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Still, Obama’s willingness to back the drone program represented an early inflection point in his war on terror. Over time, the attacks grew—far beyond anything that had been envisioned by the Bush administration. When Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency. By his third year in office, Obama had approved the killings of twice as many suspected terrorists as had ever been imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. “We’re killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them,” the head of the CIA’s counterterrorism division boasted to The Washington Post in 2011.

THE TAKE-OUT TEAM (From left) The Confidant: Brennan, The Decider: Obama, and The Strategist: Cartwright (From left: Mark Wilson / Getty Images; Brendan Smialowski / AFP-Getty Images; Mandel Ngan / AFP-Getty Images-Newscom)

The president had come a long way in a short time. Schooled as a constitutional lawyer, he had had to adjust quickly to the hardest part of the job: deciding whom to kill, when to kill them, and when it makes sense to put Americans in harm’s way. His instincts tilted toward justice and protecting the innocent, but he also knew that war is a messy business no matter how carefully it is conducted. He saw the drones as a particularly useful tool in a global conflict, but he was also mindful of the possibility of blowback.

In this overheated election season, Obama’s campaign is painting a portrait of a steely commander who pursues the enemy without flinching. But the truth is more complex, and in many ways, more reassuring. The president is not a robotic killing machine. The choices he faces are brutally difficult, and he has struggled with them—sometimes turning them over in his mind again and again. The people around him have also battled and disagreed. They’ve invoked the safety of America on the one hand and the righteousness of what America stands for on the other.

Obama’s discomfort with being “jam-med” into broad signature-style attacks extended to the military, which was conducting its own counterterror campaigns. Unlike the CIA, when the military engaged in kill missions outside of conventional battlefields—in places like Yemen or Somalia—it needed presidential approval for each individual attack. And the military was more prone to broaden its targets.

In March 2009, most of the top generals were itching to take the war deep into Somalia. This desperately poor, chaotic country was home to Al-Shabab, then a loose affiliate of al Qaeda. The military saw Somalia as a time bomb, and wanted to act before it was too late.

At a Situation Room meeting, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, briefed the president and his national security advisers on a “kinetic opportunity” in southern Somalia, Al-Shabab’s stronghold. There was intelligence that a high-level operative associated with the group would be attending a “graduation ceremony” at an Al-Shabab training area. But the military couldn’t pinpoint his precise location at any given time. So why not just take the whole camp out? The Pentagon had even prepared a “strike package” that could devastate an entire series of training areas. Obama was skeptical, but listened without revealing his doubts. At the end of Mullen’s presentation, Obama said, “OK, let’s go around the table.”

In effect Obama was inviting dissent with Admiral Mullen. None of the principals raised objections. But then Obama pointed to one of the uniformed men sitting just behind Mullen, against the wall: James “Hoss” Cartwright, the four-star Marine general and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Obama knew Cartwright, and valued his candor. “Mr. President, generally the wars we’ve been prosecuting have had these rules,” Cartwright said in a low-key, Midwestern manner. An enemy “did something to us, we went in and did something back—and then we had a moral obligation to put back together whatever we broke. In these places where they have not attacked us, we are looking for a person, not a country.”

Cartwright was now beginning to veer off from Mullen, his superior officer. Then he laid it on the line: “If there is a person in the camp who is a clear threat to the United States we should go after him. But carpet bombing a country is a really bad precedent.” Some of the other military men began to shift in their chairs. “I ask you to consider: where are we taking this activity? Because the logical next thing after carpet bombing is that we go there and open up a new front.”

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