A good clearing house for the latest in awful is here. Some call-outs from various quoted pieces:

The United States' conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

"We can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us," a senior administration official said. "It's a necessary part of what we do... We're not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, 'We love America.' "

The article also notes that the CIA is seeking to expand its own fleet of armed drones, a development which I find kind of odd and potentially troubling. Do we really want an intelligence agency to have access to its own fleet of armed drones? Shouldn't that kind of thing be consolidated with the military, where weapons like this ordinary belong, with the CIA providing logistical and intelligence support on an as-needed basis? If nothing else, a development like this suggests that the CIA is going to continue its transformation from an agency primarily dedicated to the gathering of intelligence to a paramilitary organization

What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight.

You can't bomb terror out of existence, you can't capture it on the battlefield, and you can't negotiate peace with it. On some level, fighting a "War On Terror" makes as much sense as calling World War One a "War On Tanks." By characterizing the conflict in this way, though, our government has essentially made it inevitable that we would be fighting a never-ending war that would continue to provide us with excuses to intervene throughout the world, either with ground troops or drone strikes. That's because you can never really say that you've defeated "terror."

Obama did not run for president to preside over the codification of a global war fought in secret. But that's his legacy.