Amid the drumbeat of news about the war in Ukraine and the rhetorical boxing match between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia over that Middle Eastern country’s oil production cut, a relatively big story has been buried in the headlines: The Biden administration has issued new rules on U.S. drone strikes against terrorist targets overseas.
According to The New York Times, the White House is tightening policies and procedures on a tactic that has been at the core of U.S. counterterrorism policy since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The culmination of a policy review that lasted nearly two years, the procedures will grant the White House National Security Council more authority over who is considered worthy of targeting with direct action, with President Joe Biden making the final call. To be put on the so-called kill or capture list, the individual must be deemed a “continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons,” per official guidance, which in effect compels U.S. national security agencies throughout the government to make the case to policymakers. A strike against an approved target can occur only if there is “near certainty” civilians won’t be killed or injured.
The new rules, which essentially codify the interim guidelines the Biden administration put into effect in January 2021, don’t apply to Iraq and Syria, where approximately 3,500 U.S. troops remain. Washington continues to view Iraq and Syria as areas of active hostilities, where looser targeting procedures apply.
Biden’s new targeted-killing policy is a significant evolution from the Trump administration’s, which decentralized the system and allowed commanders in the field much more leeway to find, fix upon and finish individuals labeled security threats to U.S. interests. While Trump’s policy has never been fully declassified, we know from earlier reporting, thanks in large part to the American Civil Liberties Union, that the near certainty standard for civilian casualties was changed to “reasonable certainty” when it came to adult men. What was by definition a bureaucratic change clearly had an impact; there were more than four times as many drone strikes in Somalia during Trump’s four years than there were during Obama’s eight. Yemen saw a significant uptick in U.S. strikes in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, with 131 operations conducted — a more than 200% increase from the previous year. (Although strikes went down every year after that.)
There is much to uncover about the latest rule changes, including the process by which the interagency will follow to determine whether an individual is placed on the target list. Questions abound. What exactly is the criteria for making such a decision? How does one judge whether a person is an “imminent threat” to the U.S.? What happens if different agencies aren’t on the same wavelength about an individual who meets the criteria? Do agencies have to come to a consensus, or will the president play judge and jury? All of these questions remain unanswered, at least to the vast majority of us who don’t have a top-secret security clearance.
What can be said for certain is that the general debate about U.S. targeted killing will remain as unbridgeable as it has been in the past. Serious terrorism scholars disagree among themselves about the utility and effectiveness of drone strikes, and the subject has inspired a mountain of academic literature over the last two decades. Depending on whom you ask, sending a Hellfire missile into a terrorist target halfway around the world is either a pragmatic step to increase the pressure on a terrorist organization or a counterproductive folly that will merely fatten up its ranks.
The reality, however, is the efficacy of targeted killing lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
As Georgetown University professor Daniel Byman has written, drone attacks can do material and physical damage to a terrorist group. Command and control can be degraded or rendered obsolete, key facilitators and bomb-makers with specialized skills can be neutralized, and an organization’s ability to plan and execute sophisticated terrorist operations will often suffer as a result. One study by Bryce Loidolt, a research fellow at the National Defense University, found that drones had a negative psychological impact on al-Qaida’s core leadership, with the late Osama bin Laden counseling his lieutenants to think about relocating from Pakistan’s tribal areas. Communications were hindered over time, and as experienced operators were killed, al-Qaida was forced to replace them with people who oftentimes were not as competent at their jobs.
But drone strikes have costs and consequences as well, particularly if they’re treated as some sort of panacea to what is, in all actuality, an unsolvable terrorism problem. Professor Audrey Kurth Cronin of American University has persuasively explained how targeted killing is at best a temporary Band-Aid and at worst a game of unending Whac-A-Mole that can actually push otherwise local groups into adopting broader objectives. The phenomenon of blowback, in which strikes fuel intense anger within the civilian population and potentially undermine U.S. intelligence collection efforts or even result in a recruitment boon for the very terrorist group that was targeted, is possible. More bloodthirsty individuals could also ascend to a leadership role; Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former Islamic State leader, was once a replacement.
Whichever side of the debate a person is on, it’s abundantly clear that targeted killing, or what the Biden administration increasingly refers to as “over the horizon” operations, is a counterterrorism method far preferable to the very costly nation-building campaigns of the past.
No method, however, is foolproof. Drone strikes are here to stay, but U.S. policymakers responsible for implementing them must be cognizant of the risks. Hitting every terrorist group in Africa and the Middle East is simply not an option; the priority should be on organizations that have both the capability and intent of attacking the U.S.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
