The handover of no-fly zone operations to NATO control is not going to mean a significant change to U.S. involvement in strikes on ground targets:

A NATO decision to take charge of a no-fly zone over Libya does not include conducting air strikes against Muammar Gaddafi’s ground forces, a mission that will remain in U.S. hands until a new command deal is reached, Vice Admiral Bill Gortney said on Friday.

If the Libyan air force has now been destroyed, handing over the no-fly zone to NATO control isn’t terribly meaningful. Spencer Ackerman has more in his report:

Gortney said he expected the “coming days” to bring clarity — as it’s now being reported that NATO is set to take on the whole spectrum of the Libya war, down to appointing a Canadian general, Charles Bouchard, to run it. Apparently that’s not been settled yet. Gortney showed reporters charts listing “TBD” — to be determined — for when NATO will take control of the no-fly and if it’ll take control of the no-drive.

Here is another detail from The New York Times story from this morning:

Effectively, that means that planes from NATO countries will fly missions over Libya with little fear of being shot down since Tomahawk missiles, most of them American, largely destroyed Colonel Qaddafi’s air defenses and air force last weekend.

But NATO and American officials said NATO had balked at assuming responsibility, at least for now, of what military officials call the “no-drive zone,” which would entail bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s ground forces, tanks and artillery that are massing outside crucial Libyan cities, and doing so without inflicting casualties on civilians.

Late Thursday night a senior Obama administration official insisted that NATO had agreed to assume responsibility for the no-fly and “no-drive” zones but said the details remained to be worked out. The official’s statements appeared to contradict those of the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said in Brussels earlier Thursday that NATO was still considering whether to take on “broader responsibility” for the war.

As the story explains, the obstacles to this are Germany and Turkey, which do not accept that attacks on Gaddafi’s ground forces are authorized by UNSCR 1973. German abstention on the resolution and Turkish opposition to military action from the beginning seem likely to become enduring headaches for the coalition so long as the U.S. insists on making the Libyan war a NATO operation. One can see why Sarkozy has been eager to minimize the NATO role in all of this, because he sees that involving NATO will impose limits on how the war against Libya can be waged. In meantime, despite what some might have hoped, the U.S. will be left shouldering the burden for most of the attacks on Gaddafi’s forces.