WASHINGTON – The Biden administration has quietly imposed temporary limits on attacks on drones and commando attacks outside conventional battlefield zones such as Afghanistan and Syria, and officials have begun a broad review of whether the Trump era’s rules for such operations need to be intensified.
The military and the CIA must now obtain permission from the White House to attack terrorism suspects in poorly managed locations where there are scarce U.S. ground troops, such as Somalia and Yemen. Under the Trump administration, they were allowed to decide for themselves whether conditions on the ground met certain conditions, and an attack was justified.
Officials characterized the stricter controls as a stopgap, while Biden’s government looked at how targets worked – both on paper and in practice – under former President Donald J. Trump and developed its own policies and procedures for combating or capture operations against terrorism outside war zones, including how to reduce the risk of civilian casualties.
The Biden administration has not announced the new limits. But National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan issued the order on January 20, the day of President Biden’s inauguration, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Any changes resulting from the review would be the final twist in a protracted evolution over drone rules outside conventional battlefield zones, a gray area intermittent combat action that became central to America’s protracted counter-terrorism wars rooted in the response to the attacks of 11 September 2001.
War on Territories Against Terrorism his fourth administration with Mr. Bid reach. As President Barack Obama’s Vice President, Mr. Biden was part of a previous government that oversaw a huge increase in targeted killings using remote-controlled aircraft in the first term, and then in the second time imposed significant new restrictions on practice.
While the Biden government continues to allow strikes against terrorism outside active war zones, the additional review and bureaucratic barriers it has imposed may explain a recent silence in such operations. The U.S. Army’s Africa Command has carried out about half a dozen airstrikes in Somalia on the Shabab, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda, this calendar year – but all were before January 20.
Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, acknowledged that Biden had issued “interim guidance” on the use of military force and related national security operations.
“The purpose of the interim guidance is to ensure that the President has full insight into proposed important actions in these areas, while the staff of the National Security Council conducts a thorough investigation into the existing authority and delegations of presidential authorities with regard to these matters, “said Ms. Say Horne.
Although Mr. Trump has significantly relaxed restrictions on terrorist attacks outside war zones, taking place less on his watch than under Mr. Obama. This is largely because the nature of the war against Al Qaeda and its fragmented, morphing offspring continues to change.
In particular during the first term of Mr. Obama said there has been a sharp increase in drone strikes targeting Qaida suspects in the tribal area of Pakistan and rural Yemen. Mr. Obama broke new ground by deciding to approve the 2011 assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was part of al-Qaida’s Yemeni branch.
After the establishment of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, its “caliphate” became a magnet for jihadists during the last years of Obama and much of President Trump. But the region controlled by ISIS is considered a conventional war zone, and airstrikes there have not yielded the same legal and policy issues as targeted killings away from the so-called hot battlefields.
The Biden administration’s review of legal and policy frameworks regarding target is still in the preliminary stages. Officials are said to be collecting data, such as official estimates of civilian casualties in both military and CIA strikes outside battlefield zones during the Trump era. No decisions have been made on what the new rules will be, Ms. Horne said.
“This review includes an examination of previous approaches in the context of evolving threats to terrorism to refine our approach going forward,” she said. “In addition, the review will seek to ensure appropriate transparency measures.”
Among the issues allegedly considered is whether a boundary should be tightened to prevent civilian bystanders in such operations. The current rules generally require ‘almost certainty’ that there are no women or children in the strike zone, but the Trump team has apparently allowed operators to use a lower standard of mere ‘reasonable certainty’ that no civilian adult men are likely to would not be killed, officials said.
By allowing the greater risk of killing civilian men, it made it easier for the military and the CIA to meet the standards for firing missiles. But it is also a routine for civilian men to be armed in the kinds of lawless badlands and failed states for which the rules were written.
Among the compromises under discussion, officials said, is that resources for gathering intelligence have run out. For example, keeping drones longer than a possible strike to see who is coming and going means that they are made less available for other operations.
Biden administration officials are also discussing whether general rules should be written that are more strictly enforced than the Trump-era system was sometimes in practice. They discovered that the Trump system was very flexible and allowed officials to draw up strikes procedures in certain countries with lower standards than those set out in general policy, so that the government’s safeguards were sometimes stronger on paper than in reality. .
Officials also face a broader philosophical issue: whether to return to the Obama-era approach, which is characterized by high-level centralized oversight and intelligence over individual terrorist suspects, or to maintain something closer to the Trump-era approach, which was looser and more decentralized.
In terms of the previous rules, which Mr. Obama codified in a 2013 order, known as the PPG, an acronym for presidential policy leadership, that a suspect had to pose a “continuing and threatening threat” to Americans to be targeted outside a war zone. The system has led to numerous meetings between community agencies to discuss whether certain suspects meet the standard.
Mr. Obama imposed his rules after the frequency of counter-terrorism strikes in Pakistan and rural Yemen skyrocketed, prompting repeated controversies over civilian deaths and a growing impression that armed drones – a new technology that has made it easier firing missiles at suspected enemies in regions was difficult to reach – was getting out of control.
But military and intelligence operators have struggled under the confines of the 2013 rules, complaining that the process tends to lead to too many legal and endless meetings. In October 2017, Mr. Trump scrapped the system and introduced another set of policy standards and procedures for the use of lethal force outside war zones.
His replacement instead focused on setting general standards for strikes and raids in certain countries. This allowed the military and the CIA to target suspects based on their status as members of a terrorist group, even if they were merely infantry jihadists with no special skills or leadership roles. And this allowed the drivers to decide if they should perform specific actions.
During the presidential transition, Mr. Sullivan and Avril D. Haines, who oversaw the development of Mr. Obama’s drone strike playbook and now the director of national intelligence of Mr. Biden, envisioned tightening Trump-era rules and procedures to reduce the risk of civilian casualties and setbacks due to the excessive use of drone strikes, but not necessarily back to the Obama-era, has one official said.
Since the appointment of Mr. Biden, the investigation into the interim investigation is mainly overseen by Elizabeth D. Sherwood-Randall, his Homeland Security adviser, and Clare Linkins, the senior director of counter-terrorism at the National Security Council.
The Biden team is also considering whether to restore an order of the Obama era that required the government to annually disclose estimates of how many suspected terrorists and civilian bystanders killed in airstrikes outside war zones. Mr. Obama appealed to this requirement in 2016, but Mr. Trump removed it in 2019. The military separately publishes information about its strikes in places like Somalia, but the CIA does not.
While The New York Times reported in 2017 on the replacement rules of Mr. Trump, the Trump administration has never announced its drone policy or discussed the parameters and principles in public, noted Luke Hartig, who has worked as a leading aide to terrorism in Obama’s White. House.
He argued that there was good reason to believe that the government did not carry out the full series of strikes under Mr. Trump has not publicly acknowledged, and Mr. Hartig said it was appropriate for the Biden team to gather more information about the period before deciding whether and how to change the system it controlled.
“There is a lot that the government needs to do to reintroduce higher standards after the Trump administration, but they should not just return to the Obama rules,” he said. “The world has changed. The fight against terrorism has developed. ”