Drone Strikes Plummet As U.S. Seeks More Human Intelligence -- Washington Post
Terrorist captures can lead to high-value targets
The number of drone strikes approved by the Obama administration on suspected terrorists has fallen dramatically this year, as the war with al Qaeda increasingly shifts to Africa and U.S. intelligence craves more captures and interrogations of high-value targets.
U.S. officials told The Washington Times on Wednesday that the reasons for a shift in tactics are many — including that al Qaeda’s senior ranks were thinned out so much in 2011 and 2012 by an intense flurry of drone strikes, and that the terrorist network has adapted to try to evade some of Washington’s use of the strikes or to make them less politically palatable.
But the sources acknowledged that a growing desire to close a recent gap in actionable human intelligence on al Qaeda’s evolving operations also has renewed the administration’s interest in more clandestine commando raids like the one that netted a high-value terrorist suspect in Libya last weekend.
Read more ....
Update: Is the U.S. Officially Moving Away from Drone Strikes? -- Connor Simpson, The Atlantic
My Comment: This is a major shift in U.S. counter terrorism policy .... and I am sure that gathering intelligence is one of them.
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