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The letter also confirms for the first time that the United States killed four American citizens in drone strikes since President Obama took office in 2009.

But the completion of the Obama administration’s codification of how it conducts targeted killings and other counterterrorism policies — or the “playbook” as it has been called — has much further reaching implications for future U.S. policy. Begun as a project of then-White House Counterterrorism Director John Brennan, and accelerated due to fears of Obama not serving a second term, the playbook was meant to put into writing many of the ad hoc processes the administration had developed to facilitate the targeted killing of suspected terrorists.

A Washington Post article on Brennan from 2012 revealed that the playbook is meant to “cover the selection and approval of targets from the ‘disposition matrix,’ the designation of who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted, and the legal authorities the administration thinks sanction its actions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.” The “disposition matrix” is the benign-sounding name for the process used to approve targets for strikes. Far from being limited to drones, these strikes include the use of missiles fired from Naval warships and manned aircraft, and special operations forces.

According to Holder’s letter to Congressional leaders, the playbook has been completed, though it won’t be available to the public anytime soon:

This week the President approved and relevant congressional committees will be notified and briefed on a document that institutionalizes the Administration’s exacting standards and processes for reviewing and approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities; these standards and processes are already in place or are to be transitioned into place. While that document remains classified, it makes clear that a cornerstone of the Administration’s policy is one of the principles I noted in my speech at Northwester: that lethal force should not be used when it is feasible to capture a terrorist suspect.

Among the changes rumored to be put into place in the playbook is the shifting of authority for agencies to use drones in carrying out lethal strikes. Reports indicate that while the CIA will retain control of the drone program in Pakistan, other theaters will see drones placed under the sole purview of the Department of Defense.

Despite the increased attention they’ve received, the number of drone strikes has reportedly dropped in recent years. President Obama is due to deliver a speech on Thursday at the National Defense University laying out his vision for how counterterrorism goals will be pursued in the second term, including the use of drones and the closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

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The International Crisis Group (ICG) on Tuesday published a new report “Drones: Myths And Reality In Pakistan,” examining the ongoing war against militant groups located in Pakistan. The report calls on both the United States and Pakistan to come clean about the ongoing use of drones against suspected terrorists, saying that more than strikes are needed to end Pakistan’s ongoing problem with militants.

Since 2004, according to the ICG, at least 350 U.S. drone strikes have taken place on Pakistani soil, within the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). Complicating operations against militant groups based in the area, the vast majority of Pakistan’s laws simply do not apply to the FATA, with the region instead following its own set of tribal laws and codes. Given the lack of control Islamabad exerts, the FATA has long been a haven for armed groups, including those who strike across the border in Afghanistan, including Mullah Omar’s Taliban and the Haqqani Network, as well as the Pakistani Taliban, which strikes against Pakistan itself.

One of the major issues ICG raises regarding drone strikes in the area is the lack of firm intelligence about precisely who is being targeted. In place of firm data, the U.S. often utilizes what are known as “signature strikes” or “personality strikes.” Groups of men between 16-55 who meet a certain profile are often considered legitimate targets, based on “pattern of life” data including where they’ve traveled while under surveillance and whether or not they were in the vicinity of known targets when the strike occurred.

As the report details, Pakistan and U.S. are locked in delicate dance over the actual use of drones within Pakistan, each concealing the full truth from the public. The U.S. still won’t officially confirm that the CIA-run targeted killing program within Pakistan even exists. The IGC says Pakistan often displays behavior that “borders on the schizophrenic” when it comes to the drone program. The Pakistani government often claims to have no forewarning about the use of drones and publicly denounces many of the strikes, even with ample evidence that they provide permission for the operations to occur, especially when carried out against its enemies.

ICG suggests both Washington and Islamabad become more transparent about the relationship the two have on drone strikes, while shifting their policies away from relying solely on military options, and instead taking a more comprehensive approach to combating militancy:

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Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) introduced the Oversight of Sensitive Military Operations Act, which requires the Secretary of Defense to notify the House and Senate Armed Services committees, and their subcommittees, of kill or capture operations (or a “sensitive military operation”) aimed at suspected al-Qaeda militants after the operation in question has taken place.

The bill defines a “sensitive military operation” as “a lethal operation or capture operation conducted by the armed forces outside the United States” and outside of Afghanistan, as the measure assumes that military operations there fall under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Thornberry clarified to Breaking Defense that his measure does not limit oversight “to any part of the military or to any particular technology,” including the use of drones.

Currently, the bill has mostly Republican co-sponsors but the Texas Republican said that’s likely due to lobbying logistics. It “is solely a function of how fast the emails got around,” he said, adding that now that he has the support from House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) and Rep. James Langevin (D-RI), a subcommittee ranking member, more Democrats will likely sign on. “The numbers don’t reflect the opinion about it,” Thornberry said.

He also said that he is not intending to hamstring the military. “Congress will never be in position, nor should it be, to make operational decisions — ‘OK, you should capture that person, you should kill that person’ — that’s not our role,” he said. “If it’s a larger scale military conflict,” Thornberry added, “we understand the military can’t come running over to us over every few seconds.”

But, he said, his bill would give Members of Congress “the opportunity to complain about it if we don’t think that it’s justified, or if we believe that some operations are outside the bounds or even [just] a bad idea….Then we have opportunities to restrict funding or to change the authorization or to have a closed hearing on the matter. If [we] have the information, then Congress has a number of tools to use.”

Harold Koh, the former top State Department in the Obama administration, recently criticized the lack of transparency in the White House’s targeted killing program — one that has included a ramped up use of drones throughout the last four years. “It has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies,” he said last week, adding that it is “fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control.”

Another former Obama administration official, former DOD counsel Jeh Johnson, similarly criticized the secrecy surrounding Obama’s counterterrorism polices. “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” he said.

Thornberry told Breaking Defense that this is what his bill is trying to address. “Under this framework, it lets Congress push back,” he said.

The State Department’s former top lawyer on Tuesday offered an at times scathing critique of the Obama adminsitration’s lack of transparency related to the use of drones and other tools in waging a campaign of targeted killingn against alleged al-Qaeda operatives.

Harold Koh, who served in the role of State Department General Counsel throughout President Obama’s first term, delivered a speech at Oxford University titled “How to End the Forever War?” Given the title, Koh’s talk covered a multitude of legal questions surrounding the U.S. government’s ongoing fight against terrorism. Koh said he believed that the Obama administration had gotten off to a good start in its pursuit of terrorists, pointing to the President’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech and his Executive Orders on transparency.

“But since then, to be candid, this Administration has not done enough to be transparent about legal standards and the decisionmaking process that it has been applying,” Koh said, singling out the drone policy as an example of how the lack of transparency from the White House and other parts of the Executive Branch have alienated the American people:

KOH: It has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies. Because the Administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone program, fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control.

The Administration must take responsibility for this failure, because its persistent and counterproductive lack of transparency has led to the release of necessary pieces of its public legal defense too little and too late.

Koh made certain not to cast drones themselves as “inherently evil” and to stress that he was not opposed to their use within the laws of war. But he insisted that Obama follow through on his promises and “make public and transparent its legal standards and institutional processes for targeting and drone strikes.” The administration should also, according to Koh, explain why and when Americans can be targeted under the law, clarify how it counts civilian casualties from drone strikes, and release records on those instances where strikes were carried out against a target of questionable value.

Koh isn’t the first former Obama administration official to offer criticism of the targeted killing program. Former Department of Defense counsel Jeh Johnson in March told an audience at Fordham University, “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.” Koh also echoed Johnson’s own engagement at Oxford in declaring that the war against Al Qaeda can’t go on forever.

Koh’s statements on the need for more transparancy closely mirror those of CAP Chair John Podesta, as published in a March op-ed. In that piece, Podesta called on President Obama to “[r]elease the legal guidance governing your targeted killing programs, including the justifications for targeting Americans, and take charge of the informed, free and vigorous debate that undoubtedly will follow.”

Tuesday morning, a consortium of human rights organizations launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a joint project to enact an international treaty banning the use of “fully autonomous robots” — machines that kill without direct human oversight — in combat. The launch highlights a net of thorny ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of these weapons, ones that have yet to be fully resolved by the US government or international community.

The campaign to ban robot soldiers began in response to rapid advancements in military robotics in roughly the past decade and a half, developments that most famously produced the armed Predator and Reaper drones in common use by U.S. armed personnel today. In 2009, several concerned researchers founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), the first NGO dedicated to pushing an international treaty that (among other things) would ban autonomous weapons. Debate over the topic heated up in late 2012, when Human Rights Watch released much-debated report arguing that autonomous weapons were in-principle inconsistent with international humanitarian law.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots joins ICRAC and HRW with 20 other like-minded organizations, including Amnesty International and Code Pink, in a renewed effort to codify a ban on autonomous weapons. There is no currently existing fully autonomous weapons platform and the U.S. Department of Defense, which supervises what is by far the most robotically advanced military in the world, has a self-imposed moratorium on deploying weapons capable of autonomously using lethal force. However, the Campaign’s member groups are worried that technological advancement will make the deployment of such weapons inevitable without a treaty ban:

Over the past decade, the expanded use of unmanned armed vehicles or drones has dramatically changed warfare, bringing new humanitarian and legal challenges. Now rapid advances in technology are permitting the United States and other nations with high-tech militaries, including China, Israel, Russia, and the United Kingdom, to move toward systems that would give full combat autonomy to machines…”We cannot afford to sleepwalk into an acceptance of these weapons. New military technologies tend to be put in action before the wider society can assess the implications, but public debate on such a change to warfare is crucial,” said Thomas Nash, Director of Article 36. “A pre-emptive ban on lethal autonomous robots is both necessary and achievable, but only if action is taken now.”

These efforts are obviously in their infancy, and militaries have some pretty obvious reasons to want autonomous weapons, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see a treaty banning robot soldiers anytime soon. Moreover, it’s not even clear if it’d be a good thing: lawyers and ethicists are sharply divided as to whether autonomous weapons would be illegal, unimportant, or potentially even an improvement over human soldiers.

Critics of autonomous weapons argue that they’re incapable of complying with critical provisions in international humanitarian law aimed at protecting civilians. That Human Rights Watch report concludes that no algorithm or artificial intelligence could sufficiently distinguish, for example, between civilians and insurgents in an Afghanistan-style counterinsurgency, meaning that no army employing autonomous weapons could satisfy the legal principle of “distinction” (that all armies must, over the course of fighting, identify civilian populations and military targets and treat the two differently). Critics also believe that autonomous weapons would have difficulty making the kinds of contextual moral judgments necessary to comply with the principle of proportionality, the idea that any unintentional cost to civilian life must be proportionate to the military benefits, or “military necessity,” the legal principle requiring armies to hold off on attacks (even on military targets) that aren’t necessary for winning.

Opponents of a treaty ban, by contrast, argue that such criticisms are missing the point. All weapons, they hold, can be used illegally — obviously, armies using machetes alone can violate the principles of distinction, proportionality, or military necessity. Indeed, they might be more likely to: while humans are driven to massacre by anger or sadism, a properly programmed robot will never lash out (Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology is working on just this sort of programming). It’s much smarter, they argue, to attempt to identify the specific circumstances under which autonomous weapons could be used lawfully or unlawfully rather than tilt after the windmill of an international treaty.

While some of these quandaries depend on technical assessments — How well can we program robots? How good are their sensors? — others are more conceptual. One such challenge comes from Monash University Professor Robert Sparrow, who argues that robots create problems of moral responsibility for atrocities that are in principle impossible to resolve. Sparrow argues that, the more autonomous a combat machine is, the less predictable its behavior in combat zones becomes, and hence the less fair it is to hold either its programmer or commanding officer responsible for any atrocities it commits. But if it’s wrong to hold anyone responsible for atrocities, then the entire system of international law and the morality of war — which depends on being able to hold particular individuals responsible for war crimes — falls apart.

Others, like Jeffrey S. Thurnher and Michael Schmitt, counter that it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a robot could commit a war crime without the person who ordered it into combat knowing that atrocity was a possible outcome of their order, suggesting that a person could always be responsible for the machine’s actions.

These issues have yet to be resolved as a matter of law, philosophy, or even robotics. Yet one thing is clear: the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots won’t end the end of debate about the use of robots in war. If anything, it’ll escalate it.