What standards did the Obama administration use to define “imminent” threat for lethal targeting, and how have critics responded?
Executive summary
The Obama administration’s Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) and public fact sheets tied lethal targeting outside areas of active hostilities to a “continuing, imminent” threat and a set of heightened procedural safeguards—near-certainty of target presence, near-certainty of no civilian harm, and that capture is infeasible—while reserving broader law-of-war options in declared theaters of active hostilities [1] [2] [3]. Critics responded that the administration redefined “imminent” so it could justify preemptive strikes at long distances, cloaked the most consequential interpretations in secrecy and exemptions, and sometimes reverted in practice to looser wartime standards with insufficient transparency or accountability [4] [5] [6].
1. What the administration publicly said “imminent” meant
In May 2013 the White House framed its standard as restricting lethal force to individuals who pose a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” and accompanied that threshold with four operational criteria: near certainty the target is present, near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed, capture is not feasible, and host-state authorities cannot effectively address the threat—language the administration presented as a policy floor that exceeds basic legal minima [1] [2].
2. How the PPG operationalized imminence in practice
The PPG treated imminence as part of a decision matrix rather than a single temporal moment: it required assessments of threat continuity and feasibility of capture and made “near certainty” of no civilian harm an explicit prerequisite for strikes outside active hostilities, while noting the president could still act under the laws of armed conflict in active hostilities [2] [3] [7].
3. Where critics say the standard stretched thin
Human Rights Watch and other critics argue that the administration’s practice often diluted the law-enforcement conception of “imminent” into a more permissive, anticipatory model that looks more like wartime targeting—allowing strikes on individuals assessed as part of a continuing plotting network even absent evidence of an immediate plan—and that secrecy prevented independent verification of whether the PPG’s safeguards were followed [5] [8].
4. The “continuing, imminent” formulation and academic critique
Scholars trace a deliberate conceptual shift: by qualifying imminence as “continuing” the administration moved away from “immediate” temporal constraints and thus legitimized preemptive action against ongoing threats, a change described as conceptual innovation aimed at reconciling counterterrorism needs with international-law legitimacy but criticized for changing the meaning of a foundational legal term [4].
5. Defenders’ arguments and legal cover
Supporters—including administration legal writers and commentators—contend the PPG placed meaningful, stricter policy limits on targeting, emphasized capture where feasible, and limited targeting of U.S. persons to cases where capture was impracticable and the person was a senior operational leader posing imminent danger, arguing that these constraints reflect a measured balance between security and rights [9] [10] [7].
6. Secrecy, exemptions, and contested practice
Investigative reporting and advocacy groups point to classified waivers and operational exemptions—most prominently in Pakistan and in theaters where the administration treated operations as within “areas of active hostilities”—arguing that exemptions and narrow public definitions meant the PPG’s high bar was sometimes bypassed, with critics pointing to civilian casualty counts and released memos as evidence that the standard did not uniformly constrain strikes [6] [11] [3].
7. Bottom line: a policy of higher thresholds, disputed application
Officially, Obama-era policy established a higher, policy-level threshold for lethal force outside active hostilities—a “continuing, imminent” threat plus near-certainty safeguards and capture-first prioritization—but critics contend the administration rotated the concept of imminence away from immediacy, kept key implementing judgments secret, and allowed exceptions that undermined the safeguards in practice; defenders counter that the PPG still represented a meaningful restraint and that some critiques conflate policy text with unavoidable operational complexity [1] [4] [7].