If the Obama administration decides to give the U.S. military control of the CIA's drone effort, the institutional changes to the controversial global drone strikes will be minor. That's because the important leverage points over the drones -- and the global, targeted-killing program they support -- are political, not institutional.

Daniel Klaidman at The Daily Beast reports that President Barack Obama is nearing a decision to divest the CIA of its lethal drone fleet. According to Klaidman, the CIA will "remain involved in lethal targeting," but uniformed personnel will pull the trigger from now on. "It looks like the White House may now be preparing to launch a campaign to counter the growing perception -- with elites if not the majority of the public -- that Obama is running a secretive and legally dubious killing machine," Klaidman writes.

Except he'll still be running one. The CIA conducts armed drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, among other places. The U.S. military conducts armed drone strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, and has extensive airbases and support networks for drone strikes in east Africa and now in Niger. Military launchpads are often -- but not always -- launchpads for the CIA's drones, too. And the CIA sometimes borrows the Air Force's drone fleet. In short, the military infrastructure for the drone strikes is robust and global.

In the near future, those drone launchpads will move out to sea. A newly reconfigured Navy ship, the USS Ponce, is the first of a new kind of floating staging ground for commandos and the armed robots they'll operate. Later in the decade, the Navy plans to launch an armed, stealthy drone from an aircraft carrier.

There's an argument that giving the military control over the drones will lead to greater transparency around them. Maybe, but not necessarily.

The congressional reporting requirements for so-called Title 50 programs (stuff CIA does, to be reductive) are more specific than those for Title 10 (stuff the military does, to be reductive). But the armed services committees tend to have unquestioned and broader oversight functions than the intelligence committees enjoy, not to mention better relationships with the committees: Witness the recent anger in the Senate intelligence committee that the CIA lied to it about its torture programs. The military is more likely than the CIA to openly testify about future drone operations, allow knowledgeable congressional staff into closed-door operational briefings and allow members of Congress to take tours of drone airbases.

But that's not to say that there will necessarily be more transparency of the military's drone programs. Much depends on congressional prerogative, rather than institutional requirements. A summary offered by a former Special Operations Command lawyer last year (.pdf), piggybacking off one from a former CIA lawyer, was: "If the activity is defined as a military activity ('Title 10') there is no requirement to notify Congress, while intelligence community activities ('Title 50') require presidential findings and notice to Congress." (For a good overview of how how the military can compartmentalize and limit access to information on its activities, including to Congress, read this blog post from Robert Caruso.) "Moving lethal drone operations exclusively to DOD might bring benefits. But DOD's lethal operations are no less secretive than the CIA's, and congressional oversight of DOD ops is significantly weaker," former Justice Department lawyer Jack Goldsmith tells Klaidman. Mieke Eoyang, a former House intelligence and armed services committee staffer, tells Danger Room that oversight "depends on the the level of interest of the committee chairman on the Title 10 [military] side. It depends on how detailed he wants to get, down in the weeds."

Nor does the change to military drone control restrict the relevant legal authorizations in place. The Obama administration relies on an expansive interpretation of a 2001 congressional authorization to run its global targeted-killing program. If that authorization constrains the military to the "hot" battlefield of Afghanistan, someone forgot to tell the Joint Special Operations Command to get out of Yemen.

What matters more than which bureaucratic entity operates the drones is what the politicians ostensibly in charge of those bureaucracies want to do with them. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)'s 13-hour filibuster earlier this month vented congressional dissatisfaction with the secrecy, scope and intensity of the global targeted-killing program. It remains to be seen if Paul and his colleagues wish to trim the edges of that lethal program or constrain it more substantially. Congress has been more bellicose than the Obama administration.

Then there's Obama. His rhetoric centers on drawing down the wars; his record is about intensifying and institutionalizing the targeted-killing campaign. His intelligence apparatus points to a diminished al-Qaida, yet there is no such diminution of the security apparatus established to bring about that action. It might be that putting the military in charge of the drone strikes is an early and tentative step in that direction. But it will take a decision on Obama's part that the war on terrorism is nearing an end to make the shift more than a bureaucratic one.