7. Conclusion: Towards A Path Out of Endlessness

In May 2013, more than three years and dozens of strikes into the escalation of the U.S. counterterrorism war in Yemen, President Obama spoke at National Defense University laying out his counterterrorism strategy and the place of drone strikes within it.¹ In that speech, he took pains to argue that America’s counterterrorism war should not be endless. He stated, “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states,” adding “this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”² Obama promised to engage Congress on the AUMF to help bring a close to the state of war.

And yet, more than eight years later, the United States has not meaningfully brought its state of war to an end. While many commentators have denied that the concept of “endless war” has meaning, every president who has waged the war on terror has taken pains to assure the American people that though the war might be long, it won’t be endless. Even George W. Bush, in his notorious 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech, stated, “The war on terror is not over; yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide.”³ Two decades into the overarching war, such assurances ring hollow.

America’s war in Yemen poses a hard test for advocates of ending America’s endless counterterrorism wars and the policymakers who have adopted some of their rhetoric. The war—or at least its escalation—was born in secrecy. Unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war in Yemen has never involved large numbers of American troops on the ground. It has thus tended to draw far less public discussion and scrutiny.⁴

Policymakers may be tempted to take advantage of the lower level of attention to wind down less scrutinized wars like the war in Yemen without publicly addressing American objectives or renouncing the authority to use force without new authorization.

Today, there are signs that the pace of U.S. strikes in Yemen may be slowing or even coming to a prolonged halt. Yet the United States has neither declared its objectives in Yemen achieved and its war over nor has it publicly renounced its objectives. The war has thus entered a twilight condition in which the state of war and threat of a return to strikes continues alongside pauses in actual strikes and a premature rhetoric of having ended America’s wars.

One source of the temptation to quietly limit the use of force instead of truly ending the war is that embracing the twilight character appears to hold the promise of flexibility in the event that terrorist threats increase. By maintaining the broader state of war and its authorization, an administration can seek to reassure the American public that it will take threats seriously—in so far as seriousness has unfortunately become equated with military action. Policymakers may also see the flexibility as important for signaling to hostile groups that the United States remains capable and willing of using force against those who threaten it.

This flexibility is a mirage that produces its own constraints in the form of pressure to escalate war in times of crisis when policymakers might prefer to have room to maneuver. In absolving Congress of responsibility for authorizing war, the mirage can incentivize political potshots unconstrained by the need to justify one’s own position or demonstrate consistency. It can also lock in unwise strategies and promote overconfidence by missing how authorization is an important forcing mechanism for informing the American people of what specific objectives will require and determining whether they are willing to make that commitment.⁵

While flexibility may arguably signal resolve to hostile groups, it can also undermine such signaling by blurring the difference between an America at war and one that is not. A constant state of war with few or no strikes risks bolstering al-Qaeda’s argument that jihadist groups should target the far-enemy—because any Islamist or jihadist project that doesn’t will eventually face U.S. military action no matter how restrained they are.⁶

To truly end the endless character of the United States’ counterterrorism wars, and in particular its counterterrorism war in Yemen, the United States cannot play rhetorical games that take advantage of the twilight character of today’s counterterrorism wars. Instead, the United States should publicly address the war and align U.S. objectives with what is achievable. The United States should heed President Obama’s call to “discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions.”⁷

Implementing such a policy requires progress on three fronts:

• First, the United States should clarify what its objectives in Yemen are and increase transparency about how the United States has waged its war.
• Second, the United States should abandon its unlimited and likely unachievable objective of destroying AQAP or the jihadist movement more broadly in Yemen and define limited objectives that enable the termination of U.S. military action.
• Third, the United States should strengthen its war termination planning and support non-militarized ways of addressing the broader conflicts and humanitarian crises that Yemenis face.

An essential step is repealing the 2001 AUMF and reforming the authorization structure for America’s wars. This is critical for providing stability for American objectives. In the absence of reforms to the authorization structure that require new public debate to re-initiate the use of force, even major withdrawals or pauses in strikes will institutionalize endlessness by eroding the barriers to shifting conceptions of what a war is about and its limits.

Numerous reform proposals exist regarding the 2001 AUMF ranging from straight repeal to the addition of various restrictions and reporting requirements.⁸ Any revised or new AUMF should include a sunset clause that forces Congress to go through the process of reauthorizing wars after a set period of time, limits on the regions in which force is authorized, detail on who force is authorized against, and strong requirements regarding the reporting of where and against who force is used under the authorization.⁹

The United States should also institutionalize greater transparency around U.S. drone and air strikes and refuse to wage secret wars. The United States should require that all strikes be accompanied by a public press release as soon as possible after the strike. Press releases should include civilian casualty assessments as well as assessments of the total number of people killed and injured.¹⁰

The United States should initiate a thorough review and audit of the strikes that it has conducted over the past two decades in Yemen. Preferably, this review would be tied to a broader, independent, and public review of American practices regarding air strikes and civilian casualties. At its best, a review would be part of a much broader effort to review and analyze the costs and benefits of America’s wars on terror and counterterrorism strategy.¹¹

The United States should also initiate a public review of and provide greater transparency regarding the U.S. assessment of the organizational structure and continuity of AQAP and the character of the threat it poses to the United States.¹²

Changes in American objectives to align them with achievable ends are also necessary. In their absence, advances in clarity regarding objectives and in transparency risk fueling endlessness by shifting debate from questions of whether the war is justified and effective to questions of how it is conducted.¹³

A policy agenda that fails to adjust American objectives is likely to eventually revert to unclear and non-transparent objectives. The unlimited objective of defeating and destroying al-Qaeda carries within it an unresolved tension and incoherency regarding what defeat or destruction means in the context of a non-state group or movement with a somewhat decentralized character.¹⁴

As part of the process of abandoning unlimited objectives, the president should give a speech clearly laying out what objectives the United States will pursue via war and why they are achievable. That speech should correspond to a strategy document that describes American counterterrorism policy. The speech and strategy document should clearly differentiate between the likelihood that the United States will face a persistent, even multi-generational threat from and competition with individuals and groups tied to jihadist movements, and the notion that such competition should be understood as a war. The speech should make clear that while future resurgences in AQAP’s threat may require military action, the decision to wage war in such a crisis will be publicly debated and assessed on its own terms and not treated as a mere toggling up or down of an existing war. Decision-makers should put military action back in its place as a tool for specific ends not as the overarching frame for the persistent challenges of terrorism tied to jihadist ideology.

The United States should reemphasize the role of defensive measures in preventing attacks on the homeland.¹⁵ The United States should also maintain and strengthen those capabilities and processes necessary for effective warning of rising threats.¹⁶ In the absence of an effective warning system, policymakers will find themselves surprised and wrestling with surges in public and elite demand for military action during crises.

The United States must also strengthen its war termination planning efforts and expand its toolset of non-militarized means for addressing the underlying conditions that enable terrorism. The United States has systematically undercut its broader leverage in the Middle East and surrounding regions by pursuing an unlimited war on terrorism, overly funding the military, and underfunding the State Department and other less militarized organs of U.S. foreign policy.¹⁷

Limiting American objectives and expectations while clarifying the objectives and authorization structure for America’s counterterrorism wars is the necessary first step for effective war termination, but it is not sufficient on its own.¹⁸ The United States cannot simply assert that it will not use force in the future and trust that doing so will establish a fundamental change in Americans’ vision of their role or security needs. Sustainable war termination will require strengthening other foreign policy tools and sustained work on rethinking the U.S. role in the world beyond simple expressions of sudden change. It will also require efforts to improve the lives of Yemenis. Ending America’s war by condemning Yemenis to an endless war of their own is neither a moral exit nor likely to truly remove the U.S. role, which may instead become more privatized, delegated, and hidden.

Finally, some may argue that a seemingly endless state of war is acceptable given the low costs of waging the war and what they assess to be a very real and significant threat from AQAP.¹⁹ Such an argument requires response because it is not inherently irrational or immoral to wage war without a clear end in sight.²⁰

Calculating that a war with an endless character is sustainable and low-cost makes an analytical error in confidently calculating a war’s outcome before the war is over. While it is possible that unexpected structural changes will eventually bring the war to an end on favorable terms, it is also possible that unexpected changes will bring escalation. The partial collapse of American counterterrorism strategy in 2014 amid highly internationalized conflicts—and the way that year’s setbacks posed problems for the newly promulgated Presidential Policy Guidance on the use of drone strikes should provide sufficient warning of this possibility.²¹ An embrace of endless war as a low-cost approach in the face of the difficulty of actually ending wars avoids addressing these issues by replacing strategic thinking with operational thinking and thus courts disaster when conditions do change.²²

Analysts should not be confident the counterterrorism war in Yemen will not escalate into a larger and more costly war. Yemen may not have the same level of escalatory potential as some other locations, notably Syria and Iraq, and the level of Iranian control and presence in Yemen has often been exaggerated.²³ Yet, Yemen is engulfed in an internationalized civil conflict.

Waging an unlimited war on an already devastated AQAP has the potential to deepen and escalate that conflict.²⁴ Crises in Yemen have the potential to become tied to broader regional conflicts. When the United States and Iran engaged in an escalatory spiral centered in Iraq that involved the assassination of Qassem Soleimani leading to the direct targeting of U.S. forces in Iraq by Iran, the United States has also conducted a strike targeting an IRGC official in Yemen.²⁵ In 2022, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles at the UAE, which made U.S. forces based in the UAE take cover.²⁶

Neither can the potential for escalation be analyzed on the basis of conditions in Yemen alone. U.S. government officials from the Obama administration to the Biden administration have explicitly connected the war in Yemen to other conflict areas.²⁷ Embracing the logic of endlessness in one case thus tends to promote its adoption in other locations because it becomes difficult to explain why Yemen requires an endless war footing but any one of the vast range of other places that al-Qaeda or ISIS has a foothold does not. Strategies that accept endlessness promote the circulation of theories and personnel structures built around that acceptance in other wars. The history of aerial bombing suggests that it is not so easy to geographically cordon off such violence in one part of the world.²⁸

Even if the counterterrorism war in Yemen does not produce escalation, the pursuit of an endless war brings other costs. Beyond the cost to non-American life (which is too often obscured in calculations of cost), a persistent war footing can promote the development of new racial structures and forms rooted in the very theories that supposedly keep the war and its explanations as to why endlessness is acceptable from circulating beyond the specific geography of the war.²⁹ It can also militarize American society and harm American democracy.³⁰ These systems of domination, and their racial dynamics, can exist even if the war is conducted in a manner that limits the death of civilians. Samuel Moyn, for example, argues that death and violence may not be the “elemental face of war” but rather “control by domination and surveillance”³¹ George Orwell’s writing on permanent war warns of the possibility of a war primarily defined by domination rather than inhumane violence.³²

The lack of direct costs to the United States produces its own danger in committing the United States to a seemingly endless war conducted in a context of radical asymmetry, where AQAP and other targets of the U.S. war are incapable of posing a major threat to the United States and its military while the United States is capable of extensive violence via drone strikes.³³ As Neil Renic argues, this radical asymmetry undermines the basic moral frameworks that differentiate war from forms of one-side violence, potentially creating dehumanizing visions of war that can promote massacre.³⁴

Waging war over a long period in a structurally asymmetric fashion is likely to prove self-defeating for American counterterrorism because radical asymmetry on the battlefield encourages a shift to terrorism on the part of the weaker party for strategic reasons while also undermining the influence of moral restraints on the use of terrorism.³⁵

Policymakers may not feel an urgent need to bring the counterterrorism war in Yemen to a close but maintaining a war without a foreseeable end in sight is akin to keeping a loaded weapon ready for any crisis to set it off. Moreover, the weapon’s presence can be its own form of violent coercion even in the seeming pauses between its firings. Rather than waiting for one of the many tensions to explode in even-greater catastrophe, policymakers should work to bring the war to a close.