Targeting
106 Articles
Letter to the Editor: Finding a Middle Ground on “Areas of Active Hostilities”
News that the Trump administration is close to revising the Obama-era policy on direct action against terrorist targets has reawakened the long-simmering debate over the appropriate…
Addendum to My “Memo to the Human Rights Community” (on drone strikes outside of “hot battlefields”)
On Wednesday, I published an essay at Just Security titled, “Why the Laws of War Apply to Drone Strikes Outside “Areas of Active Hostilities” (A Memo to the Human Rights…
A Response to Goodman’s “Memo to the Human Rights Community”
Ryan Goodman’s “Memo to the Human Rights Community” is a perplexing critique that takes a surprising tone, coming from a former U.S. government official who worked on these…
The Newly Relaxed Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan and Civilian Casualties
Military Times reported Monday that Secretary of Defense Mattis, appearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford told a pair…
Why the Laws of War Apply to Drone Strikes Outside “Areas of Active Hostilities” (A Memo to the Human Rights Community)
Reports that the White House is poised to revise a four-year old set of policy restrictions on drone strikes and other lethal operations has generated a heated debate that turns…
Easing Restrictions on US Killings Outside War Zones Would be a Serious Mistake
President Donald Trump is poised to rescind some of the key rules crafted by the Obama administration that restrain the use of armed drones and other lethal operations outside…
Three Half-Truths on U.S. Lethal Operations and Policy Constraints
Late last week, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump might soon adopt a new policy on U.S. lethal operations outside hot warzones.…
Trump’s New Drone Strike Policy: What’s Any Different? Why It Matters
[Editor’s note: this article was originally published on September 21, 2017 at 9:50 PM] After months of continued tough talk and recent assurances that the United States…
A Careless Attack on the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria
Over on Lawfare, Lt. Col. Shane Reeves and Lt. Col. Ward Narramore have published a critique of the latest report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the…
What Can Stop the Next Black Hawk Down: Risks to Special Operation Forces in the Trump Era
(Editors’ note: This article first appeared as a three-part series. We are reproducing it here in full.) Twenty-four years ago this month, President Bill Clinton, a first-term…
No, the U.S. Is Not Bombing ISIS Prisons on Some Theory Prison Labor Contributes to ISIS’s Economy
A recent post at Lawfare—titled “The Al-Mayadeen Prison Bombing and the Problem of War-Sustaining Targets”—suggests that the U.S. military may have struck a prison in Syria…
U.S. Secrecy and Transparency in the Use of Lethal Force
Much of the news in the first few months of the Trump administration has been dominated by the Russia scandal, James Comey, and the President’s Twitter feed. Falling below…