On September 14, 2001, three days after the attacks on New York and Washington, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. The vote was 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House. The resolution authorized the President to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the September 11 attacks.
That resolution is still in effect.
In the twenty-five years since, it has been used to justify military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Mali, Niger, Kenya, Djibouti, and the Philippines, against organizations that did not exist on September 11, 2001, in countries that had no connection to the September 11 attacks, by three presidents of both parties who interpreted a three-paragraph document as an open-ended global war authority that the Congress that passed it almost certainly did not intend.
There has been no declaration of war. There has been no new authorization that names the current enemies and the current theaters. There has been no vote in which the American people, through their representatives, formally decided that the country was at war and with whom.
The Constitution requires one. Congress has not provided it since December 8, 1941.
What the Constitution Says and What It Means
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war. This was not an accident or a minor procedural detail. It was one of the most deliberate structural choices in the entire document, and it was extensively debated.
The founders understood that the power to initiate war was the most consequential power a government could exercise. It committed the nation’s treasure, its young men, and its moral standing to a cause that might be just or unjust, necessary or manufactured, temporary or generational. They did not want that power in the hands of a single executive who could be reckless, ambitious, or simply wrong.
So they split the war power. The President commanded the army once war was underway. Congress decided whether there would be a war at all. The President could respond to sudden attack, defend the country from immediate assault, but the decision to initiate or escalate military conflict required a formal act of the legislature representing the people who would fight and pay for it.
The Anti-Federalists thought even this division insufficient. Several writers warned specifically about the executive’s war-making tendencies, that any president with military command authority would find reasons to use it, that emergencies (real or manufactured) would be the pretext, and that once military operations began, the political pressure to continue them would be nearly irresistible. They wanted tighter constraints, not looser ones.
Cato, believed to be New York Governor George Clinton, warned that the executive as designed was too close to a monarch, with too much authority over foreign affairs and military command. He wrote that the history of republics showed that executive war power, once exercised, tended to expand rather than contract, that the president who began as commander of a limited defensive force would, over time, become the initiator of conflicts that Congress merely ratified after the fact.
He was describing the 2001 AUMF in 1787.
How the Abdication Happened
The formal declaration of war has five entries in American history: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. After 1941, Congress stopped declaring war. It did not stop authorizing military force, it simply found a different mechanism that kept its hands cleaner.
The Korean War was conducted under a United Nations resolution and presidential authority as “police action.” No declaration. The Vietnam War was authorized by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964, passed after an attack on U.S. ships that subsequent investigation showed was partially fabricated and partially misreported. No declaration. The two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, all conducted under authorizations for the use of military force that gave the president broad authority without the constitutional weight of a formal declaration.
In 1973, after Vietnam demonstrated the consequences of undeclared wars, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon’s veto. It required the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing armed forces into hostilities, and to withdraw those forces within 60 days unless Congress authorized their continued presence.
Every president since has argued that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional as applied to the commander-in-chief. Every president has complied with the notification requirement while ignoring the withdrawal requirement when it was inconvenient. No president has withdrawn forces under the 60-day clock. No Congress has successfully enforced it.
The resolution that was supposed to restore the constitutional balance has been, for fifty years, a reporting requirement that the executive branch treats as courtesy notice.
What Undeclared War Costs
The cost of the abdication is not primarily legal or constitutional, though it is those things. It is human and financial and strategic.
The human cost: approximately 7,000 American service members killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Over 50,000 wounded. Hundreds of thousands of veterans with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, and the compound consequences of multiple deployments to conflicts that had no defined endpoint because no one had formally defined what winning meant or what the mission was. When Congress declares war, it implicitly commits to defining the terms of victory and the conditions for the declaration’s end. When it issues an open-ended authorization, there are no such terms, and the war can continue indefinitely because there is no constitutional mechanism that ends it.
The financial cost: approximately $8 trillion in direct and indirect costs for the post-9/11 wars, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University. This money was not appropriated through the normal budget process. It was borrowed, adding to the national debt that every American carries, financed through deficit spending that produced the inflationary pressures described in earlier articles in this series.
The strategic cost: twenty-three years in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban controlling the country. The Islamic State emerged from the vacuum created by the Iraq War and required a new military campaign that itself required a new authorization, or rather, a reinterpretation of the 2001 authorization to cover an organization that didn’t exist in 2001.
The communities that paid the highest human price for these undeclared wars are disproportionately rural. Military service is disproportionately drawn from small towns and rural counties, the communities that have the fewest economic alternatives and the strongest traditions of service. A decision made in Washington to deploy forces under a resolution that no one in Chenango County voted on produces flag-draped coffins in Chenango County.
The Non-Partisan Failure
The war powers abdication is genuinely non-partisan. Both parties have perpetuated it when in power and criticized it when out of power.
Democrats criticized the unilateral authority claimed by the Bush administration to conduct the Iraq War. Then the Obama administration conducted military operations in Libya without congressional authorization, reinterpreted the 2001 AUMF to cover operations against the Islamic State, and significantly expanded the drone strike program in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all without formal congressional authorization.
Republicans criticized executive overreach in Libya and Syria. Then the Trump administration conducted strikes against Syria, moved close to military confrontation with Iran after the killing of Qasem Soleimani, and at no point sought a new AUMF that reflected the actual current state of American military operations.
Each party criticizes the mechanism when the other party uses it. Neither has proposed the structural solution: requiring Congress to actually vote, actually debate, and actually authorize each significant military commitment, with a clear statement of mission, a defined scope, and a sunset provision that requires renewal.
The structural critique is identical to the one Cato made in 1787: the executive, given military authority, will use it. The only check is a legislature willing to exercise its own authority. And the legislature has, for eighty years, preferred to let the executive act and criticize selectively rather than accept the political responsibility of a formal declaration that might go badly.
The Citizen Who Never Voted for the War
The family in Delaware County whose son deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 did not vote for the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. They were not represented in the Senate chamber where it passed 98-0. They did not authorize the specific mission, the specific theater, the specific rules of engagement, or the specific strategic objective their son was serving.
The Constitution says that authorization belongs to Congress. Congress gave it to the President. The President gave it to the commanders. The commanders gave it to the soldiers. And the soldiers came from the counties that had the least political influence over any step in that chain.
This is precisely the structure the Anti-Federalists feared: executive military authority, exercised at a distance from the citizens who would bear the consequences, without the formal democratic accountability of a declaration that named an enemy, stated a purpose, and required the representatives of the people to stand and vote for it.
Cato said in 1787 that an executive with military command would find ways to use it that the legislature would ratify rather than initiate. He was correct. The 2001 AUMF is the proof: a three-paragraph document passed in three days of grief and fury, still governing American military operations a quarter century later, covering conflicts its authors could not have foreseen, carrying the human and financial cost that falls heaviest on the communities least able to shape the decisions that produced it.
The structural fix is simple and has been proposed repeatedly: require a new authorization for each significant military commitment, with defined scope, defined mission, and a sunset that forces Congress to vote again if the commitment continues. This requires Congress to accept political responsibility for military decisions rather than delegating that responsibility to the executive and then criticizing from the sidelines.
That Congress has not done this for eighty years is the measure of the abdication.
Cato, Letter IV, November 8, 1787. Brutus, Letter I, October 18, 1787. Available at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School, and the Library of Congress American Memory collection. War Powers Resolution, Pub.L. 93-148, November 7, 1973. Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub.L. 107-40, September 18, 2001.