Biden administration curtails drone strikes amid major policy review

GettyImages 503831464 — A US Air Force MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), carrying a Hellfire missile lands at a secret air base after flying a mission in the Persian Gulf region on January 7, 2016.
John Moore/Getty Images

The Biden administration is limiting drone strikes amid a major policy review, The New York Times reported.
The administration is considering more safeguard to protect civilians.
Insider last month reported on a stark drop in drone strikes during Biden's first weeks in office.
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There has been a steep drop in reported drone strikes since President Joe Biden took office, as Insider reported last month. Now The New York Times is reporting why: the new administration is conducting a major policy review that began the day it came into power.

The last administration unleashed the CIA and Pentagon, scrapping rules meant to protect innocent men, women, and children from being killed by unmanned aerial vehicles. It also spent its last few weeks in office escalating in Somalia, conducting a half-dozen attacks in the first half of January alone.

There have been no strikes there since January 20, however.

The Times reported that Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan imposed strict new controls on the use of drones outside of active war zones, requiring the White House to sign off on any such attack.

The new administration is using the pause to review how the military and its intelligence agencies conduct extrajudicial killings. Among considerations: whether or not restore Obama-era rules that limited drone strikes to targets considered an active threat - not just members of a designated terrorist organization - and only when there is "near certainty" that no women or children will be killed.

That is just the sort of review that critics of US foreign policy hoped for when Insider first reported on the apparent lull in drone strikes.

"If there is a pause in air strikes overall, we hope it's due to a reassessment of the United States' strategy and a recognition that past strikes have not succeeded in ending attacks by armed groups, but have instead killed and injured thousands of civilians," Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International, said at the time.

It is extremely unlikely, however, that the Biden administration will stop using drones altogether. It is not even certain that it will return to limits on their use that former President Barack Obama imposed in his second term amid an outcry over civilian deaths in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

As The Times reported, the chief concern is rolling back the Trump-era expansion of the rules of engagement, with Biden officials discovering that ostensible safeguards for civilians "were sometimes stronger on paper than in reality."

That resulted in a record-breaking pace of US airstrikes. For example, according to monitoring groups, the US may have bombed Yemen more often during Donald Trump's four years in office than under all previous US presidents combined.

"I totally changed the rules of engagement," the last president boasted.

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