to the FARC’s collapse and forced territorial concessions. Research covering 1,276 leadership-targeting episodes shows Islamist groups are frequently resilient to lethal strikes. Therefore, live capture, combined with rapid exploitation, produces better intelligence and accelerates organizational distrust, as no endless bombing cycle ever could.
The Department of War must enact two changes.
First, create — within the U.S. Special Operations Command — a Joint High-Value Extraction Command with permanent Israeli co-leadership. This unit could combine commercial satellite imagery with classified tracking to conduct precise small-team captures rather than large raids or strikes. Captured leaders could eventually be moved into an interagency exploitation and prosecution cell modeled on Maduro’s case.
In conjunction with this, the next National Defense Authorization Act should fund it by shifting money from precision munitions programs to persistent surveillance and exfiltration capabilities. There is no doubt that reliance on bombing has proven strategically bankrupt. This alternative approach reduces political exposure while delivering greater intelligence returns in denied environments.
Second, the Trump administration should enact a post-extraction fracture directive. After each capture, forensic teams with deployable tools could exploit seized devices in real time to identify internal divisions and grievances among subordinates. Pre-positioned defection playbooks could offer mid-level commanders security or conditional sanctions relief for verifiable stand-downs, weapons surrenders, or withdrawals from key terrain. Success will be judged by documented reductions in attack planning and territory under organizational control. Applied against Iranian proxy networks, this turns leadership removal into the effective structural collapse that Tehran’s thugs cannot easily repair through funding or ideology.
TRUMP’S PATCHWORK PRESIDENCY: PRESSURE WITHOUT PERMANENCE
The record is clear. Bombing has exhausted its utility against adaptive terrorist organizations while creating unsustainable political liabilities across the West. Targeted extractions impose costs and humiliation on human capital that distant strikes cannot match. They preserve high-end munitions for peer conflicts and raise the personal price of serving as a terrorist commander.
Washington and Jerusalem must embrace this doctrine or accept another generation of Islamist violence, shattered deterrence, and strategic humiliation. The only alternative to decisive action is drift, defeat, and disgrace.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the IDF special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C., area.