Earlier this year, President Obama and anonymous administration officials said that they’d like to move control of the U.S. government’s drone operations away from the CIA, which runs much of the program now (and does all of the drone strikes in Pakistan), to the Pentagon (which controls plenty of drones of its own). According to a report in Foreign Policy Tuesday night, that effort has now been largely abandoned:
The transfer was never expected to happen overnight. But it is now clear the complexity of the issue, the distinct operational and cultural differences between the Pentagon and CIA and the bureaucratic politics of it all has forced officials on all sides to recognize transferring drone operations from the Agency to the Defense Department represents, for now, an unattainable goal.
“The physics of making this happen quickly are remarkably difficult,” one U.S. official told FP. “The goal remains the same, but the reality has set in.”
It’s not exactly surprising that the idea of tightening drone oversight came to nil: The Obama administration has talked a big game about ending indefinite detention and closing Guantanamo Bay, too, an effort they also found impossible (even as they keep releasing the marginally less dangerous detainees, who are likely to return to terror nonetheless). As Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen points out, this move might come as a surprise to the journalists who dutifully reported that Obama CIA nominee John Brennan would do the right thing and give up control of drones to the ostensibly more accountable Pentagon because he’d read Thomas Aquinas and goes to Mass. That development was one of the major policy shifts that was supposed to come out of Obama’s late-May 2013 speech at National Defense University that the media gushed over as an end to the War on Terror and the start of a more thoughtful approach to national security — five months on, this proposal looks as serious as the president’s campaign promises in this area do after five years. Which may not be such a bad thing.