WASHINGTON — The White House is considering giving the Pentagon more independent authority to conduct counterterrorism raids as part of an effort to accelerate the fight against the Islamic State and other militant organizations, administration officials said on Thursday.
Such a step would allow military commanders to move more swiftly against terrorism suspects, streamlining a decision-making process that often dragged on under the Obama administration, frustrating Pentagon officials.
The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, called the proposal “a philosophy more than a change in policy.” He said that “the protocol is not changing in terms of what has to be signed off,” but added that Mr. Trump believed “these are the experts in the field.”
Critics say that giving the military more authority could lead to more problematic outcomes like the Special Operations raid in January in Yemen, which left a member of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 dead, as well as about two dozen civilians.
WASHINGTON — The White House is considering giving the Pentagon more independent authority to conduct counterterrorism raids as part of an effort to accelerate the fight against the Islamic State and other militant organizations, administration officials said on Thursday.
Such a step would allow military commanders to move more swiftly against terrorism suspects, streamlining a decision-making process that often dragged on under the Obama administration, frustrating Pentagon officials.
The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, called the proposal “a philosophy more than a change in policy.” He said that “the protocol is not changing in terms of what has to be signed off,” but added that Mr. Trump believed “these are the experts in the field.”
Critics say that giving the military more authority could lead to more problematic outcomes like the Special Operations raid in January in Yemen, which left a member of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 dead, as well as about two dozen civilians.
It could also leave the Pentagon to take the blame when things go wrong. But one Defense Department official pointed to comments by President Trump about the Yemen raid as a sign that military commanders would be held responsible for botched operations whether the president signed off on them or not.
Mr. Trump and Defense Department officials have maintained that the January raid — the first such operation approved by the new president — was successful, saying that valuable intelligence was collected. Military officials have been advocating an increase in raids in Yemen in particular.
On Thursday, the United States resumed its air attacks on targets in Yemen, conducting strikes against several suspected Qaeda sites across the south-central part of the country.
The coordinated series of attacks occurred in three Yemeni provinces — Abyan, Shabwa and Baydha — that have been linked to terrorist activity, according to the Pentagon. The strikes were conducted against targets that had been developed before the January raid, a senior official said.
On Monday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis presented the White House, under Mr. Trump’s directive, with a series of options for accelerating the fight against the Islamic State. Pentagon officials say that while much of the proposal would continue what the United States was doing under President Barack Obama, Mr. Mattis and senior military commanders want to target not just the Islamic State, but also Al Qaeda and other extremist organizations in the Middle East.
The proposal on counterterrorism raids is the latest step in Mr. Trump’s increased reliance on military commanders to run American national security policy. Mr. Trump has become increasingly reliant on Mr. Mattis, a retired Marine general, upon whom he consistently lavishes praise. He has also appointed Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser, to replace a retired general, Michael T. Flynn. His Homeland Security secretary is yet another retired general, John F. Kelly.
“We’re at a point now in our nation where general officers have an outsize role in the direction of the country,” said Andrew Exum, a retired Army Ranger and a Defense Department official in the Obama administration.
Still, Mr. Trump has already shown himself willing to blame the generals when things go wrong. On Tuesday, he told Fox News that the Jan. 29 Yemen mission that led to the death of the Navy SEAL team member, Senior Chief Petty Officer William Owens, known as Ryan, “was a mission that was started before I got here.” He added that “my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe, and they lost Ryan.”
Jon B. Alterman, the director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the administration faced a delicate calculation over how much authority to cede to the generals.
“One extreme,” he said, is “giving 20-somethings in the White House veto power over generals in the field.” That should be avoided, he said. “At the same time,” he added, “if you’re going to target and kill someone, there needs to be some kind of process to ensure that it serves a strategic purpose. We shouldn’t be comfortable with the other extreme, essentially handing out death sentences without much deliberation.”
Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the strikes on Thursday in Yemen, which numbered more than 20, were “conducted in partnership with the government of Yemen and were coordinated” with President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Captain Davis said the attacks had targeted Qaeda militants, equipment and infrastructure.
After the January raid, Mr. Hadi’s government had withdrawn permission for the United States to conduct Special Operations ground missions, a decision prompted by anger at the civilian casualties incurred in the raid.
Computers and cellphones seized during that raid offered clues about attacks that Al Qaeda might be planning, including insights into new types of hidden explosives that the group is making and new training tactics, American officials said.
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But it is still unclear how much the information advances the military’s knowledge of the plans of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, and some intelligence and congressional officials have questioned how significant the information analyzed so far really is.
“There are obvious contradictions about the relative value of intelligence,” said Senator Kamala D. Harris, a California Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who added in an interview this week that she would be seeking more explanations from intelligence officials.
According to a Yemeni military official, the airstrikes on Thursday in the Abyan mountains began around 3:30 a.m. local time.
The local news media reported that at least three people suspected of being Qaeda members were killed in Shabwa Province. Residents near the scene in the Saeid region said an airstrike had destroyed a house used by Qaeda operatives.
The death of Chief Owens came after a chain of miscues and misjudgments that plunged the elite forces into a ferocious 50-minute firefight with Qaeda militants in a mountainous village in central Yemen. Three other Americans were wounded, and a $75 million aircraft was deliberately destroyed.
A month later, the mission remains under intense scrutiny, with questions unabated over the casualties, how Mr. Trump and his aides approved the raid over a dinner meeting at the White House five days into his presidency, and the value of the information collected from the raid.
“It is reasonable for the White House to determine which decisions they need to be part of and which ones they are comfortable deferring to the Pentagon,” said Derek Chollet, an assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration. “But a president has to think very carefully about this, because he may choose to delegate authority, but he cannot absolve himself of responsibility.”
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