US air wars under Trump: increasingly indiscriminate, increasingly opaque

Lack of transparency over looser rules of engagement is hallmark of administration, writes Julian Borger

Julian Borger World affairs editor
Tue 23 Jan 2018 05.00 GMT

The escalating air war in Somalia is part of a global pattern of an ever broader and unfettered use of air power that has it roots in the Obama administration but which has been spurred on and expanded under Donald Trump.

In the first year of his presidency, Trump has gone out of his way to claim credit for the defeats inflicted on Islamic State, attributing it to his loosening of constraints on his generals.

“I totally changed rules of engagement. I totally changed our military,” the president said in October.

It is difficult to separate fact from exaggeration and hubris in Trump’s claim. The preference for air power and drones against enemies far beyond the battlefields of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq is not new. The Obama administration did seek to mitigate the cost in civilian lives from such stand-off and remote-control weapons, by maintaining political control over operations from the White House. But in the last weeks of the outgoing administration, some of those curbs were lifted.

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