A picture pulled from U.S. Africa Command X account, with the caption: "In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command conducted airstrikes against ISIS-Somalia on Feb. 1, 2025."
U.S. military commanders can now approve airstrikes with fewer checks and balances according to a new directive signed in early February, the news of which was leaked to the American press on Thursday.
U.S. officials told CBS News that U.S. President Donald Trump had approved a policy shift easing restraints on army commanders and lessening executive oversight, meaning it will be easier for commanders to order airstrikes and that the range of possible targets is broader.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who confirmed the CBS report the day after it was published, brought the directive into force while meeting with U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Germany on Feb. 11 — his first overseas trip in office. During that meeting, Hegseth and senior AFRICOM leaders discussed the al-Shabaab group in Somalia and the Houthis in Yemen as potential targets.
An official AFRICOM statement released following the meeting makes no mention of the seismic decision, only briefly listing discussions of "enhancing lethality, improving force readiness, and strengthening partnerships to counter emerging threats and maintain stability."
The U.S. military bombed Syria 75 times the day the Assad regime fell, targeting sites associated with the Islamic State (IS). Since then, it has launched dozens more airstrikes against IS and al-Qaeda targets, with the latest on March 1 killing the top military leader of Hurras al-Din, a branch of al-Qaeda in Syria.
A U.S.-U.K. coalition has also bombed Yemen hundreds of time since Houthi rebels started targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza amid Israel's devastating war against Hamas.
“We won’t tolerate Biden-era bureaucracy preventing our warfighters from doing their job,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement Friday. “America is back in the business of counterterrorism and killing Jihadists.”
Obama-era military restrictions
Trump's decision rolls back constraints on American military operations that go back to the Obama administration.
According to AFRICOM's website, American military airstrikes fall into two broad categories: deliberate and defensive. Deliberate airstrikes were, until Feb. 11, tied to a multi-layered set of regulations during which military lawyers review the compiled intelligence to determine if targets are "legal combatants under the law of armed conflict," to avoid targeted killings of innocent people mistaken for terrorist suspects.
Defensive airstrikes are used "in limited circumstances where U.S. or specifically designated partner forces are in imminent danger from hostile forces," the website states, and are typically authorized by the combatant command, without the approval of the executive branch.
In 2015, The Intercept revealed a leaked Pentagon study from 2013 on U.S. strikes in the previous two years against Yemen and Somalia. The study "admits frankly that capturing terrorists is a rare occurrence and hints at the use of so-called 'signature strikes' against unknown individuals exhibiting suspicious behavior."
According to the Intercept's reporting, under Obama, military commanders had to ensure every proposed strike met a number of strict criteria and obtained approvals from seven decision makers — including the president. The targeted individual had to be a confirmed member of an approved terrorist organization using two independent forms of intelligence; civilian casualties had to be projected as minimal; and there could be no "contradictory intelligence" casting any doubt on the operation.
The process became a high-stakes roundtable whereby airstrike had to be approved by the task force that assembled the target package, the combatant commander, the CIA chief of mission, and the host nation. A single dissent along the way would result in the operation being aborted.
CBS reports that it's still not clear which if any of these provisions are still active following Trump's decision, however, the outlet points out, these processes were in place during Trump's first term, with some exceptions on approval by the host nation in countries such as Afghanistan.
Pentagon officials kicked out
Less than two weeks after signing the directive, Hegseth fired three military lawyers from the air force, army and navy, describing them as “roadblocks” to “orders that are given by a commander in chief.”
On Feb. 21, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals amid an unprecedented upheaval of U.S. military leadership.
The head of the U.S. navy, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service, was also fired, as well as the air force vice chief of staff.
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