Drones Turned the CIA Into a Paramilitary Force, and There's (Probably) No Turning Back

For a long time, the Central Intelligence Agency was in the otherwise quiet business of doing what still lingers in popular consciousness as the stuff of, well, the CIA: Intelligence gathering. Data collection, sifting, and analysis. You know, wonky spy shit.

Then drones came along. The CIA gradually took to the technology, and with its own dedicated fleet of armed unmanned aircraft began carrying out more and more remote aerial attacks throughout the Middle East and Horn of Africa. What was once a decidedly non-lethal spy agency was suddenly turned on its head, hunting and killing from above to the point that it now seems the CIA is irrecoverably paramilitarized. Is there really no turning back?

Let's back up. Some 433 missile strikes have pummeled Pakistan and Yemen since the US began its hunter-killer drone campaign in earnest in 2004, according to the Long War Journal. A recent UN human rights report put the official drone death toll in Pakistan alone at over 2,200 militants and as many as 400 civilians.

The grim reality is that we'll ultimately never know the true scope of the US's ongoing, boundless shadows wars, of which drones have become the centerpiece. Head counts are notoriously difficult to come by even as the frequency of American drone strikes drops. This is true in both the rugged Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which have beared the brunt of American drone strikes, and populated areas, as evidenced by a strike last week in northwest Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which sits well beyond Pakistan's semiautonmous tribal region.

What we do know is that the lion's share of these strikes have come by way of the CIA. As we've reported, the agency has had free reign in Pakistan, at least, for the past year. And now, six months after President Obama made clear in a landmark speech at the National Defense University his intention to shift the heavy lifting behind America's counterterror efforts from the CIA back to the Defense Department, the CIA remains responsible for the majority of lethal drone operations, the Washington Post reports.

I don't want to say the CIA is plain not willing to flip its hand in the US's dronings abroad. "The principal mission of the agency is to collect intelligence," CIA Director John Brennan told Pentagon brass earlier this month. The former top Obama adviser, who rose to prominence as the president's drone "high priest", added that as director of the agency one of his first undertakings would be to size up "whether or not there has been too much of an emphasis of the CT [counterterror] front." US officials who spoke with the Post on condition of anonymity said that Brennan, who's helmed the CIA for eight months now, "is continuing to assess the agency's posture and allocation of resources, and has made significant adjustments" to the way the CIA treats bad guys.

Fair enough.

Then again, it really is like the CIA just doesn't want to hand over its Hellfire. It's a creeping norm made all the more apparent in that there's been hardly much of anything done in terms of bringing Obama's revisioning of America's national defense efforts to reality, of bringing the trigger of lethal drone strikes back under the auspice of the Pentagon, and thus returning the CIA to its original intelligence mission. White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden admitted as much: "There has been no change in policy since the president's speech… I'm not going to speculate on how long the transition will take, but we're going to ensure that it's done right and not rushed."

It'll be a Herculean task—one "beset by technical snags," the Post reports:

Despite their overlapping "orbits" in Yemen, the CIA and JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] employ different surveillance equipment on their drone fleets. They also rely on separate and sometimes incompatible communications networks to transmit video feeds and assemble intelligence from multiple streams in the moments before a strike.

That's to say nothing of how the two counterterror arms do or do not jibe in Pakistan and wherever else the shadow wars have fallen. The point, though, is that the CIA's image-slash-raison d'etre and American counterterror policy alike have been forever changed, one way or another. Current and former US officials told the Post that they've seen little evidence that the agency is easing up its paramilitary stance toward the US's targeted killing program. "It's been business as usual," one former senior US intelligence official with knoweldge of how the CIA works overseas told the Post.

Which puts an entirely new spin on "spy drone," doesn't it?

@thebanderson