4. Assessing the Clarity and Character of American Objectives

The United States failed to define clear objectives for the war, setting the stage for its endlessness. The initial decision to wage the war covertly contributed to this failure. When the United States did state its objectives, they alternated between unlimited and limited aims. Because the United States failed to clearly name and establish its limited objectives in a measurable and achievable manner, the war tended to move towards the unlimited objectives.

These dynamics found expression in both the Obama and Trump administrations. While the Biden administration may have halted strikes in Yemen for the time being, it has not resolved the issues that plagued the two prior administrations’ approaches to the counterterrorism war in Yemen, and its adoption of the concept of sustainable counterterrorism risks further muddling the ends of American counterterrorism warfare.

When the Obama administration took office, security conditions in Yemen were already deteriorating. The Obama administration also inherited the framework of a global war on terror from the Bush administration. Obama’s decisions within this context solidified Yemen’s location as a distinct battlefield in the war on terror, and arguably initiated a new war (or at least a new stage), as the administration expanded the legal interpretation of what constituted an associated force of al-Qaeda, designated AQAP as a foreign terrorist organization, stated objectives regarding that entity, and began carrying out direct U.S. strikes in Yemen, moving well beyond an assistance paradigm.¹

Despite the solidification of Yemen as a battlefield and the decision to wage war against AQAP, the Obama administration failed to provide a clear and stable public explanation of its objectives. Instead, the administration alternated between unlimited objectives, shaped in part by the framework bequeathed by the Bush administration, and limited objectives without resolving the tensions.

Secrecy, Lies, and Silence: Very Unclear Objectives at the War’s Initiation

The initial decision to wage the war covertly contributed in a significant manner to the very unclear character of American counterterrorism objectives in Yemen. Until 2013, there were no open hearings on the drone wars, and despite public knowledge and reporting, those directing and carrying out the wars were not allowed to discuss them publicly.² Scott Shane, who reported on the U.S. hunt for Awlaki for the New York Times, writes, “The people who really mattered – President Obama and top counterterrorism officials – remained silent on the subject, Congress held no hearings on the contentious and critical questions it raised… as so often in the post-9/11 era, government secrecy rules that were supposed to make the country safer were undermining democratic decision-making.”³

In the first years of the war, the United States simply lied about its role in strikes, pretending that American actions were actually Yemeni ones. Notably, in one exchange revealed by Wikileaks, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh assured then-commander of CENTCOM David Petraeus: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”⁴

Nor did the Obama administration view the war in Yemen as requiring specific authorization.⁵ As Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, put it in an April 2012 speech, “There is nothing in the AUMF that restricts the use of military force against al-Qa’ida to Afghanistan.”⁶

In contrast, in the counter-ISIS war, Obama repeatedly made public statements that addressed what actions he had authorized and for what purpose.⁷ While the administration did not obtain a specific congressional authorization for that war either, the discussion of objectives and the means being used was far greater and more public than it was in Yemen.

There’s a telling silence about the Yemen war in the memoirs of former officials. In his memoir, President Obama does not provide a detailed explanation of his decision to escalate the counterterrorism war in Yemen.⁸ The index includes only one entry for Anwar Awlaki, the American citizen, who the Obama administration targeted and killed in Yemen. That entry only discusses him in passing relation to the Fort Hood attack.⁹ The index includes two entries for the Underwear Bomber—both are in the context of the political fallout of the attack.¹⁰ Obama’s broader discussion of the drone war briefly name-checks Yemen but does little to explain the strategy or decision-making process behind the wars beyond a moral rumination and a brief description of the bureaucracy behind the strikes.¹¹

Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes’s 2018 memoir, The World as It Is, includes only six references to Yemen and of these references, five feature the word Yemen as part of a broader list of countries or issues with the focus on an overarching theme.¹² In contrast, the word ISIL appears more than 50 times, including detailed recounting of the decision points in the move towards war.

Rhodes’s 2021 follow up memoir, After the Fall, does discuss the counterterrorism war in Yemen by placing it within a broader criticism of the war on terror as a “forever war.”¹³ However, his discussion of the case provides little purchase for understanding what U.S. objectives were or particular decision-making processes, instead focusing on a critique of the broader war on terror as conceptualized by George W. Bush.

Rhodes discusses the political challenges that arose regarding attacks tied to AQAP, and the realness of specific attacks, and amid his critique suggests that “killing people in Yemen could at times be necessary to protect American lives” and that “Americans could defend individual measures at a given time, as I often did in government,” mentioning “the use of drone strikes.”¹⁴ Yet, he then downplays the importance of specific policy debates to emphasize the broader conceptual problem of the war on terror.¹⁵ In doing so, he misses the type of endlessness that emerged in Yemen—produced not just by the adoption of an expansive or unlimited objective but also by a lack of clarity or stability in its limited objectives.

Rhodes’s criticism aligns with parts of this report’s argument. He rightly points to Bush’s unlimited objectives and contends that “defeating every terrorist group of global reach was an impossibility, a recipe for forever war.”¹⁶ Yet this formulation is unsatisfying—it criticizes the breadth of the defeat objective when applied to terrorism in general but retains defeat as a possible objective for specific groups and the value of military action in the case of vaguely defined defendable “individual measures.” It also elides the extent to which President Obama reproduced and extended unlimited objectives even if restricting them to specific groups.

It’s not just Rhodes who avoids detailed discussion of the Yemen counterterrorism war and its objectives. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Obama, Samantha Power, only includes two mentions of Yemen in her memoir, neither of those mentions are in the context of America’s war there.¹⁷ Former Secretary of State John Kerry’s memoir has only one small reference to Yemen while devoting multiple pages to discussion of ISIS and the counter-ISIS war.¹⁸ Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state when the Obama administration began its campaign of drone strikes in Yemen, discusses a range of issues that can help shed light on the drone war in Yemen but does not devote space to a discussion of the U.S. decisions regarding the war.¹⁹ In contrast, Clinton devotes substantial space to detailed discussions of the U.S. decision-making process and strategy in the war in Afghanistan.²⁰ Similarly, Susan Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser, rarely mentions Yemen, though to her credit she discusses U.S. support of the Saudi-led coalition as a failure for the administration.²¹

There are exceptions to the general silence. Former Obama Counterterrorism Adviser and former CIA Director John Brennan discusses the use of drone strikes, including in Yemen, in his memoir, although he tends to discuss them in terms of specific strikes and procedures rather than the overall strategic objectives.²² Former Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta also discusses the decision-making process regarding the war in Yemen in his memoir.²³ Michael Morell, who served as deputy director of the CIA and as Acting Director for large portions of the Obama administration also provides some discussion of counterterrorism warfare in Yemen in his memoir.²⁴

The exceptions tend to come out of the intelligence community, further illustrating the difference between the counter-ISIS war, which saw more public discussion from across the government and the war in Yemen, where decision-making was shrouded in secrecy.

Unlimited Objectives in Yemen Under Obama

The Obama administration sought unlimited objectives in its counterterrorism war in Yemen. It repeatedly stated that it sought the defeat and destruction of al-Qaeda, including its affiliate AQAP. For example, the Obama administration’s May 2010 National Security Strategy states, “We are fighting a war against a far-reaching network of hatred and violence. We will disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qa’ida and its affiliates through a comprehensive strategy that denies them safe haven, strengthens front-line partners, secures our homeland, pursues justice through durable legal approaches, and counters a bankrupt agenda of extremism and murder with an agenda of hope and opportunity.”²⁵ Though the strategy views Afghanistan and Pakistan as the focus of that effort, it states, “Wherever al-Qa’ida or its terrorist affiliates attempt to establish a safe haven—as they have in Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, and the Sahel—we will meet them with growing pressure.”²⁶ Obama’s Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan said during a press conference following the October 2010 AQAP cargo bomb plot, “If anything, this just demonstrates to us, and I think to the Yemenis as well, that we need to redouble our efforts so that we’re able to destroy al Qaeda. And we will.”²⁷

The Obama administration’s 2011 National Counterterrorism Strategy described one overarching goal as “Disrupt, Degrade, Dismantle, and Defeat al-Qa‘ida and Its Affiliates and Adherents.”²⁸ Regarding AQAP specifically, the strategy stated, “The defeat of AQAP will remain our CT priority in the region, and we will continue to leverage and strengthen our partnerships to achieve this end.”²⁹

In June 2011, Brennan stated during a speech on the release of the strategy, “This is a war—a broad, sustained, integrated and relentless campaign that harnesses every element of American power. And we seek nothing less than the utter destruction of this evil that calls itself al-Qa’ida.”³⁰ He added, “We are taking the fight to wherever the cancer of al-Qa’ida manifests itself, degrading its capabilities and disrupting its operations” as part of a list of objectives leading up to the objective of destroying al-Qaeda.³¹

In his January 2011 State of the Union speech, Obama stated, “And we’ve sent a message from the Afghan border to the Arabian Peninsula to all parts of the globe: We will not relent, we will not waver, and we will defeat you.”³² In March 2011, then-Deputy National Security Adviser Dennis McDonough referenced a “strategy to decisively defeat al Qaeda” in remarks addressed to American Muslims on countering violent extremism efforts.³³

These strategy documents and major speeches provide the primary window into the Obama administration’s objectives. However, other sources help reveal the extent to which unlimited objectives were more than an occasional bit of overheated rhetoric but framed how key participants viewed the war.

The embassy cables released by Wikileaks suggest that rhetoric regarding unlimited objectives was not merely for public, domestic consumption. The cable dated December 21, 2009, discussing the Yemeni reaction to the U.S. strike on December 17, 2009, conveyed comments from the Yemen’s Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi, reading: “Alimi assured the Ambassador that Saleh wants these operations against AQAP to continue ‘non-stop until we eradicate this disease.’”³⁴ It is possible the phrasing might reflect Saleh’s desire to appeal to U.S. decision-makers, who controlled aid money, through exaggerated statements of commitment. But this would still suggest that Saleh viewed expressing unlimited objectives as a way to appeal to American decision-makers, which in turn suggests that American claims of unlimited objectives had impact. A September 2009 cable similarly says that in a meeting with Brennan, Saleh offered open access to carry out direct strikes, saying the United States would thus take responsibility for “efforts to neutralize AQAP.”³⁵

Key figures continued to list unlimited objectives in post-facto discussion of the war. For example, in his memoir, Leon Panetta, who served as director of central intelligence and secretary of defense under Obama, wrote, “If we were going to dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda, we needed to conquer it not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in Yemen as well.”³⁶

By the end of the Obama administration, objectives like defeat received less prominence and were often replaced by or coexisted with warnings about the danger of overreach. In December 2016, Obama gave remarks on his administration’s approach to counterterrorism saying that “a sustainable counterterrorism strategy depends on keeping the threat in perspective,” and adding, “we cannot follow the path of previous great powers who sometimes defeated themselves through over-reach.”³⁷ The speech did make a reference to defeating terrorists, but when he turned specifically to Yemen, he spoke of how “years of targeted strikes have degraded al Qaeda in the Peninsula” without referencing defeat.³⁸

The objective of defeat did not entirely disappear. In September 2016, CENTCOM issued a press release on U.S. strikes in Yemen that stated, “The U.S. will not relent in its mission to degrade, disrupt and destroy al-Qa'ida and its remnants. We remain committed to defeating AQAP and denying it safe haven regardless of its location.”³⁹

The Department of Defense’s Exit Memo from the end of the Obama administration illustrates the lack of clarity regarding the place of unlimited objectives. It has an overall section titled, “Countering Terrorists and Other Violent Extremists,” and within that there’s a subsection titled, “Defeating the Global Terrorist Threat” and within that subsection there’s a line reading, “In Yemen, we have conducted counterterrorism strikes against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), in order to protect Americans, thwart its destabilizing effect on Yemen and deny it a haven from which to plan future attacks on the United States and our allies.”⁴⁰ The final line would appear to list limited but transformative objectives while the fact that it is included in a sub-section seems to signal a larger unlimited objective, which is itself within a section whose name could allow either unlimited or limited objectives.

In addition, by the end of the Obama administration, the government had set “defeat” as the objective for the counter-ISIS war. As ISIS had developed an affiliate in Yemen, this choice raises questions about whether the rhetoric regarding defeating ISIS, which does appear in the administration’s Department of Defense exit memo, applied to the Yemen war.⁴¹

Limited Objectives in Yemen Under Obama

Despite statements of unlimited objectives, in practice the United States often sought limited objectives of both the transformational and disruptive kind. Reporting on the Obama administration’s initial decisions regarding drone warfare and the war in Yemen suggests that Obama was reticent to pursue unlimited objectives in Yemen. Yet such reporting sits uneasily alongside the aforementioned references to unlimited objectives. Unlimited objectives may have been in some sense more rhetorical than real, but the administration’s claims to be pursuing limited objectives had a similar sense of unreality to them.

Obama and his Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan reportedly preferred a “more surgical strategy.”⁴² During a March 2009 discussion regarding whether to authorize a drone strike in Somalia, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James “Hoss” Cartwright, said, “In these places where they have not attacked us, we are looking for a person, not a country” and Obama commented, “That’s where I am,” creating what Daniel Klaidman describes in his book on the decision-making around the drone war as “a new litmus test for military operations outside conventional theaters of war, like Somalia and Yemen, that would single out targets as true threats to the United States.”⁴³

Klaidman suggests that some of the references to defeating al-Qaeda may have just been rhetoric, writing that while advisers like Brennan emphasized that drone strikes in Pakistan could dismantle the organization: “People who have spoken to Obama about the drone program say he was under no ‘illusion’ that it would ‘win’ the war on al-Qaeda. But Obama believed he had to stay focused not only on the big picture but also on the individual terrorist who might slip US defenses and attack the homeland.”⁴⁴ Klaidman cites an anonymous counterterrorism adviser, as saying, “The president is skeptical that kinetic strikes will end the war on terror,” adding, “But he is not skeptical that they can stop a terrorist who is planning to kill Americans in Times Square.”⁴⁵

Even as the Arab Spring helped enable AQAP’s expansion as an insurgency and its territorial threat to the Yemeni cities of Zinjibar and Jaar, Obama emphasized limited objectives of protecting the homeland over calls from the military led by General James Mattis, then the combatant commander for CENTCOM, for a broader campaign of air strikes aimed at more unlimited objectives, according to Klaidman.⁴⁶ Klaidman describes a series of discussions over May and June 2011. As Klaidman describes it, the administration was discussing “by far the largest targeting request since it had stepped up operations in Yemen.”⁴⁷ In a June 11, 2011 meeting on the proposed strike, Brennan expressed concern the strike would be a “slippery slope” that would lead to counterinsurgency.⁴⁸ Then in a mid-June meeting on drone targeting in Yemen, a military adviser, according to Klaidman, “made a reference to the ongoing ‘campaign’ in Yemen” and “Obama abruptly cut him off. There’s no ‘campaign’ in Yemen, he said sharply. ‘We’re not in Yemen to get involved in some domestic conflict. We’re going to continue to stay focused on threats to the homeland – that’s where the real priority is.’”⁴⁹

The administration also expressed such limited objectives publicly. In 2012, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor stated, “We’re pursuing a focused counter-terrorism campaign in Yemen designed to prevent and deter terrorist plots that directly threaten U.S. interests at home and abroad,” adding, “We have not, and will not, get involved in a broader counterinsurgency effort. That would not serve our long-term interests and runs counter to the desires of the Yemeni government and its people.”⁵⁰

Obama and Brennan’s repeated description of unlimited objectives of destroying AQAP and transformational objectives of denying AQAP territory challenge claims that the administration was committed to avoiding involvement in a counterinsurgency campaign. There may have been impulses towards limited objectives, but the administration never took the step to clearly define and impose those limitations at the level of the war’s overall objective.

Even so, the emphasis on limited means possibly reflecting the presence of limited objectives was further formalized in the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) released in 2013, which publicly provided and codified the procedures the administration would use for kinetic counterterrorism action outside areas of active hostilities, a category that included Yemen. The PPG stated, “The most important policy objective. particularly informing consideration of lethal action, is to protect American lives.”⁵¹ The basic standard was that to merit U.S. direct action, a target should pose a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.”⁵²

While this standard was consistent with the reported emphasis on limited objectives in the Obama administration, it focused its limitation on means not necessarily objectives. The PPG held out the possibility of direct action to protect non-Americans in “extraordinary cases” that would justify variation from its regulation—though such deviations required legal review.⁵³ Some former officials have argued that the military and intelligence services gamed the limitations to continue their prior practices by shaping the intelligence provided to decision-makers.⁵⁴

In announcing the PPG, Obama appeared to explicitly refuse unlimited objectives, warning that they would generate permanent warfare and undermine American democracy. He stated, “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’”⁵⁵ He then continued to say, “Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society.”⁵⁶

In a briefing before the speech, a senior administration official explained the PPG’s restrictions, saying, “we only take action against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat.”⁵⁷

However, Obama directed his criticism only at the inability to achieve unlimited objectives with regard to defeating terrorism as a tactic. He retained defeat as an achievable objective for organizations and networks. In the very same speech, he touted defeat not only as an achievable objective but one being achieved in Afghanistan and Pakistan, saying, “The core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat.”⁵⁸ He then proceeded to discuss the need for such action outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, specifically mentioning military efforts in Yemen.⁵⁹

As a result of the reticence to embrace unlimited objectives, a series of limited objectives can be found in statements regarding the U.S. strategy in Yemen alongside unlimited ones. The aforementioned September 2016 CENTCOM press release provides a perfect example stating: “The U.S. will not relent in its mission to degrade, disrupt and destroy al-Qa'ida and its remnants. We remain committed to defeating AQAP and denying it safe haven regardless of its location.”⁶⁰ Here, we can identify two limited and transformational objectives in Yemen: degrading al-Qaeda and its remnants and “denying it safe haven.” We can also identify a limited and disruptive objective, where the press release says disrupt al-Qaeda. And finally. there’s the continued citation of an unlimited objective of destroying al-Qaeda and defeating AQAP.

In his memoir, Michael Morell ties “a flurry of drone strikes in Yemen” in 2013 to intelligence regarding an AQAP plot targeting U.S. diplomats in Yemen, which he writes led President Obama to make “decisions to protect our diplomats and disrupt the terrorists.”⁶¹ Furthermore, much of the early war sought to kill Awlaki and thus disrupt his role in staging attacks on the United States.

However, the Obama administration failed to present its limited objectives in specific, positive terms that imagined an end state and thus they were not truly objectives. Instead, gerunds such as denying safe haven and degrading capabilities prevailed. Without an imagined end state expressed in measurable terms, such limited objectives formed an endorsement of endless war. Because safe haven is relative it is insufficient to establish an achievable limited objective to simply state an intent to deny safe haven without providing a sense of what level of safe-haven constitutes an acceptable risk not requiring war. ⁶²

Given the unclear end-points of America’s potentially limited objectives, the oft-stated unlimited objectives of destroying al-Qaeda filled in as the projected end-state of the strategy. Even if administration officials viewed them as mere political rhetoric, unlimited objectives ended up defining the war. Limited objectives ended up confined to a question of sub-objectives and means.

Under the Trump administration, American objectives continued to alternate between an objective of defeat and more limited objectives with little clarity. As the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Thomas Joscelyn has noted, in comparison to Trump’s trumpeting of military actions against ISIS, “Trump’s silence on al-Qaeda was deafening. You’d never know that his administration is still engaged in a worldwide campaign against the group.”⁶³

In his first year, Trump massively escalated the war in Yemen, conducting 131 air strikes and multiple raids according to U.S. Central Command.⁶⁴ Yet the next year, the number of strikes declined to 42, according to New America’s tracking, of which CENTCOM acknowledged 36.⁶⁵ In Trump’s final two years, strikes declined further.

There are few public statements to explain either the massive escalation or the de-escalation. The changes could be the result of policy decisions, changes in target availability, or conditions in Yemen that constrained or promoted strikes.⁶⁶ The Trump administration eroded the limited transparency regarding the policies governing strikes that the Obama administration established.⁶⁷ This contributed to the difficulty of determining the objectives behind the U.S. war. Further clouding the public’s ability to understand the war’s conduct and objectives, the Trump administration appears to have conducted at least some covert strikes in Yemen.⁶⁸

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism, while not addressing the war in Yemen in detail, emphasized a general counterterrorism objective of defeat. In the introductory letter, Trump stated, “We must defeat the terrorists who threaten America’s safety, prevent future attacks, and protect our national interests.”⁶⁹ At the same time, a page with a graphic on objectives and end states in the strategy did not use the language of “defeat” or other unlimited objectives even as it put forward end states that are likely impossible to achieve or which lack specificity like “the terrorist threat to the United States is eliminated.”⁷⁰

The unclassified summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy also does not specifically mention the counterterrorism war in Yemen but suggests that the Trump administration sought unlimited or at least transformative objectives. It states, for example, “We will develop enduring coalitions to consolidate gains we have made in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, to support the lasting defeat of terrorists as we sever their sources of strength and counterbalance Iran.”⁷¹

However, even as the strategy referenced unlimited or at least transformative objectives of lasting defeat, the emphasis appears to have shifted away from defeat conceived of as total destruction as the primary objective towards a greater emphasis on denial and deterrence. A bulleted list of “defense objectives” includes such limited objectives as “defending the homeland from attack,” “deterring adversaries from aggression against our vital interests,” and “preventing terrorists from directing or supporting external operations against the United States homeland and our citizens, allies, and partners overseas” but does not include a bullet for destroying al-Qaeda.⁷²

In contrast, the 2008 National Defense Strategy’s bulleted list of objective lists “defend the homeland” first followed immediately by “win the long war."⁷³ The 2008 strategy further explicated, “For the foreseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremist movements will be the central objective of the U.S.,” adding, “We face an extended series of campaigns to defeat violent extremist groups presently led by al-Qaeda and its associates.”⁷⁴ The difference in the level of emphasis between the strategy set out a year before the United States decided to escalate in Yemen and the 2018 strategy on defeat is clear.⁷⁵ Still, defeat as an objective has not entirely disappeared even as its importance has been downgraded.

Former Trump officials’ memoirs do little to clarify the reasoning for the war. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for much of 2018 and 2019 when the United States reduced the pace of strikes in Yemen from the unprecedented peak of 2017, has little to say on the decisions around the war against AQAP.⁷⁶ On the other hand, he devotes chapters to discussing the 2018 strike in reaction to Syria’s use of chemical weapons and the wars in Afghanistan and against ISIS in Syria. LTG (ret.) H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s National Security Adviser prior to Bolton, likewise does not provide any detailed description of the decision process regarding the war in Yemen, although this is in part a result of McMaster’s self-proclaimed refusal to write a tell-all.⁷⁷ McMaster does mention Yemen while explicating his view of the importance of a long-term counterterrorism strategy with the seemingly unlimited objective of “defeating” jihadist terrorist organizations and the transformative objective of “denying terrorist organizations safe havens and support bases” interpreted expansively.⁷⁸ Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who also was CENTCOM commander for a period under the Obama administration, similarly does not discuss the war in Yemen in any detail in his memoir.⁷⁹

The record that can be pieced together regarding U.S. objectives in Yemen under Trump suggests that the government continued to simultaneously hold limited and unlimited objectives without clearly resolving the tension between them. For example, in a War Powers Resolution letter sent to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Trump described the mission in Yemen as working with partner forces “to degrade the terrorist threat posed by” AQAP and ISIS.⁸⁰ This would appear to be a limited objective—albeit one that fails to explain what level of degradation would justify an end to the war. Notably, the letter does state an unlimited objective of “defeat” when discussing the campaign against ISIS. Tellingly, the letter also states, “It is not possible to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”⁸¹

Documents released under an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request⁸² regarding the January 2017 U.S. raid in the Yakla area of Yemen’s al-Bayda governorate describe transformative objectives of “degrading AQAP’s ability to operate openly” and a “policy to disrupt and degrade AQAP’s external operations capability.”⁸³ They also point to close cooperation and support for Emirati counterterrorism efforts.

An examination of CENTCOM press releases regarding strikes in Yemen under Trump shows that the military continued to cite an objective of destroying and defeating AQAP (See Appendix 2).⁸⁴ In other cases CENTCOM referenced what could be limited objectives, but their presence alongside the continued citation of unlimited objectives suggest they were either operational objectives nested in a broader strategy of destroying AQAP or evidence that U.S. objectives were not stable.

Of eight CENTCOM press releases regarding U.S. counterterrorism operations in Yemen in 2017, two explicitly discussed unlimited objectives while six discussed objectives without explicitly naming unlimited objectives.

Of five CENTCOM press releases in 2018, two used explicit language regarding an unlimited objective, three did not explicitly use such language. Of the two press releases in 2019, one did not use explicit language regarding unlimited objectives though its phrasing of the objectives of strikes as “disrupt and destroy militants' attack-plotting efforts, networks, and freedom of maneuver within the region” could be read as an explicit adoption of an unlimited objective depending on how one interprets what is meant by “networks.” The other did not discuss objectives.

Far from clarifying the objectives of the counterterrorism war in Yemen, the Trump administration further muddled them while backtracking on transparency.

American objectives remain unclear under the Biden administration. Upon taking office, Biden quickly instituted a review of U.S. counterterrorism strikes.⁸⁵ That review appears to have paused strikes in Yemen, which had already slowed prior to Biden taking office.⁸⁶

However, the pause cannot be equated with an end to the war. In July 2021, the United States again conducted strikes in Somalia after an apparent six-month pause related to the review.⁸⁷ The United States also previously paused strikes in Yemen to evaluate procedures only to return to carrying out strikes. For example, in May 2010, the United States paused its strikes for about a year after a strike killed Jabir al-Shabwani, the popular deputy governor of Yemen’s Marib province.⁸⁸ Yet the strikes resumed in May 2011, when the United States saw an opportunity to kill Awlaki.⁸⁹

The Biden administration has not renounced the authorities under which the United States has waged its war in Yemen. Even if air strikes have paused, the United States appears to have troops in Yemen, conducting operations tied to those authorities. According to the Biden administration’s June 2021 War Powers Resolution Letter, “A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS.”⁹⁰ This is the same language used in Trump’s aforementioned 2020 War Powers Resolution Letter.

As Biden withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan, framing the withdrawal as ending an endless war, he made clear that the United States would remain on a war footing more broadly while simply emphasizing air strikes over the deployment of large ground forces. In his August 31 speech on the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden said, “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries. We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it.”⁹¹

Biden has repeatedly represented Yemen as a potential site of terrorist threats and future military action in his speeches on Afghanistan. For example, in his August 31 speech, Biden stated, “I respectfully suggest you ask yourself this question: If we had been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, from Yemen instead of Afghanistan, would we have ever gone to war in Afghanistan,” and added, “The terror threat has metastasized across the world, well beyond Afghanistan. We face threats from Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, and ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates across Africa and Asia.”⁹² Biden asked a similar question in his August 26 remarks on Afghanistan.⁹³ He said, “We have greater threats coming out of other countries a heck of a lot closer to the United States. We don’t have military encampments there; we don’t keep people there. We have over-the-horizon capability to keep them from going after us.”⁹⁴ He made the same point in remarks about Afghanistan on August 20.⁹⁵

What may be emerging is a commitment to a vision of sustainable counterterrorism that eschews the objective of “defeat” and reduces the emphasis upon military approaches without bringing them to an end. Such a vision seeks to nest military efforts to degrade and disrupt terrorist activity within a larger effort to respond to the roots of terrorism without envisioning a final day of victory.

This vision was partly articulated in a September 2021 speech by Dr. Liz Sherwood-Randall, assistant to the President for Homeland Security.⁹⁶ In that speech, she emphasized that the government views itself as having succeeded at some limited objectives. For example, she states, “We have degraded Al-Qa’ida and ISIS and reduced the threat of large-scale attacks on the Homeland directed by foreign terrorist organizations.” Given this claimed success, she then emphasizes the importance of limiting the role of military counterterrorism, stating, “Though the military will remain an important tool, it should not be the option of first resort,” adding, “we must expand our use of the full range of non-kinetic tools and capabilities to accomplish our counterterrorism objectives.”

Notably, in that speech she uses phrases characteristic of limited objectives like “disrupt” and “degrade,” while words characteristic of unlimited objectives like “destroy” or “defeat” are absent. This absence goes beyond the one speech. The administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance also largely avoided the language of defeat.⁹⁷ Similarly, Biden’s June 2021 War Powers Resolution Letter notes that the United States continues operations against AQAP and ISIS in the Arabian Peninsula but does not tie them to an unlimited objective of defeat.⁹⁸ Regarding the Arabian Peninsula, the letter references efforts “to work closely with the Government of the Republic of Yemen and regional partner forces to degrade the terrorist threat posed by those groups.”⁹⁹

Instead of embracing unlimited objectives, Sherwood-Randall emphasizes limited objectives. She states, “President Biden, at the outset of the Administration, directed a review of the policies governing the use of force in counterterrorism operations to ensure it is generally employed only when necessary to disrupt imminent threats to our nation and our people and, moreover, wielded in a manner that is consistent with our values.”

However, sustainable counterterrorism is neither a clear statement of limited objectives nor a turn away from the vague alternating frames of the Obama administration. The broad strokes of the policy are apparent in prior administrations, for example, in his 2016 speech, Obama used the phrase “sustainable counterterrorism strategy” and called the threat to the United States “degraded.”¹⁰⁰ Yet, only months after giving that speech, Obama handed an already-escalating war over to the Trump administration, which then escalated it further.

Sherwood-Randall’s speech is full of words that avoid a complete renunciation of objectives beyond disruption of specific imminent threats. For example, the speech discusses when force should be “generally employed,” and says the military should not be the “first resort.” The speech also reiterates Biden’s call for continuing the broader state of war just with fewer or no U.S. troops on the ground.

Aside from Afghanistan, Sherwood-Randall’s speech does not address specific wars or the history of American objectives.¹⁰¹ It does not define how degraded AQAP needs to be in order to declare the war over. Nor does it directly reference or renounce CENTCOM’s statements of objectives of denying AQAP territory or the 2021 War Powers Resolution Letter’s discussion of ongoing operations to degrade AQAP. By not discussing prior objectives, the speech obscures whether limited objectives are resilient to increases in threat and risks blaming the personalities of prior leaders for their escalations rather than recognizing the continuities across administrations and role of conditions on the ground in escalatory moments.¹⁰²

The speech also calls for a greater emphasis on the role of U.S. partners, who will help “maintain the fight against terrorism.”¹⁰³ Supposed limitations on objectives may thus be as restricted in meaning as the claim to have ended a war while continuing the fight by air.

That the strategy was not set out in a presidential speech is worrisome. Also concerning is the lack of the AUMF reforms necessary for institutionalizing changes as more than a temporary decision about means. While the Biden administration has suggested that it might be willing to reform the AUMF, it has not put forward a specific plan to do so, and Congress remains split on the issue.¹⁰⁴ Tellingly, the administration continues to invoke the AUMF, including to justify strikes in Somalia over the summer of 2021.¹⁰⁵

Language about defeat has not entirely disappeared. The Biden administration has toned down such references even compared to Obama’s 2016 speech on sustainable counterterrorism. Yet, during the presidential campaign, Biden called for the destruction of al-Qaeda and ISIS.¹⁰⁶ The language of defeat also continues in descriptions of the counter-ISIS war.¹⁰⁷

It is possible that Biden will halt U.S. strikes in Yemen over the long term. It is also possible that the rhetoric of sustainable counterterrorism is the beginning of a move towards a fuller clarification of U.S. objectives. However, the United States could still settle into a dynamic like that in Pakistan, where there have been no reported U.S. strikes in more than three years, but where there is also no official statement that the U.S. war there is over.¹⁰⁸

Alternatively, the continued contemplation of military action, persistence of authorizing authorities, and lack of clarity about objectives could simply be a less bombastic version of the alternation between limited and unlimited objectives that characterized the war in Yemen under the Obama/Biden administration when U.S. strikes escalated. It is premature to state that the Biden administration has adopted a policy of ending the endless counterterrorism war in Yemen even if strikes remain paused for the foreseeable future.