Silverwall wrote:Thinking strategically there is also the fact that the most effective church commanders are those that are most willing to evade if not openly defy church orders. In the big picture generals who do thier own thinking rather than just follow orders from Zion are critical to promoting critical thinking and undermining the writt so you have to balance thier effectiveness at a tactical level with thier value at the strategic one.
This bears emphasis - it's much like the situation with the tech wizards. For that matter, clever clerks who are willing and able to make exceptional logistics work outside established traditions and perhaps (somehow) in defiance of the Church's expectations and preferences would be in the same category of grand strategical allies who are operational pains-in-the-tush.
It's no defense for the commanders who are innovative and effective in ways that represent still full obedience to the Church and its ways of doing things, and it may be a defense for the inspiring innovators who are nevertheless not that effective. (But then, that lot does not need an exemption from Allied assassination: they're win-win already.)
An overarching problem with assassination on the Allied side, or the Inner Circle one at least, is that, as the rebels against God's own Church here, they carry a burden of suspicion and distrust. That's going to get vastly worse with the Reveal, both with the painful rejection of the Writ and Safehold's identity and with the revelation that the IC has been deceptive about its ultimate ends and hiding what it knew. They need to rack up a whole lot of moral capital to get through that, and doing anything that people will regard as wrong along the way is very expensive that way.
So they have to consider the perception of assassination. Not snipping out the leader whose single death will save tens of thousands is a pretty clear moral mistake to us, and may be that to Safeholders in the event. But if it isn't - or if the situation is not that beautifully clear hypothetical - then saving those tens of thousands by snipping the one may mean losing the whole struggle because people don't trust you and millions will be lost in vain.
The argument could work the other way around - they could, theoretically, lose that moral capital not assassinating the perfect target. Zhaspyr Clyntahn is a very good candidate for that position. So it's not a blanket condemnation of assassination for Charis, and they're already sniping the worst of the Inquisition elsewhere precisely as their part to reducing the genocide the Church is conducting. But it does mean that you need to look a lot further than who will replace this leader if you kill him, and when you do, assassinations are likely to look worse more often than they look better.