Lexicon

Targeted killing

The deliberate, premeditated killing by a state of a specific named individual it judges to be a continuing threat

A targeted killing is the deliberate, premeditated killing by a state of a specific named individual identified as a continuing threat. The category is distinguished from conventional military targeting (which is directed against military forces or facilities, not against named individuals) and from law-enforcement use of force (which operates under judicial-process constraints — arrest, charge, trial, the proportionality framework that governs police use of lethal force). Targeted killing operates outside both frameworks; it is the contemporary form of what earlier eras called assassination, with the institutional vocabulary deliberately reframed to indicate that the practice is conducted within a state-authorised operational framework rather than as an isolated criminal act.

The principal contemporary practitioners of targeted killing as a sustained operational programme are Israel and the United States. The Israeli programme, conducted by the Mossad (against foreign-located targets) and by Aman and the IDF (against targets in operational reach of Israeli forces), has the longest documented operational history — the Wrath of God campaign of 1972-onward against Black September operatives connected to the Munich attack is the principal early case study; subsequent Israeli targeted-killing operations across the post-2000 period against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah leadership are extensively documented in Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First (Random House, 2018) and in the post-2010 Israeli judicial record on the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel cases.

The post-September-2001 US targeted-killing programme is the other principal contemporary case. The programme operates jointly across the CIA Counterterrorism Center (under presidential covert-action authority — see the finding entry) and the US Joint Special Operations Command (under Title 10 military authority). The principal documented operational mechanism is the unmanned-aircraft (drone) strike, deployed across Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (2004–2018), Yemen (2002–present), Somalia (2007–present), Libya (2011–present), and Iraq and Syria (post-2014). The programme's substantive scale, as reconstructed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation, and the Long War Journal across the post-2010 period, is in the range of 5,000+ documented strikes and approximately 10,000–15,000 documented killings across the post-2002 cumulative period.

The legal framework under which the US targeted-killing programme operates is the principal contested institutional question. The Obama-administration framework, as articulated in the May 2013 Procedures for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets Located Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities (the "Presidential Policy Guidance" — partially declassified in 2016 in response to ACLU FOIA litigation), required that targets be identified as a "continuing imminent threat" to US persons and that operations be conducted with "near certainty" of no civilian casualties. The Trump-administration framework, articulated in the Principles, Standards, and Procedures of October 2017, narrowed the previous restrictions on targeted-killing authority. The Biden-administration framework returned substantively to the Obama-era constraints with modifications. The successive administrations' framework documents have been only partially declassified; the operational record under each remains substantially classified.

The substantive question of whether targeted killing is a category of operational activity intelligence services should conduct at all, or whether the function should be returned to the conventional military framework with appropriate operational-security measures, has been the recurring institutional debate across the post-2001 period. The principal arguments for the targeted-killing model are operational precision (the elimination of a specific named threat with substantially reduced collateral damage relative to conventional military operations) and the integration of the targeting decision with the intelligence-collection apparatus that identifies the target. The principal arguments against are the institutional accountability question (the legal framework operates with substantially less external oversight than the military targeting framework provides), the substantive question of the post-2001 strikes' counter-terrorism efficacy (whether the post-2001 programme has reduced or expanded the underlying threat), and the precedent question (the legal arguments under which the US conducts targeted killing of named foreign nationals create precedent for foreign states conducting analogous operations against persons including US citizens).

See also