President Donald Trump has rescinded Biden-era limits on counter-terrorism drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones, reverting to the looser set of rules he used in his first term, according to officials familiar with the matter.
Under restrictions imposed by the Biden administration, US military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone operators generally had to obtain permission from the White House to target a suspected militant outside a conventional war zone. Now, commanders in the field will again have greater latitude to decide for themselves whether to carry out a strike.
The relaxation of the rules suggests that the United States is likely to more frequently carry out airstrikes aimed at killing terrorism suspects in poorly governed places that are not deemed traditional battlefield zones, like Somalia and Yemen. It also means there may be greater risk to civilians.
The Trump administration did not formally announce the change, elements of which were reported earlier by CBS News. The report also said Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had signed a directive, apparently implementing the change for the US military’s Africa Command, in a meeting in February at its headquarters in Germany.
Mr Hegseth linked to the CBS report in a social media post, stating only: “Correct”. But another person familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, clarified that Mr Trump had reinstated the rules he had put in place in October 2017, specifically revoking a set of rules Joe Biden had signed in October 2022. A senior Pentagon official confirmed that account.
It is not clear when Mr Trump made the change, but it appears to have been after an airstrike targeting terror group ISIS militants in Somalia on Feb 1. In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb 21, Mr Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council’s senior director for counter-terrorism, dramatically described Mr Trump personally approving that operation. That step would no longer have been necessary after the switch.
Mr Hegseth was in Germany on Feb 11. There was a strike targeting ISIS militants on Feb 16, according to US Africa Command. Mr Gorka did not mention that one in his speech, but he declared: “We have unleashed the hammers of hell on ISIS.”
Redacted versions of both the first-term Trump rules and the Biden rules became public after The New York Times filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for them. The American Civil Liberties Union also brought a separate, parallel lawsuit under the disclosure law for the Trump-era rules.
Under the first-term Trump system, the government laid out a set of general operating principles in which counter-terrorism “direct action” – usually meaning airstrikes but sometimes commando raids – may take place. So long as those conditions were met, operators decided for themselves whether to target particular militants. By contrast, the Biden system required White House approval for each such strike.
Moreover, the Trump system permitted targeting militants based only on their status as members of a terrorist group – meaning commanders could, if they chose to do so for policy reasons, blast away at low-level foot soldiers. By requiring the president’s personal approval, the Biden system essentially limited strikes to particular high-value targets.
Both sets of rules said there should be “near certainty” that no civilian bystanders would be killed, while allowing exceptions. A Biden-era review found that while the Trump rules for specific countries had kept the “near certainty” standard when it came to protecting civilian women and children, they often allowed a lower degree of certainty for adult civilian men.
Mr Brian Hughes, a National Security Council spokesman, responded to a request for comment about the changes with a broad statement about untying the hands of commanders. “President Trump will not hesitate to eliminate any terrorist who is plotting to kill Americans,” he said. “We won’t tolerate Biden-era bureaucracy preventing our warfighters from doing their job. America is back in the business of counter-terrorism and killing jihadists.”
The Biden rules already allowed commanders to carry out strikes in self-defence without any need for higher-level permission. Most counter-terrorism airstrikes in recent years fit in that category, like firing at al-Shabaab militants in Somalia to defend partner forces of the US, and at Houthis in Yemen to protect ships they were menacing.
And there have been fewer counter-terrorism raids and drone strikes outside recognised war zones as the global terrorist threat has evolved. During the rise of the ISIS group, for example, extremists flocked to Iraq and Syria – where the US has had ground forces engaged in combat and considered a conventional war zone, and so the special rules for so-called direct action operations did not apply.
The rise of armed drone technology early in the 21st century coincided with the sprawling war that began with the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and targeted killings away from conventional war zones became a central feature of the armed conflict. Terrorist groups tended to operate from poorly governed spaces or failed states where there were few or no US troops, and no police force that was able to arrest people and suppress the threat they posed.
Such places included tribal regions of Pakistan, rural Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Drone strikes targeting terrorism suspects in such places began under President George W. Bush and soared in frequency during the first term of President Barack Obama. So did legal and political concerns about civilian casualties. The government’s deliberate killing, in 2011, of a US citizen suspected of terrorism, Anwar al-Awlaki, without a trial, intensified the debate.
In May 2013, Mr Obama imposed the first systematic set of rules to regulate when the military or the CIA could carry out such operations away from so-called hot battlefields and to constrain excessive use. His system involved a high-level-interagency review of whether a suspect posed a threat to Americans. Mr Trump replaced those rules in 2017 with his decentralised framework. Mr Biden suspended that system and imposed his own version, which in many respects resembled Mr Obama’s – and has now itself been cancelled.