How do Biden-era airstrike totals (2021–2024) compare to the Trump and Obama administrations?
Executive summary
Airwars and contemporaneous news reporting show U.S. declared airstrikes fell sharply after 2020: declared strikes across major theaters dropped from about 951 in 2020 to roughly 439 by mid‑December 2021, a 54% decline; Airwars then reports an even steeper fall to about 36 declared strikes in 2022 [1] [2]. Reporting also documents that much of the 2021 decline reflected the end of large campaign phases — notably the withdrawal from Afghanistan — while later years included episodic surges (e.g., strikes tied to Middle East tensions in 2024) not fully captured by the annual totals in these sources [1] [2] [3].
1. A clear downward inflection after 2020: the numbers
Independent monitor Airwars and multiple outlets report that declared U.S. strikes across Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen fell from 951 actions in 2020 to about 439 by mid‑December 2021 — a 54% reduction — and then to a historic low of roughly 36 declared strikes in 2022 [1] [2]. Major news outlets repeated the Airwars figure that strikes dropped 54% between 2020 and 2021 [4] [5].
2. Why totals fell: endings, policy review and operational shifts
Reporting links the decline to concrete policy and operational changes: the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 removed the single largest locus of strikes, and the Biden administration undertook a counterterrorism policy review and announced limits — including pauses or reduced support in Yemen and elsewhere — that materially reduced declared strike counts [1] [2]. Sources note the change was as much structural (campaigns ending) as doctrinal (new restraints) [1] [2].
3. Not a simple “Biden vs. Trump vs. Obama” head‑to‑head in one metric
Available reporting compares year‑to‑year totals rather than clean four‑year aggregates by administration. Airwars shows a drop from the high point around 2016 and then a sharp fall after 2020; outlets cite 2020 as a spike (largely under Trump’s last year) and 2021 as a much lower year under Biden [6] [1]. However, Cost of War researchers document that Biden‑era counterterrorism operations still involved airstrikes in multiple countries between 2021–2023 and counted operations in 78 countries overall, showing continued global activity even as declared strike totals fell [7]. Sources do not provide an authoritative single four‑year comparative total for Obama, Trump and Biden within this dataset, so a definitive administration‑to‑administration tally is not present in current reporting (available sources do not mention a single authoritative four‑year comparative total).
4. The 2022 nadir and the 2024–25 uptick caveat
Airwars reported declared strikes hitting a minimum in 2022 (about 36) as several theaters quieted and some operations shifted to raids or other footprints [2]. Congressional and media sources then describe episodic U.S. actions in 2024 tied to regional escalations — including a series of strikes and reporting to Congress in 2024 after attacks on U.S. facilities — indicating that the pattern is not uniformly downward and that surges can occur in response to crises [3] [8]. Wikipedia and later press snippets document intensive US–UK strikes in Yemen beginning January 2024, but those later tallies fall outside the core Airwars 2021–2022 comparisons and some are reported in allied combined totals [9].
5. Disagreement in framing and data sources: monitoring groups vs. official tallies
Airwars’ declared‑strike counts underpin many of the steep declines cited by outlets and by PBS and Fox in late 2021–2022 [1] [4] [5]. Other analysts (e.g., Costs of War at Brown) emphasize the breadth of counterterrorism activity — ground actions and limited strikes across many countries — that numbers alone may understate [7]. Congressional legal analyses focus on the legal justification and reporting cadence for specific 2024 strikes rather than aggregate totals, showing a different emphasis in official oversight reporting [3].
6. What remains unclear in current reporting
Sources do not provide a single, consistent methodology for counting strikes across administrations (Airwars declared strikes vs. CENTCOM public tallies vs. later combined allied figures), and they do not offer a fully reconciled four‑year comparison for Obama, Trump and Biden in one place (available sources do not mention a reconciled, administration‑level four‑year comparison). Nor do the provided sources settle whether later 2024–2025 operations (e.g., combined US‑UK strikes in Yemen) should be counted against Biden’s airstrike totals in the same way as previous years’ U.S.-only totals [9] [1].
Conclusion — what the record shows and what it doesn’t: independent monitoring organizations and contemporary reporting agree that declared U.S. airstrike activity fell sharply after 2020 — a drop Airwars quantifies as 54% from 2020 to 2021 and then to a low in 2022 — but the picture is nuanced. The fall was driven largely by the end of large campaigns (notably Afghanistan) and policy shifts, while other sources emphasize continued, dispersed counterterrorism activity and episodic surges that complicate a clean administration‑to‑administration strike tally [1] [2] [7] [3].