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Trump - Rules of Engagement (ROE)

In the fight against ISIS in Mosul, the United States adjusted its rules of engagement (ROE). Under the December 2016 Obama directive there had been some "relatively minor adjustments" that decentralized part of the process of approving fire missions as the campaign moved from a largely defensive campaign to an offensive one. Under an additional directive issued by Trump in February 2017, US advisers embedded at the brigade level were able to directly deliver support such as airstrikes and artillery fire to the units they're partnered with. Previously, such support would have gone through a whole a strike cell bureaucracy and through Baghdad.

Trump hadn't eliminated Obama's troop number limits. Thus, the caps of 503 for Syria and 5,262 for Iraq remained. But the military is ignoring them with White House approval by using an existing loophole to categorize deployments as temporary. On 31 March 2017 the Pentagon said that officially there are 5,262 U.S. troops in Iraq, though officials privately acknowledged a couple thousand more there.

On the campaign trail in late 2015, Donald Trump pledged to "bomb the shit" out of ISIS if he became president. "The other thing with terrorists," then-candidate Donald Trump said on "Fox and Friends" in December 2015, "is that you have to take out their families."

In December 2016, when the Army issued its latest Rules of War Manual, military leaders planning operations against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria may authorize strikes where up to 10 civilians may be killed, if it is deemed necessary in order to get a critical military target.

The collateral damage estimation (CDE) included a threshold of predicted civilian deaths called the Non-Combatant cutoff value or NCV. his number is the threshold of predicted deaths where, in order to get permission for the strike, the targeteer has to prove that the military utility is so significant as to make those predicted deaths acceptable.

The procedure for every military action involves a precise evaluation of the number of civilian deaths likely to result from a given military action. According to the LA Times: "The U.S. military predicts how many people will die in its airstrikes by surveilling and estimating the population within a proposed blast radius. It also sets a limit on the number of innocent people each command is authorized to kill incidentally. This limit, called the Non-Combatant Cutoff Value, or NCV, is perhaps our starkest rule of engagement, and it varies region-by-region for political reasons."

Obama-era rules required "near-certainty" that no civilians will be killed in airstrikes. Under Trump, there was a transfer of risk from military forces onto civilians. Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan had been designated "areas of active hostility," but drone strikes in other areas such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan required high-level approval under Obama-era doctrine.

In March 2017 Trump lowered the threshold on acceptable civilian casualties from a "near certainty" of no such deaths to "reasonable certainty". In March 2017 Trump gave the US military more authority to conduct offensive airstrikes on al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia.

On 31 March 2017 Sarah Sewall, undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights during the Obama administration, said that Trump had "moved the Somalia engagement of U.S. forces from the category of more targeted uses of force to that of general hostilities.... The former category required that only those who were a direct threat to Americans could be targeted. Now they can be targeted if they're members of an organization that's an associated force with the perpetrators of 9/11.... the former standard of using the use of targeting according to a near certainty of not killing civilians has now been relaxed.... the laws of war still apply, so uses of force still have to be proportional and they still have to be discriminate."

On 10 September 2019 Donald Trump forced out John Bolton as his national security adviser. The president said they had strong disagreements on several policy issues. Trump tweeted that he told Bolton his "services were no longer needed" at the White House.

John Bolton took over the role of national security adviser in April 2018. He was a surprise pick at the time, with a world view seemingly ill-fit to the president's isolationist "America First" pronouncements. Trump had sometimes joked about Bolton's image as a warmonger, reportedly saying in one Oval Office meeting that "John has never seen a war he doesn't like". Prior to becoming Trump's national security adviser, Bolton was a Fox News commentator. He served as the US ambassador to the UN from August 2005 to December 2006 and undersecretary of state from 2001 to 2005. Bolton also served under the administrations of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.

Bolton had opposed a recent State Department plan to sign an Afghan peace deal with the Taliban, believing the group's leaders could not be trusted. That opposition pinned Bolton against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Individuals familiar with his view said Bolton believed the US could draw down to about 8,600 troops in Afghanistan and maintain a counterterrorism effort without signing a peace deal with the Taliban.

Bolton had opposed a recent State Department plan to sign an Afghan peace deal with the Taliban, believing the group's leaders could not be trusted. That opposition pinned Bolton against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Individuals familiar with his view said Bolton believed the US could draw down to about 8,600 troops in Afghanistan and maintain a counterterrorism effort without signing a peace deal with the Taliban.

North Korea was another issue upon which Bolton and Trump disagreed. US officials have said it was Bolton who was responsible for the collapse of a summit in February between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi by recommending the presentation a list of hardline demands that Kim rejected. Even before taking over as national security adviser, Bolton said that he thought talking to the North Korean leadership would be fruitless.

Despite Trump's efforts to improve relations with Russia, Bolton remained a harsh critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bolton was also against Trump's insistence that Moscow be allowed to rejoin the G7. Bolton was an ardent opponent of arms control treaties with Russia. He was instrumental in Trump's decision to withdraw last month from a 1987 accord that banned intermediate-range missiles because of what Washington charged was Moscow's deployment of prohibited nuclear-capable cruise missiles, an allegation Russia denied. Bolton was also outspoken about Russian meddling in the US elections.

"Attempting to undermine America's constitution is far more than just a quotidian covert operation. It is, in fact, a casus belli, a true act of war, and one Washington will never tolerate," Bolton told graduates at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School of National Security in Washington. "We should respond in cyberspace and elsewhere. I don't think the response should be proportionate. I think it should be very disproportionate. Because deterrence works when you tell your adversary that they will experience enormous cost when they impose costs on you. That causes them to say we're not even going to think about it," Bolton said about a possible response to Russia's meddling.

Bolton advocated against Trump's decision last year to pull US troops out of Syria. He masterminded a quiet campaign inside the administration and with allies abroad to convince Trump to keep US forces in Syria to counter the remnants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS).

Bolton advocated for hardline measures on Venezuela. The US backs opposition leader Juan Guaido, who invoked the constitution earlier this year and declared himself interim president, calling President Nicolas Maduro's 2018 reelection "illegitimate". Maduro accuses Guaido and the US of attempting a coup. In January, Bolton held a notepad with a handwritten line that read, "5,000 troops to Colombia". According to the Miami Herald, White House officials said that the president was frustrated that Maduro had not stepped down as Bolton had predicted. The Herald added, however, that officials warned that US policy towards Venezuela was not likely to drastically change with Bolton out of the picture.