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The United States military has scored successes in a number of recent high-profile missions: the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden; the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki; and the air support for Libyan rebels that led to the overthrow and death of longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Taken together, these and other operations form the outline of President Obama’s overall approach to the use of American military force, what we might call the “Obama Doctrine.”
In a nutshell, the Obama Doctrine emphasizes air power and surgical strikes, rather than boots on the ground. In this column, I shall sketch the Obama Doctrine’s emerging contours and raise both strategic and legal questions about its long-term prospects.
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The Obama Doctrine also raises a host of domestic and international legal questions. These include questions about what sorts of military actions constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution, as well as questions about targeted killings (like the ones raised by my fellow Justia columnist Joanne Mariner). The recent leak of the gist of the Office of Legal Counsel memorandum finding legal authority for the al-Awlaki killing only intensifies these questions. As I noted in a blog post, the Obama Justice Department tried, in the memorandum, to walk a tightrope between the war paradigm and the crime paradigm for fighting terrorism on a global battlefield.
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