Gates and Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced the move at a press briefing Thursday.

Gates reiterated that U.S. troops will not be on the ground in Libya. He also said regime change in Libya was always a political goal, but it will take time.

Speculation for the briefing surrounded the possible naming of Cartwright as the replacement for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen when Mullen leaves the post in October.

Watch the live briefing, which started at 3:00 p.m.

Responding to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request of “records relating to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles – commonly known as ‘drones’ – for the purpose of targeting and killing individuals since September 11, 2001,” which was submitted July 2010, the Department of Defense told Jonathan Manes of the ACLU’s National Security Project that while this department does possess documents estimating the number of civilian casualties that result from operations involving military aircraft, it does not distinguish between weapons platforms.

“The only documents that address estimates of civilian casualties related to drone strikes are individual battle damage assessments evaluating each military aircraft mission, which the ACLU and DoD have agreed are outside the scope of documents to be processed in this litigation,” writes Mark H. Herrington, the DoD’s associate deputy general counsel.

The letter is dated Dec. 30, 2010, but ACLU spokesperson Molly Kaplan said the department held on to the letter for months, “apparently by mistake,” and it did not make it to the ACLU’s desk until last Friday.

Herrington further writes:

“In July 2010, the Department of Defense (DoD) informed the ACLU that all records related to this section of the request are classified and not maintained in a format that allows searching without significant cost. However, in light of ACLU’s insistence that civilian casualty information was of particular interest, DoD agreed to conduct 40 hours of searching for estimates of civilian casualties caused by such strikes, after which the parties would discuss whether additional searches would be undertaken.

DoD’s search confirmed that DoD does not create or maintain documents to compile estimates of civilian casualties related to drone strikes separately from estimates related to other weapons systems.”

Last year the civil liberties organization sued DoD after it would not fill its FOIA request on unmanned drones used to target killings overseas. The ACLU wanted to know when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, as well as the number and rate of civilian casualties. Generally, the ACLU wanted the government to clarify the legal basis for using unmanned drones.

“It is remarkable that the Defense Department does not compile data about the total number of civilian casualties inflicted by unmanned drones – a new and controversial technology,” said Manes in a press statement. “The public must have accurate information about civilian casualties in drone strikes in order to assess the ethical, legal and strategic concerns that these weapons raise.”

According to the ACLU, the CIA, for its part, has entirely refused to respond to a request for information about the drone strikes in Pakistan.

Because the government has not been much help coming forward with this information, independent organizations and other media have attempted to pick up the slack. Last October, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) released a report that concluded that innocent civilians in northwest Pakistan were being killed by both U.S. drone strikes and the ground and aerial attacks from the Pakistani military, as well as local militants.

The report found that in 2009, an estimated 2,300 civilians were killed in terror attacks alone and noted that “there is no governmental or military mechanism that systematically and publicly investigates or collects data on civilian casualties.” The group also discovered that the Pakistani government runs several compensation programs and suggested that drone victims be included in one of these programs.

On Thursday, CIVIC released a statement calling on the DoD and the CIA to “count and compensate civilians harmed by U.S. drones,” in light of the ACLU’s reveal.

“The US has a duty to know where it has caused civilian harm, including whether it was caused by close air support or unmanned aerial vehicles,” said Sarah Holewinski, CIVIC’s executive director, in the statement. “Let’s say civilian casualties skyrocket. Why the spike? How can the problem be fixed? Without good data, the US is operating with blinders on. After ten years at war, the US should know better.”

The New America Foundation is another organization that has attempted to quantify the civilian casualties of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, compiling data and information since 2004 from sources such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and the BBC and English-language newspapers and media in Pakistan, such as The Daily Times, Dawn, The Express Tribune and Geo TV.

Thus far, NAF has found that the 233 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan — including 20 in 2011 – have killed between 1,411 and 2,247 people, of whom about 1,134 to 1,810 have been described as militants. According to the organization: “The true non-militant fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 21 percent. In 2010, it was more like six percent.”

NAF has also created a map with estimated locations of each drone strike.

Schumer and McCaskill praised the success of the drones already in operation along the border:

“A lot of people now think of drones in the way that they’ve been used in Pakistan in taking out Al Qaeda, but primary to the drones is their ability to get real-time surveillance,” McCaskill said. “ So imagine the advantage of getting real-time surveillance above the airspace where we have some lawlessness going on and what that could do to assist the people on the ground of manning up where they need to man up in terms of resources at the border.”

The Department of Homeland Security already operates seven drones in border areas: four in Arizona, two in Texas and one along the North Dakota-Canada border. Each drone costs millions of dollars, with the camera alone worth more than $2 million. The unmanned drones can fly for more than 20 hours at a time, but can only be used when weather is deemed clear enough.

The drone program has some detractors in the border security community, where border patrol agents and sheriffs have said money on drones would be better spent on more human law enforcement. Safety is also a concern: The Federal Aviation Administration said earlier this summer they need to finish writing regulations for unmanned aircraft before they can approve significant increases in the number of unmanned drones in civilian airspace.

Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said Thursday that he would deliver a report on June 3 to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva declaring that the “life and death power” of drones should be entrusted to regular armed forces, not intelligence agencies. He contrasted how the military and the C.I.A. responded to allegations that strikes had killed civilians by mistake.

“With the Defense Department you’ve got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan,” he said in an interview. “The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the C.I.A. is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about.”

Alston stops short of calling the drones a violation of the laws of war. But that doesn’t diminish the tension between the rules-based internationalism Obama seeks and the drone strikes he considers a crucial counterterrorism tool.

Consider that the drones are a fairly cheap and unsophisticated technology. It’s only a matter of time before some other country replicates the U.S.’s move to outfit them with missiles. China, for instance, has at least seven types of unmanned aerial vehicles. Russia has at least eight. Will the Obama administration accept an assertion by China or Russia that they retain the right to launch missiles from remotely-piloted aircraft at foreign military targets in defiance of the wishes of a U.N. special rapporteur?

Koh told the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law that the administration is guided by the principles of proportionality — no overreaction to an al-Qaeda attack — and distinction, meaning no civilians can be targeted. There’s more:

Koh also responded to critics who have questioned the legality of such attacks under international law. “[S]ome have suggested that the very use of targeting a particular leader of an enemy force in an armed conflict must violate the laws of war. But individuals who are part of such an armed group are belligerent and, therefore, lawful targets under international law….[S]ome have challenged the very use of advanced weapons systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, for lethal operations. But the rules that govern targeting do not turn on the type of weapon system involved, and there is no prohibition under the laws of war on the use of technologically advanced weapons systems in armed conflict—such as pilotless aircraft or so-called smart bombs—so long as they are employed in conformity with applicable laws of war.”

I have to go back here to my colleague Dave Weigel’s coverage of the conservative effort last year to keep Koh out of his job because he was allegedly a wild-eyed enemy of American sovereignty. Koh’s chief persecutor was Ed Whelan of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, who capped tendentious readings of Koh’s writings by contextualizing them in hysterical ways like this:

“What judicial transnationalism is really all about,” wrote Whelan, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.”

Perhaps Whelan would like to explain how launching missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles onto targets in Pakistan and Yemen — which kill, by the New America Foundation’s estimate, one civilian for every two combatants — are the favored policy response of effete European elites. The ACLU, meanwhile, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the formal legal arguments prepared by the Obama team justifying the drone strikes.

According to McChrystal’s command, however, there is no change in tactics. Or, rather, the only change in tactics is an increase in drone strikes under his six-month old command from his predecessor. Overall airstrikes, particularly from piloted aircraft, are indeed down under McChrystal. But “the two-in-one-day strikes you saw the other day may have been unusual from a press release standpoint,” McChrystal spokesman Tadd Sholtis, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, emailed, “but it wasn’t an operational aberration.”

Indeed, according to data provided by Sholtis, the first half of January has seen six airstrikes from remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) like the Reaper. December 2009 featured 14 so-called RPA strikes; while under McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, December 2008 featured three. From Sholtis, here’s the full monthly breakdown of those drone strikes since McChrystal took command in Afghanistan this summer, as compared to the previous year:

July 2009:  13 — July 2008: 15

August 2009:  14 — August 2008: 11

September 2009:  8 — September 2008: 5

October 2009:  11 — October 2008: 12

November 2009:  23  — November 2008: 12

December 2009:  14 — December 2008: 3

January 1 – January 14, 2009: 6 — January 2008: 3

The spike in recent months compared to the previous year looks like the result of a combination of factors. First, the increased operational tempo of U.S. troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s south and east, despite the (increasingly less relevant) traditional winter lull. Second, senior military leaders like Central Command’s Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq’s Gen. Raymond Odierno have spoken for months about accelerating the transfer of combat-support assets like surveillance drones to Afghanistan; and those drones can be outfitted with Hellfire missiles. “More strikes by these aircraft is probably best understood as a function of more ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] -and-strike capable assets flowing to the theater,” Sholtis said. And finally, the precision capabilities contained within the remotely-piloted drones satisfy McChrystal’s guidance for a “a higher degree of certainty, patience and restraint in employing air strikes,” in Sholtis’ phrase. Or, as a Marine officer quoted in The Washington Post put it, “It has pinpoint precision, and it limits collateral damage.”

And that’s the most important aspect of the increase in drone usage: it has occurred during an internationally validated reduction in U.S./NATO-attributable civilian casualties. A United Nations report released yesterday determined that the U.S. and its allies are responsible for 28 percent fewer civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2009 than in 2008, a drop that the U.N. specifically attributed to McChrystal’s instructions to prioritize the protection of Afghan civilians. It looks like McChrystal’s command has found the sweet spot: an increase in aerial lethality that does not result in significant collateral damage.

For more on the air war in Afghanistan and McChrystal’s role in it, I can’t recommend this recent Wired piece by Noah Shachtman highly enough.

From a cyber warfare perspective, the short term solution to the UAV video issue is not to encrypt the data (which is the long term solution), rather to use the unencrypted video stream to go after the cyber insurgents – with the specific intention of getting inside their network. It is not complicated to have a normal UAV camera send a video signal exactly as intended for the military function, but include packet data that exploits vulnerabilities in software like skygrabber, or to include code that exploits known vulnerabilities in popular video players. I’m sticking to very common examples that are easily understood by the masses, but at many layers of the UAVs video signal the potential to exploit the unencrypted broadcasted video feed as a weapon is significant.

I’d be lying if I said that I knew how this works, or whether it’s actually applicable to the kinds of signals the drones employ, but Galrahn knows what he’s talking about in general. And I imagine in cyberwarfare, like in counterintelligence, your actual capabilities are less important than the way the enemy perceives your capabilities. Galrahn is recalling the famous command issued by French military genius Ferdinand Foch when trying to prevent the Germans from piercing the French line during World War I: “Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.”

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

This is happening in Iraq, and it’s a pretty safe bet that it could happen in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if it’s not already. U.S. military officials in Iraq discovered the drone penetration in the summer. “There’s been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it,” an anonymous senior defense official told The Wall Street Journal, “but there’s an issue that we can take care of and we’re doing so.”

Reassured? The vulnerability is inherent in the drone program, which sends imagery captured by the unmanned planes to their pilots hundreds or thousand miles away. The Air Force says it’s got a new system — with the baroque name Gorgon Stare — that appears to build redundancy into the process. But this gives cause for concern:

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Yeah, who could possibly be as smart as Americans, right? This ought to be the subject of immediate congressional hearings. As The Journal points out, the Air Force is (somewhat reluctantly) accepting that unmanned flights are the service’s future. Can that future really be compromised by a $26 hack and ignorant, arrogant, xenophobic assumptions?

Beginning in 2007, candidate Obama suggested that his administration might take unilateral action against extremists in Pakistan if the Pakistani government proved to be intransigent. It brought him reproach from then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), now his secretary of state, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), still the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And over the past year, as the Pakistanis have, with U.S. pressure and guidance and support, launched military offensives first to drive the Pakistani Taliban out of the Swat Valley and then to extirpate it in south Waziristan, the vow has faded. But it’s apparently returned.

A recent letter from Obama to his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari — whose position is rather tenuous at the moment as he faces a restive military — outlined a series of carrots in the event of accelerated action against the extremists, including “enhanced development and trade assistance; improved intelligence collaboration and a more secure and upgraded military equipment pipeline; more public praise and less public criticism of Pakistan; and an initiative to build greater regional cooperation among Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.” And then the stick, shown by national security adviser Jim Jones:

Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, was more precise in conversations with top Pakistani government and military leaders, U.S. and foreign officials said, stating that certain things have to happen in Pakistan to ensure Afghanistan’s security. If Pakistan cannot deliver, he warned, the United States may be impelled to use any means at its disposal to rout insurgents based along Pakistan’s western and southern borders with Afghanistan.

That’s a modified version of the vow, but there it is. Officials on the campaign stressed that it was a last resort, and a very conditional one. And it’s a questionable thing to reiterate after the Pakistani military has done more to go after al-Qaeda and its affiliates in 2009 than it did in the previous eight years. But with Obama planning to outline the ultimate end of the Afghanistan war on Tuesday night, perhaps it means something rather specific: if you won’t bring us the head of Osama bin Laden, we’ll get it ourselves.

The big reveal is that Blair, the nominal overall intelligence chief, wants a much bigger role over the CIA’s drone strikes in Pakistan.

Since the CIA’s establishment in 1947, its officers have had a direct line to the National Security Council. No cut-outs, no go-betweens.  Blair and his deputies believed that the CIA’s National Clandestine Service was failing to provide a full picture of several of the agency’s largest covert collection and special activity programs. In particular, the DNI would often find out about CIA-initiated drone strikes in Pakistan well after the fact. The CIA was conscientious about briefing the National Security Council, but did not bother to loop in the DNI.

That won’t happen any longer. The CIA will keep its unfettered access to national security principals, and the DNI still doesn’t have the authority to order covert action programs, but the White House is now requiring the CIA to fully brief the DNI on all covert action programs and will seek from the DNI regular assessments of whether any program fits in with the nation’s intelligence strategy, which is set by Blair. Since Blair briefs Congress more often than Panetta does, it makes sense for Blair to know as much about covert action programs as CIA briefers would.

That might sound like bureaucratic box-checking. But for years, the DNI’s office — long before Blair took over — has quietly absorbed many intelligence analysts who look at long-term geopolitical questions, rather than analyzing the crises of the moment. Since the big question with the drone strikes is whether they ultimately enrage Pashtun Pakistanis by the civilian casualties they create — and therefore raise the question of whether the strikes are counterproductive — it’s not inconceivable that Blair’s office would take a more skeptical view of the program’s value than the CIA does.

But that’s not the only big piece of news Ambinder uncovers. Check this out:

The conflict became public earlier this year, after the CIA protested when the Director of National Intelligence appointed a senior National Security Agency representative to be the DNI’s representative in Kurdistan. Traditionally, the CIA’s chief of station had served as the foreign nation’s principal intelligence representative. But the NSA has a bigger footprint in Kurdistan, and the DNI decided that he would be better served by appointing an NSA officer to be his representative.

The conflict is not new. But the fact that it took place over Iraqi Kurdistan most definitely is. And the additional fact that Kurdistan is home to a National Security Agency presence is big big news. I would bet a lot of money that such a presence is geared toward some serious spying on nearby Iran.