> What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy).
There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before.
Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues.
But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before.
Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues.
But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.