A surgeon as sloppy as that would be indicted.

The U.S. government has never explained how it calculates whether the cost of a given targeted killing outweighs the benefits. One wonders how many terrorists, or sworn enemies of America, are created on average when our drones kill an innocent. If the Pentagon or CIA has a working theory, official secrecy makes it impossible to vet.

On the other side of the ledger, al-Qaeda and ISIS kill far more civilians outside the United States than inside it. Some drone strikes surely spare more foreign innocents than they kill.

The trend of more secretive killings in successive presidencies will now continue. The Trump administration “is preparing to dismantle key Obama-era limits on drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional battlefields,” according to a New York Times article by Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, trusted bylines on this subject.

Two rule changes loom largest:

First, the targets of kill missions by the military and the C.I.A., now generally limited to high-level militants deemed to pose a “continuing and imminent threat” to Americans, would be expanded to include foot-soldier jihadists with no special skills or leadership roles. And second, proposed drone attacks and raids would no longer undergo high-level vetting.

The article adds that officials agree “they should keep in place one important constraint for such attacks: a requirement of ‘near certainty’ that no civilian bystanders will be killed.” What that constraint means in practice has long been unclear since civilian bystanders have, in fact, been killed every year it has been in place.

Given the horrific possibility of killing innocents and the risk of subsequent blowback, why would U.S. officials want to expand permissible targets from those who pose a “continuing or imminent threat” to Americans to “foot-soldier jihadists”?

Luke Hartig articulates the logic at Just Security:

Over 16 years of operations, our counterterrorism professionals have become adept at analyzing the structure of terrorist networks and targeting them based on the understanding that there are particular nodes that, if removed, could have a devastating impact on the entire network. In many cases, those nodes may be couriers, bodyguards, or propagandists who, while lawful military targets under the laws of war, may not pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons. The new policy appears to give operators greater leeway to target according to what will be considerably more effective in disrupting and defeating terrorist networks. The challenge … will be establishing governing principles that limit the pace of strikes (as the continuing, imminent-threat standard did), since there are few countries outside of hot war zones that will give the U.S. blanket approvals for unfettered drone campaigns.

That logic is seductive but incomplete.