Covert Action

If Joe Biden wins the November election, Americans will likely see a reversion to a more traditional approach to the presidency. What might that mean in the field of U.S. national security?

Tomorrow is an ignominious anniversary. On that date in 1961, about 1,400 American-trained Cuban exiles launched a secret invasion of Cuba in an effort to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime. After landing on the island’s southern coast at the Bay of Pigs, the invading guerrillas were routed by government forces. The humiliating disaster gave rise to a rare, publicly available Justice Department analysis of presidential power to wage covert war.

Greg Miller has an interesting and seemingly quite well-sourced article in the Washington Post today documenting (and offering explanations for) a significant decline in CIA drone strikes. To be clear, the claim is not that drone strikes on the whole are in decline.

One thing I love about the various annual authorization bills is that they often contain very interesting but little-noticed provisions. The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, which HPSCI (the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) voted out last week, is no exception. The full text is here, and my top-five highlights appear below:

Section 303: The Intelligence Committees want in on Special Access Program reporting.