Exh J Foriegong wip

https://theweek.com/foreign-policy/1007579/biden-nearly-ended-the-drone-war-and-nobody-noticed

'Joe Biden nearly ended the drone war, and nobody noticed'

"Immediately after taking office, [Joe Biden] set up a new system requiring White House approval for any strikes outside of active war zones (and later published Trump's loose rules that enabled so many civilian massacres). Now that the occupation of Afghanistan is over, that requirement applies almost everywhere, and it appears Biden is extremely reluctant to grant approval. 

Where Trump oversaw more than 1,600 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria during his first 11 months in office, Airwars reports just four during Biden's term so far. Strikes in Somalia fell from roughly 75 last year to fewer than 10 this year, with no civilian casualties. And in Yemen, the annual total dropped from about 18 to maybe four, with fewer than 10 casualties of any kind. (Precise figures are unclear because some strikes are classified.)"

All of them are technically . Classification is a strange concept in the DoD, yet even stuff you see in official press releases can too be considered “classified” like For Official Use Only, where any non-released specifics are still considered Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, etc.

Though I also know that there are 3 levels of classification, as it is from lowest to highest: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret. They could be compartmentalized within, so only because you got a Top Secret Clearance it doesn't say that you're permitted to look at any TS information, you need the compartment/codeword brief to look at the info under that codeword.

Any information not under this umbrella is "Unclassified" (not a classification), FOUO and Controlled Unclass Info (CUI) is primarily composed to information that is unclassified however still beholden to release controls (press release, freedom of information, etc.).

So I am basically trying to answer the question in a way that is easy to understand to people outside of the DoD/was contextually key to information as it relates to combat operations and DCAS procedures, not get anyone Information Warfare qual’d.

"And Donald Trump changed the rules so the CIA wouldn't have to publish their numbers, or even aggregation them with the DoD numbers."

This Trump dude is truly feared by the state apparatus and not only annoying to them due to him being big baby who makes it a little less pleasant to do their job.

So credit where credit is due (to Joe Biden). that's something positive he did in ending the drone war

Former President Barack Obama's final tally of drone strikes is 542 ,which offed 3,797 people - including 324 civilians. Barack Obama did 39% of all drone strikes amongst US Presidents /irony. Read this in Nick Mullens Ben Shapiro voice

This article is a tad misleading when they classify all military aged lads/guys, 14-60, in the strike as combatants.

They'd do the same things with adult women if they had to. The aim is to massage the numbers and not have to truly verify on the ground. Since once you do that, you can't really justify a drone strike on a house. 

More easy to have a list of figures pulled from some dead person's phone, see one of their SIM cards ping from an antenna, find where it's at and wait on something shady to occur like, a bulky unknown package being carried or uncarried from a vehicle or having visitors at off hours then you wait 4 hours for kids to show up on camera. 

Not likely to have a bunch of underaged kids playing outside between the hours of 12 am and 0300 but ya know you waited for "hours" to confirm so you're covered, hit that target with a hellfire at 0330. Mission accomplished. /s

This hearkens back to that drone strike on that vehicle just after the Afghanistan withdrawal. The military came out at first with a reasonable-sounding story of "oh yep they were super bad guys, we had fine intel, and there was even a secondary explosion", which clearly turned out to be false. 

Anything more than cursory inspection exposed their narrative which led to it falling apart, but most drone strikes get a footnote in the MSM all due to a Pentagon press release. Focused inquiry by the media into particular events appears to be quite rare

10% civilian rate isn't freaking horrendous at all by some measures. Though in 2006 former President George W Bush ordered 2 drone strikes that killed 94 people, all of which but 1 were civilians. The non-civilian was on the CIA payroll. He was collateral damage.

Joe Biden is for all intents and purposes simply bringing back Barack Obama's drone strike policy. Donnie Trump loosened Obama's policy to give even less concern to civilian casualties, so despite Trump only served for half as long as Barack Obama, Trump in reality killed more civilians in drone strikes than did Barack Obama.

They're all wrong, this shouldn't be seen as a defense of Obama. Only explaining what the policy was.

Joe Biden is launching very much fewer drone strikes than Obama. Biden was a dove when Barack Obama was President. Hilary Clinton was the warhawk. Biden tried to withdrawing immediately from Iraq and Afghanistan, he also opposed the war in Yemen and Libya, and he even opposed the raid to kill Osama Bin Laden 

People claiming that drone strikes would become worse under Joe Biden or that he'd drag us into another forever war and Donald Trump would be better on both of those fronts, are nuts

The blowback for Barack Obama's drone policy happened very late yet it's been unpopular for a long time now. Not to mention, from a pragmatic pov, the damage it does to US reputation in places we're supposed to be "stabilizing." The pressure to ditch drone war would have been huge on Biden whereas Trump wouldn't give a damn and had to be reminded why he couldn't simply nuke Afghanistan. Donald Trump appeared to me to seem to revel in drone strikes for pure sport

Anywayz when a Republican president (DJT) dramatically did more drone strikes and a Democrat president (Joe Biden) dramatically did less drone strikes that has to be acknowledged and Democrats shouldn’t merely be attacked non stop because ‘our expectations for Democrats are higher’. We’ve got ourselves a two party system. The differences do have merit 

Joe Biden reducing the number of drone strikes is a great thing if the figures are accurate and then the administration should be looked upon in a more favorable light for this change by them in policy.

Joe Biden 'leaving Afghan too early criticism' to counter my positive view of him reducing drone strikes "They'll (Afghanistan citizens) will be allowed to grow up under the boot of the Taliban and their lives may well be horrible"

My reply: Afghanistan is not actually a state society outside of their cities. For the rest of its population, the Taliban boot and the US boot look basically the same: a fusion of being ignored completely or extorted by warlords, pronounced by the once in awhile bout of indiscriminate violence. At times the boots truly are the same:several local powerbrokers were playing both sides the entire time

Donald Trump tried his hardest to initiate an Iran conflict during his final year of his junta, thankfully the Iran government didn't fall for that trap. People just sort of gloss over that.

And North Korea. DJT got a lot of (somewhat warranted) praise(???) for his later diplomacy with them and stepping over the NK border etc, however before that point he had been a looney old man waving his wand at the crazy cult of personality autocrat leader of North Korea with nukes. It was uncalled for and, however "harmless" North Korea was in spite of their posturing, a hecking pointless reason to make the Doomsday Clock tick ever so closer to midnight.

So really, has Joe Biden 100 percent actually reduced the strikes though? Or does he only not have the same conflicts to use our drones?

Trump had essentially wound down the Afghanistan conflict prior to Joe Biden taking office (and DJT did want the US out of Afghanistan before then, but he was blocked from doing so). I don't see how many drones were used in Syria yet that conflict had also had tapered off before Biden too. Ditto with Yemen

Seeing how fast Donald Trump wussed out of situations or blundered into situations depending on what the previous person he talked to said, it is fully possible that DJT would have stayed in Afghanistan if, as that became real, a war-hawk general that brown-nosed him enough asked him to remain in Afghanistan.

Maybe Trump would have drawn out. But at the same time , he is totally unpredictable and Trump makes decisions based solely on ego and narcissism except at the very time he may face repercussions, at which time he typically backs down but could truly do just about anything.

I've been pleasantly surprised with Joe Biden. I imagined that he would get not one thing accomplished domestically and that he would start and enflame foreign wars. Turns out he will accomplish nothing too shabby domestically but he did get us out out of Afghanistan and he has as mentioned in this post and article, deescalated the drone war. This is a lot more than I expected.

There's this brand new cold war thing, but that'll progress in steady doses regardless of which colorful liberal 2.0 wins the Presidency 

Actually, come to think of it I can picture Andrew Yang being the worst by far since he'd stupidly have to "prove" that he's tough on China for the slightly-moderate racists.

Barack Obama spoke of his desire to pivot away from the Middle East and to focus on more relevant and "productive" relationships in the Pacific region, however he got drawn back in by the Arab spring and ISIS. It appears like Joe Biden may actually get to do what Barack Obama couldn't here.

Reports are that Joe Biden was highly critical of Obama listening to the military and cautioned Barack about listening to the military on the Middle East.

One of the fine things (and cringe things at the same time) about Biden is he certainly knows DC and he can 100 percent appreciate how the military can trick an inexperienced President into continuing an endless forever war 

Just Biden lowering the cost of insulin by a large amount is more than a lot to solidly most of what Donald Trump accomplished.

DoD has not too long ago issued a statement in regards to a shift in military training to mesh with the US’s loss of air superiority against what they label “near peer” adversaries. Pretty clear what 2 adversaries those are.

US conflicts since WW2 have been shaped by full or near full air superiority. US military strategy is built upon air dominance, which is shrinking

Military leaders and the Pentagon, and more, have long admitted ground troop over reliance on aerial support. Its also a running meme. In future wars, such aerial support pretty likely will not be feasible in more and more combat encounters.

US is adopting this strategy to respond to this. “We’re going to be flying in lower flight profiles than we have over the last 20 years in counterinsurgency operations and so, even today, we are changing the way we train Army aviators” - Major General David Francis.

The Bell 360 Invictus is one such example of this strategy shift . Planned to replace the Apache as an over-the-shoulder recon support helicopter with crafting suited particularly for low flight profile urban combat in megacities (like in China). The 5th generation fighter jets too aren't able to control the air with Chinese and Russian air defense systems with boots on the ground

Part of the air dominance strategy is because of the nature of the wars US was waging. Adversaries were technologically not up to par with the US to such a degree that fighting wars that were ways off from home while at the same time operating over enemy turf was routine 

China and Russian are though technologically inferior to the US in areas like fighter jets but in a future conflict they will nearly totally be on or around “near peer” home turf, where their anti air systems are located. Anti air systems that are developed particularly for shooting down US planes, and placed exactly where US sorties would occur 

There are loads of people that know so much more about this stuff than me but not long ago,  i’ve been getting knee deep into it. It has global impacts, such as the article at the top of this post

There are numerous reasons why Afghans, Saudis, and the like are terrible troops. Particularly corruption, no vested interest, tribalism, and cultural factors. The Afghani soldiers couldn't even put up a fight against the Taliban.

NATO countries are a different sort in that they are allies whom the US has been dragging into wars for nearly a century. China’s lack of combat experience is huge in comparison to NATO. It remains to be seen what will come of such an experience gap.

Both China and Russia too have noticeably less training for their troops. China’s army in sheer troop figures dwarfs that of the US, yet they are a lot less trained and 100 percent lacking in true combat experience.

But even at that, the role of ground troops in  conflicts of the future between technological superpowers is not foreseeable 

Neocons are seething over Joe Biden. Biden cucked the Noecons hard. Donald Trump was more favorable to the neocons than Biden, yet the Neocons all loathed Trump and they told all people to vote for Joe Biden.

Democrat voters (not the ideologically hardcore liberal 2.0ers or especially not the radlibs . I am talking about normal Democrats) will be likelier to disapprove of a Democrat president than Republican voters for Republican presidents. The reason for this is because ideologically the country leans more right wing (you can decipher right however you wish but libertarian ideas are popular no matter where you are on the american political spectrum) than a lot care to concede

At the same time, I don't think Joe Biden's unpopularity right now would stick come about in 2023. I do think Democrats will get screwed in the 2023 elections but that'll help motivate the voters to keep Biden in power in 2024.

In reality Americans are fine with war so long as it doesn't bother their conscience on the tube. Drone strikes are one of the most acceptable types of mass murder to the public since they never ever have to think about drone strikes and they take drone strikes to mean that the president is "doing things" to keep them safe from 'Islamists'

It's how Barack Obama and Donnie Trump (before he decided to act like he wasn't doing things about the virus due to drama) held their popularity. it always seen like they were 'doing' things.

It's what happened last time Joe Biden quit being an imperialist monster

And maybe more generally as to not draw attention to the amount of drone strikes were happening and the theatres where these strikes were happening at. From a political standpoint, taking a dovish tone also appears to be running against the grain of a MSM and security machine that is as it is preparing the US for the next wars

Seems like when we end one shi*ty practice to begin another such practice somewhere else. I want to venerate things like Joe Biden reducing drone strikes however I know its only going to evolve into some new kind of warfare for the US to wage..

Joe Biden is getting ever so close to having the best foreign policy in 40-80 years

But of course that bar is pretty damn low

But then again, Joe Biden championed every damn military conflict over the last 41 years. He should have been put in the Hague for such conflicts long ago

Joe Biden reducing drone strikes is all about as electoral meandering as it can get, like when rightoids claim that Trump “didn’t start any wars” or those times that liberal 2.0ers claim that Obama was “shifting the mission to hearts and minds.”

Biden is overseeing a humongous reduction in our cruel military ops. This isn't some lazy pr piece, its legit simply the numbers proving Biden in being better. I get that Joe Biden is a sh*tty neoliberal, yet this is unironically good and deserves some praise.

I feel like the one reason we see it as relevant is how gosh awfully low the bar is. Is the DoD budget adjusting? Are the US military bases shutting down? Are special ops and clandestine operations in the process of being declassified? Is there NOT any Cold War with China? Is there no constant desire by the US to screw with Latin America? None of the above.

I’m not saying this drone strike reduction by Joe Biden is not a good thing, I’m just not feeling like being tricked that it is being made in good faith based upon everything being done as a whole.

And I am not claiming that Joe Biden is this dove anti-imperialist. It can also simply be that Biden is only less imperialist than his predecessors (which is an insanely low bar seeing how the things that the GW Bush, Barack Obama, DJ Trump admins doled out in strikes). This is better under Joe Biden and I don't see the harm in me stating "eh fine job here Jo, continue to be less imperialist". This has been our new norm for two decades now, and Biden has deviated from it. Him needing approval for all strikes appears to have dramatically reduced strikes, good.

Joe Biden opposed the Gulf War (which is a good thing), as VP Joe firmly advised against the troop surge (but he was overruled by Obama and the JCOS) and most vitally, he got us the heck out of Afghanistan.

While Joe did approve the Iraq War he not too long later came to regret it and pushed for a complete troop withdrawal. I believe his legacy is more complicated than him being a war criminal, in particular as a center-right Democrat.

But not too get carried away here , Joe Biden sadly did redeploy those Afghanistan troops around the Middle East theater. In 1998 he was pushing for a violent regime change in Iraq, and as leader of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in 2002 Biden championed that alongside GWB, repeating lies about WMDs.

So Joe Biden was and still has a looney warmongering streak which can get worse if he becomes senile

But merely didn't just championed that, but he freaking suppressed testimony from UN inspectors.

It takes me back to the "We wouldn't have gone to war if Al Gore had won the 2000 election" myth that still exists today despite Gore being an open war hawk who openly called for the invasion of Iraq.

The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act only stated that "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.", which is a basically uncontroversial stance. It passed 360-38 in the house and passed unanimously in the Senate - and yes even Bernie Sanders supported it. It was not however an authorisation for war.

As for repeating the lies about the WMDs, well of course of course Joe repeated these lies, but he didn't have knowledge of what those lies were, the GW Bush administration and the intelligence community insisted they had the evidence. While Iraq was a hot mess clusterfuck,Can't we forgive congressmen/women and senators who voted for that war and quickly agreed to oppose and regret it?

I don't think it's fair at all to call Joe Biden a 'warmongering lunatic'.

Biden admitted in 2020 he knew that the WMD talk were lies at that time, there was no WMDs in Iraq. I’m really struggling with this narrative I have concocting of Joe Biden being less warmongering and imperialist than I feared versus the hard truth reality that Biden has after all the smoke and mirrors above, championed endless war and bloodshed for the past 5 decades of his political career.

Joe Biden tried to get the US to invade Yugoslavia

I admit Biden's foreign policy is much better than I thought it would be but he is somewhat a war criminal in some respects

The Yugoslav situation was a whole lot of messy however- there was an actual genocide playing out on Europe's doorstep which Europe was entirely unwilling to deal with. (TEAM US WORLD POLICE!!)

Biden desired to support the Bosnian Muslims with weapons and NATO air strikes then to investigate any war crimes. He even set up a three hour meeting with Slobodan Milosevic, where he personally said to him "I think you're a damn war criminal and should be tried as one".

Admittedly, Joe Biden did throw his support behind the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and also co-sponsored a bill with John McCain calling for former President Bill Clinton to use all needed force (including ground troops) to confront Milosevic. But once again, I don't think that's being an insane war mongering swamp creature when you're trying to make sure an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe on Europe's doorstep doesn't happen

Of course some people say that the only "humanitarian catastrophe on Europe's doorstep" in 1999 was what NATO had done to Yugoslavia so there is that viewpoint too

Overplaying or exaggerating the 1990s genocide that happened in Yugoslavia does makes some western neocons feel better about their NATO war that killed more people in 2 months than the entirety of Barack Obama's drone campaign did in 8 years, but maybe me writing this means I am being delusional here. Some international courts has supposedly ruled there was no Yugoslavian genocide of Bosnians so there is that too

But I would never go further and claim that NATO committed crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia but it isn't hard to make that leap in logic

Joe Biden's relative 'non interventionism' is likely a calm before a war storm.

I bet Joe and his military cabinet are looking at the world map on a daily basis in search for where they could initiate a new war

Maybe for Joe Biden and his neocon imperialist warmonger allies ,Myanmar seems like a good deal for a war they can start

*China has a non-interventionist policy so it's not like PLA will be throwing them out if they make the decision to go in to Myanmar. Possibly just some malding and angry UN statements.

Moreover, the US bases in Myanmar won't be opposed by India (who are a QUAD member)

* China has one for the most part, yet China's non interventionist policy wouldn't apply if we're referring to the US invading and occupying a country (Myanmar) which directly borders China.

The US tried to do that stuff with Korea, and when they did China stepped in and knocked them back in their place. So maybe instead of Myanmar being the US's next warmonger imperialist target, India or Africa would be a better bet. China has been developing those areas. I hate the military industrial complex

If we got to abolish capitalism worldwide after WWII but that came at the price of not having a Nuremberg Trial and all the bad guys from WWII got sent to the Moon, Mars and ISS each and lived happily ever after would it have been good to have done it?

The downplaying Joe Biden's warmongering hawkish imperialism is pretty damn interesting since people in the room during Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefings (which Joe was present for) say that when presented with options,  Joe was constantly the most hawkish person in the room

Joe Biden's “alternative” to the infamous Surge was to deploy special forces around bashing down doors and shooting up citizens at random. It was implemented in company with the Surge and was a disaster (unlike the surge)

So Biden ordered the retaliation (for the ISIS kamakazi bomber at the airport in Kabul) strike that killed the Afghan family who had zero to do with the ISIS bomber.?

That was a really bad mistake for which Joe Biden can not excuse.  I think he was actually feeling the pressure after that brutal attack at the airport though - the withdrawal was still happening and at the time people lost their minds there and more attacks were on US military people and innocent civilians were going to occur. 

Drone strikes in the article figure that we know of. furthermore the situation has changed. so clearly there's less air strikes.

Similar to how they attempted to cover up the Kabul air strike . that ultimately turned out to kill 10 civilians.

Unless the US government gets exposed for a lie, like they did in the Afghanistan airstrikes. claiming "fewer than 10 casualties" is erroneous. Of course maybe the us government is fibbing, but regardless they cannot be hiding drone strikes in the hundreds to falsify the figures that much.

Evidently, Joe Biden has been anti-war for quite some time, especially after his son Beau's death, which he blamed on his time serving in the Iraq War. He wasn't even concealing it, it's just that basically nobody took him seriously. Or gave heed to what he's saying in the first place, in that regard

And so, let's admit it, Biden played everyone. We all thought Joe would be simply a impotent whacked out figurehead for the war party machine and its corporate buddies, and the machine thought so too. Turns out Joe has got other takes, and he's truly in charge. (Pity Biden did not turn out to be a covert libertarian socialist/luxemburgian/Anarcho tankie, but reigning in the US military still sets Biden on course to being a better US president than we think and maybe even the best President on international issues in quite a while)

But if I am being picky anything that falls short of renouncing the power to use drones in ordering extrajudicial assassinations absolutely isn't good enough, but this reduction of drone strikes by Biden at least is some improvement to the status quo on drones since Barack Obama was President

Seeing how military deployment is the most vital thing the President is out front and unaccountably responsible for, Joe Biden is - should be commended for him not being as much as a warmonger, imperialist hawk as I thought and maybe Biden thus is even the most ideal Presidents in that relative 'non interventionist' department since either Richard Nixon or Dwight Eisenhower were Presidents 

However I don't fancy being cynical yet I'm pretty sure Biden's reduction in drone strikes is merely due to him not liking all of this newfangled RC toy robot scrap heaps. He may simply want to get back to conducting massacres on civilians the old school way.

(Unironically however reducing drone strikes a fine outcome regardless the motive.)

In some respects, Joe Biden's foreign policy give off 'absolute improvement from what the US has previously been doing in the 2000s decade' vibes

"Active War Zones"? When did Congress previously declare war?

Joe Biden and his Democrat party are objectively less bad than Republicans at least on paper

and anyone who says no to this is either a secret rightoid or a tard. If Trump was still junta leader he would still be blowing people out of the water and sand willy nilly while Biden appears to ideologically be against it

Joe Biden= bad! Democrats= bad! Donnie Trump is such a based anti war president! Both parties are the same oh oh but but um um republicans are the better half! /s

Seriously though I am taken back that Glenn Greenwald hasn't said a word about this reduction in drone strikes by Joe Biden but you can still find Glenn slobbering Donald Trumps knob for talking of withdrawing from Afghanistan