The United States should eliminate the President's authority to deploy military forces abroad without Congressional approval.

Turn - Congressional authorization enables riskier military actions

Nzelibe 7 [Jide Nzelibe (Asst. Professor of Law @ Northwestern); “Are Congressionally Authorized Wars Perverse?”; Stanford Law Review: Vol. 59, 2007; http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=952490]

Contrary to the received wisdom, this experimental Article advances the empirically plausible assumption that congressional authorization of the use of force might actually have a perverse effect. Thus, rather than create a drag effect that minimizes the impulse to rush into imprudent wars, congressional authorization might actually do the opposite: because such authorization allows the President to spread the potential political costs of military failure or stalemate to other elected officials, it will lead the President to select into more high risk wars than he would otherwise choose if he were acting unilaterally. In other words, since congressional authorization acts as a political “insurance policy” that partially protects the President against the possible political fallout from a military misadventure, he is likely to be more willing to engage in wars where the expected outcome is uncertain. More importantly, not only is the President likely to use congressional authorization as a hedge to prevent future political opponents from exploiting his misfortunes, he is also likely to use it to protect members of his party in Congress who are more likely to be electorally vulnerable in the absence of such authorization. While this notion of congressional authorization as political insurance might appear puzzling, it makes sense when understood as a cheap mechanism designed to protect a vulnerable President or ruling party from the insecure political atmosphere that is likely to exist in the aftermath of a high risk conflict. Significantly, two factors operate in tandem to ensure that the initial Presidential decision to seek congressional authorization will not be particularly costly from a political perspective. First, since a member of Congress is likely to have less information than the President about the likely outcome of a high risk conflict, he or she is likely to defer to the President’s judgment that the conflict will have a positive outcome and hope to ride the President’s electoral coattails as voters rally around the flag. Thus, the purported institutional benefit of deliberation by multiple voices that congressional authorization is supposed to confer is likely to be trivial, if not non-existent. Second, since the electoral consequences of voting against a successful war are likely to be dearer than voting for a losing war, the President is relatively assured of getting a favorable vote to use force from those members of Congress who are elected from swing districts. In sum, seeking congressional authorization for the use of force becomes a tradeoff in which Presidents are willing to accept the relatively low short-term costs of involving other elected officials in the war decision-making process in exchange for longterm political security.

Mitigates - Congressional checks already occur before deployment.

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Professor Ingber and others may be correct that once the President sends U.S. forces into hostilities, it is politically difficult for Congress to openly oppose the operations, 85 but the empirical evidence suggests that much of the congressional checking occurs before the President initiates military action. Reformists often also argue that the sparse number of cases in which Congress positively restricted presidential action, either before the President used force or once an operation began, is evidence of Congress’s impotence, but that sparsity is also consistent with the hypothesis that presidents anticipate congressional political opposition or the possibility of restrictive legislation and adjust their actions prospectively. 86 Studying only the military interventions and conflicts that actually occurred, as well as the way in which they were conducted, overlooks evidence of the variety of ways in which Congress checks the President in matters of war.

Turn - Congressional involvement makes presidential threats more credible.

Waxman 14 (Matthew C. Waxman, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School; Adjunct Senior Fellow for Law and Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations. 4/15/14, “The Power to Threaten War”, Yale Law Journal, Volume 123, https://yalelawjournal.org/article/the-power-to-threaten-war, DOA 3/8/25) JD

Furthermore, studies suggest that Congress can actively shape media coverage and public support for a president’s foreign policy engagements.155 Under this logic, Presidents, anticipating dissent, will be more selective in issuing threats in the first place, making only those commitments that would not incite widespread political opposition should the threat be carried through.156 Moreover, with regard to the signaling so critical to effective threats, “Congress matters, and matters greatly[,] to a nation’s ability to credibly convey resolve to enemies and allies alike.”157 Political opponents within a legislature have few electoral incentives to collude in an executive’s bluff, and they are capable of expressing opposition to a threatened use of force in ways that could expose the bluff to a threatened adversary.158 This again narrows the President’s range of viable policy options for brandishing military force. Having called for tougher action in Bosnia during the 1992 presidential campaign, for instance, President Clinton delayed coercive military threats against Serb forces once in office, due in part to congressional opposition and infighting.159 Counterintuitively, given the President’s seemingly unlimited and unchallenged constitutional power to threaten war, it may in some cases be easier for members of Congress to influence presidential decisions to threaten military action than presidential war decisions once U.S. forces are already engaged in hostilities. It is widely believed that once U.S. armed forces are fighting, congressmembers’ hands are often tied: policy opposition at that stage risks being portrayed as undermining our troops in the field.160 Perhaps the President takes this phenomenon into account and discounts political opposition to threatened force, assuming that such opposition will dissipate if he carries it through or announces his firm intention to do so. It is also likely that actual use of force generally attracts much more interest in Congress than threats of force, so members of Congress may be much less inclined to exercise their influence when actual military action seems remote. These factors may help explain how President Obama seemingly misjudged congressional reluctance toward armed intervention in Syria when he called on Congress to authorize strikes in August 2013.161 Nonetheless, well before a final decision-point to use force occurs, members of Congress may communicate messages domestically and convey signals abroad that the President will find difficult to counter.162 In some cases, Congress may communicate greater willingness than the president to use force, such as through non-binding resolutions. For example, in May 2013, the Senate, invoking constitutional war powers as its basis, passed a resolution 99-0 calling for the United States to support Israel against Iran if it were to take military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.163 A generation earlier, many members of Congress publicly opposed President Jimmy Carter’s termination of the Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan directed at Communist China.164 Congress passed, despite the President’s objections, the Taiwan Relations Act, which was in part intended to signal a strong commitment to defend Taiwan.165 Such efforts, in addition to showing that the President and his agents do not completely control communication of threats, put pressure on the President to act while also conveying to foreign audiences a sturdy political foundation for threats the President may make along those lines. The upshot is that a body of recent political science, while confirming the President’s dominant position in setting policy in this area, also reveals that policy-making with respect to threats of force is significantly shaped by domestic politics and that Congress is institutionally positioned to play a powerful role in influencing those politics, even without exercising its formal legislative powers. The President’s exercise of war powers—including powers to threaten war—is not as unfettered as many assume. B. Democratic Institutions and the Credibility of Threats A central question among constitutional war powers scholars is whether robust checks—especially congressional ones—on presidential use of force lead to “sound” policy decision-making. Congressionalists typically argue that legislative control over war decisions promotes more thorough and valuable deliberation, including more accurate weighing of consequences and gauging of political support for military action.166 Presidentialists usually counter that the executive branch has better information and therefore better ability to discern the dangers of action or inaction, and that quick and decisive military moves are often required to deal with security crises.167 If we are interested in these sorts of functional arguments—and we should be—then reframing the inquiry to include threatened force prompts critical questions as to whether such checks also contribute to or detract from effective deterrence and coercive diplomacy and therefore positively or negatively affect the likelihood of achieving aims without resort to war. Here, recent political science provides some reason for optimism, though the scholarship in this area is neither well-developed nor conclusive. To be sure, “soundness” of policy with respect to force is heavily laden with normative assumptions about war and the appropriate role for the United States in the broader international security system, so it is difficult to assess the merits and disadvantages of constitutional allocations in the abstract. That said, whatever their specific assumptions about appropriate uses of force, constitutional war powers scholars usually evaluate the policy advantages and dangers of decision-making allocations too narrowly in terms of the costs and outcomes of actual military engagements with adversaries. The importance of credibility to strategies of threatened force adds important new dimensions to this debate. On the one hand, one might intuitively expect that robust democratic checks would generally be ill-suited for coercive threats and negotiations—that institutional centralization and secrecy of decision-making might better equip non-democracies to wield threats of force in support of foreign policy ambitions. As Quincy Wright speculated in 1942, autocracies “can use war efficiently and threats of war even more efficiently” than democracies,168 especially the American democracy in which vocal public and congressional opposition may undermine threats.169 Moreover, proponents of democratic checks on war powers usually assume that careful deliberation is a virtue in preventing unnecessary wars, but strategists of deterrence and coercion observe that perceived irrationality is sometimes important in conveying threats: “Don’t test me, because I might just be crazy enough to do it!”170 On the other hand, some political scientists have recently called this view into question. They have concluded that the institutionalization of political contestation and some diffusion of decision-making power in democracies of the kind described in the previous Section make threats especially credible and effective in resolving international crises without actual resort to armed conflict. Recent arguments in effect turn some old claims about the strategic disabilities of democracies on their heads: whereas it used to be generally thought that democracies are ineffective in wielding threats because they are poor at keeping secrets and their decision-making is constrained by internal political pressures, a new wave of political science accepts this basic description but argues that these democratic features are really strategic virtues.171 Rationalist models of crisis bargaining between states assume that because war is risky and costly, states will be better off if they can resolve their disputes through bargaining rather than by enduring the costs and uncertainties of armed conflict.172 Effective bargaining during such disputes—that which resolves the crisis without a resort to force—depends largely on states’ perceptions of their adversary’s capacity to wage an effective military campaign and its willingness to resort to force to obtain a favorable outcome. A state targeted with a threat of force, for example, will be less willing to resist the adversary’s demands if it believes that the adversary intends to wage and is capable of waging an effective military campaign to achieve its ends. If a state perceives that the threat from the adversary is credible, that state has less incentive to resist such demands if doing so will escalate into armed conflict. The accuracy of such perceptions, however, is often compromised by informational asymmetries that arise from private information about an adversary’s relative military capabilities and resolve that prevents states from correctly assessing each other’s intentions, as well as by the incentives states have to misrepresent their willingness to fight—that is, to bluff.173 Informational asymmetries increase the potential for misperception and thereby make war more likely; war, consequentially, can be thought of in these cases as a “bargaining failure.”174 Some political scientists have argued in recent decades—contrary to previously common wisdom—that features and constraints of democracies make them better suited than non-democracies to credibly signal their resolve when they threaten force. To bolster their bargaining position, states will seek to generate credible signals by making “hand-tying” commitments from which leaders cannot back down without suffering considerable domestic political costs.175 These domestic audience costs, according to some political scientists, are especially high for leaders in democratic states, where they may bear them at the polls.176 Given the potentially high domestic political and electoral repercussions democratic leaders face from backing down from a public threat, they have significant incentives to refrain from bluffing. An adversary that understands these political vulnerabilities is thereby more likely to perceive a threat that a democratic leader does issue as highly credible, in turn making it more likely that the adversary will yield.177 Other scholars have recently pointed to the special role of legislative bodies in signaling and threatening force. This is especially interesting from the perspective of constitutional powers debates, because it posits a distinct role for Congress—and, again, one that does not necessarily rely on Congress’s ability to pass binding legislation that formally confines the President. Kenneth Schultz, for instance, argues that the open nature of competition within democratic societies ensures that the interplay of opposing parties in legislative bodies over the use of force is observable not just to their domestic publics but to foreign actors; this inherent transparency within democracies—magnified by legislative processes—provides more information to adversaries regarding the unity of domestic opponents around a government’s military and foreign policy decisions.178 Political opposition parties can undermine the credibility of some threats by the President to use force if they publicly voice their opposition in committee hearings, public statements, or through other institutional mechanisms. Furthermore, legislative processes—such as debates and hearings—make it difficult to conceal or misrepresent preferences about war and peace. Faced with such institutional constraints, Presidents will incline to be more selective about making such threats and avoid being undermined in that way.179 This restraining effect on the ability of governments to issue threats in turn makes those threats that the government does issue more credible because observers will likely assume that the President would not issue it if he anticipated strong political opposition. Especially when legislative members of the opposition party publicly support an executive’s threat to use force during a crisis, their visible support lends additional credibility to the government’s threat by confirming that domestic political conditions favor the use of force should it be necessary.180 The credibility-enhancing effects of legislative constraints on threats are disputed. Some studies question the assumptions underpinning theories of audience costs—specifically the idea that democratic leaders suffer domestic political costs to failing to make good on their threats, and therefore that their threats are especially credible181—and others question whether the empirical data support claims that democracies have credibility advantages in making threats.182 Other scholars dispute the likelihood that leaders will really be punished politically for backing down, especially if the threat was not explicit and unambiguous or if they have good policy reasons for doing so.183 Additionally, even if transparency in democratic institutions allows domestic dissent from threats of force to be visible to foreign audiences, it is not clear that adversaries interpret these mechanisms as political scientists expect in their models of strategic interaction, in light of various common problems of misperception in international relations.184 These disputes are not just between competing theoretical models but also over the links between any of the models and real-world political behavior by states. At this point there remains a dearth of good historical evidence as to how foreign leaders interpret political maneuvers within Congress regarding threatened force. Nevertheless, at the very least, strands of recent political science scholarship cast significant doubt on the intuition that democratic checks are inherently disadvantageous to strategies of threatened force. Quite the contrary, they suggest that the types of legislative political checks discussed in the previous Section—including the signaling functions that Congress is institutionally situated to play with respect to foreign audiences interpreting U.S. government moves—can be harnessed in some circumstances to support such strategies. C. Legal Reform and Strategies of Threatened Force Among legal scholars of war powers, the ultimate prescriptive question is whether the President should be constrained more formally and strongly than he currently is by legislative checks, especially a more robust and effective mandatory legal requirement of congressional authorization to use force. Calls for reform usually involve narrowing the circumstances in which congressional authorization is not constitutionally required, tightening enforcement of these purported requirements (by all three branches of government), or revising and enforcing the War Powers Resolution or other framework legislation requiring express congressional authorization for military actions.185 Under these sorts of proposals, the President would often lack authority to unilaterally make good on threats except in narrow circumstances (such as stopping imminent attacks on the United States). Whereas legal scholars are consumed with the internal effects of war powers law, such as whether and when it constrains U.S. government decision-making, the analysis contained in the previous Section shifts attention externally to whether and when U.S. law might influence decision-making by adversaries, allies, and other international actors. In prescriptive terms, if the President’s power to use force is linked to his ability to threaten it effectively, then any consideration of war powers reform on policy outcomes and long-term interests should include the important secondary effects on deterrent and coercive strategies—and how U.S. legal doctrine is perceived and understood abroad.186 Would stronger legal requirements for congressional authorization to use force reduce a president’s opportunities for bluffing? If so, would such requirements improve U.S. coercive diplomacy by making ensuing threats more credible? Or would they undermine diplomacy by taking some threats legally off the table as viable policy options? And would stronger formal legislative powers with respect to force have significant marginal effects on the signaling effects of dissent within Congress, beyond those already resulting from open political discourse? These are difficult questions, but the analysis and evidence above help generate some initial hypotheses and avenues for further research and analysis. One might ask at this point why, having exposed as a hole in war powers legal discourse the tendency to overlook threatened force, this Article does not take up whether Congress should assert some direct legislative control of threats—perhaps statutorily limiting the President’s authority to make them or establishing procedural conditions like presidential reporting requirements to Congress. This Article puts such a notion aside for two reasons. First, for reasons alluded to above, such limits would be constitutionally suspect and difficult to enforce.187 Second, even the most ardent congressionalists do not contemplate such direct limits on the President’s power to threaten. Direct limits are therefore not a realistic option for reform. Instead, this Article focuses on the more plausible—and much more discussed—possibility of strengthening Congress’s power over the ultimate decision whether to use force, but augments the usual reform debate with appreciation for the importance of credible threats A claim previously advanced from a presidentialist perspective is that stronger legislative checks on war powers could be harmful to coercive and deterrent strategies, because they establish easily visible impediments to the President’s authority to follow through on threats: legal constraints trade off with credibility. This was a common policy argument during the War Powers Resolution debates in the early 1970s. Eugene Rostow, an advocate inside and outside the government for executive primacy, remarked during consideration of legislative drafts that any serious restrictions on presidential use of force would mean in practice that “no President could make a credible threat to use force as an instrument of deterrent diplomacy, even to head off explosive confrontations.”188 He continued: In the tense and cautious diplomacy of our present relations with the Soviet Union, as they have developed over the last twenty-five years, the authority of the President to set clear and silent limits in advance is perhaps the most important of all the powers in our constitutional armory to prevent confrontations that could carry nuclear implications. . . . . . . . . . . [I]t is the diplomatic power the President needs most under the circumstance of modern life—the power to make a credible threat to use force in order to prevent a confrontation which might escalate.189 In his veto statement on the War Powers Resolution, President Nixon echoed these concerns, arguing that the law would undermine the credibility of U.S. deterrent and coercive threats in the eyes of both adversaries and allies—they would know that presidential authority to use force would expire after sixty days, so absent strong congressional support they could assume U.S. withdrawal at that point.190 In short, those who oppose tying the president’s hands with mandatory congressional authorization requirements to use force sometimes argue that doing so incidentally and dangerously ties his hands in threatening it. Their position assumes that presidential flexibility to act militarily, preserved in legal doctrine, enhances the credibility of presidential threats to escalate. A second argument, this one advanced by some congressionalists, is that stronger legislative checks on presidential uses of force would improve deterrent and coercive strategies by making them more selective and credible. The most credible U.S. threats, this argument holds, are those that carry formal approval by Congress, which reflects strong public support and willingness to bear the costs of war.191 A frequently cited case for this claim is President Eisenhower’s request (soon granted) for standing congressional authorization to use force in the Taiwan Strait Crises of the mid- and late-1950s—an authorization he claimed at the time was important to bolstering the credibility of U.S. threats to protect Formosa from Chinese aggression.192 “It was [Eisenhower’s] seasoned judgment . . . that a commitment by the United States would have much greater impact on allies and enemies alike because it would represent the collective judgment of the President and Congress,” concludes Louis Fisher. “Single-handed actions taken by a President, without the support of Congress and the people, can threaten national prestige and undermine the presidency. Eisenhower’s position was sound then. It is sound now.”193 An important assumption here is that legal requirements of congressional participation in decisions to use force filter out unpopular uses of force, the threats of which are unlikely to be credible and which, if unsuccessful, undermine the credibility of future U.S. threats. A third view is that legal clarity is important to U.S. coercive and deterrent strategies; that ambiguity as to the President’s powers to use force undermines the credibility of threats. Michael Reisman observed in 1989, for example, that ambiguity “in the allocation of competence and the uncertain congressional role will sow uncertainty among those who depend on U.S. effectiveness for security and the maintenance of world order. Some reduction in U.S. credibility and diplomatic effectiveness may result.”194 Such stress on legal clarity is common among lawyers, who usually regard it as important to planning, whereas strategists tend to see possible value in “constructive ambiguity,” or deliberate fudging of drawn lines as a negotiating tactic or for domestic political purposes.195 A critical assumption here is that clarity of constitutional or statutory design with respect to decisions about force exerts significant effects on foreign perceptions of U.S. resolve to make good on threats, if not by affecting the substance of U.S. policy commitments with regard to force, then by pointing foreign actors to the appropriate institution or process for reading them. Political scientists almost never directly engage these questions of constitutional design and reform (it is difficult, in fact, to find even passing references to questions of legal doctrine or reform in political science scholarship on threats of force). Partly this may reflect a general scholarly disposition favoring descriptive over normative or prescriptive analysis—the opposite of most American legal scholarship. Partly, though, it also reflects a difference in emphasis between legal scholars and political scientists with respect to democratic institutions. Whereas legal scholars tend to focus on formal legal powers and checks—such as binding legislative control and judicial review—political scientists focus on the political interactions that these institutional arrangements facilitate.196 Political scientists tend to concentrate on the legal allocation of powers between branches of government only to the extent that such arrangements reinforce or provide a forum for political contestation and competition among domestic political opponents. As a result, they rarely examine how the sorts of constitutional and legislative reforms so often put forward by legal thinkers would affect the credibility of threats.

Takeout - Congressional authorization doesn't prevent, and can prolong, wars.

Brentwood-ScPa-Con-NSDA-Last-Chance-Qualifier-Round-1

big ones. 93 There are other potent arguments for reforming war powers, and this Essay does not claim to comprehensively catalogue them, but the common assumption that weak legal checks create the conditions for more (or bigger) wars is much overstated. 94

Takeout - President is 'sole organ' in foreign affairs with inherent constitutional authority.

ALBERTO R. GONZALES 2014 Alberto R. Gonzales was the 80th United States Attorney General, appointed in February 2005 by President George W. Bush, becoming the highest-ranking Hispanic-American in Executive Branch government to date. “ADVISING THE PRESIDENT: THE GROWING SCOPE OF EXECUTIVE POWER TO PROTECT AMERICA”, (http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Gonzales_Final.pdf )//EG

Much of the debate over the exercise of executive power in the national security context arises in those circumstances where the President arguably has neither express constitutional nor express congressional authority. In these situations, presidents have relied upon an inherent or implied authority under the Constitution, emanating from their Commander in Chief power to protect and defend America.127 As the Supreme Court has recognized, the President is considered the “sole organ” of the United States in foreign affairs.128 The Court held in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. that the President is uniquely positioned to act decisively and quickly in the field of international relations and especially in times of war, given the delicate nature of intelligence and negotiations with foreign sovereigns.129 Although the Constitution says relatively little about the national security powers of the executive, I am unaware of any serious widespread disagreement that the President has some inherent authority. However, there is serious disagreement as to the scope of that authority.130 Unfortunately, the courts have been inconsistent in the development and application of a framework to help resolve the question.131 From my study of history, the default position throughout American history appears to be that the President has inherent power do what he needs to do to protect our country, subject to examination after the fact by Congress, the media, historians, and the American people. The President’s inherent authority to take action appears to be even more widely accepted when such action is against non-citizens outside the boundaries of the United States. Given the growing magnitude of today’s threats, I believe this default position will remain true as we move into the future.

Takeout - Congressional politics already make Congress accountable.

Waxman 19 [Matthew C. Waxman, Liviu Librescu Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and an adjunct senior fellow for Law and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations; "War Powers Oversight, Not Reform"; War on the Rocks; Published: 11-19-2019; Accessed: 6-24-2022; https://warontherocks.com/2019/11/war-powers-oversight-not-reform/; KL]

Moreover, focusing only on formal congressional action obscures the more subtle but substantial ways in which Congress influences decisions about military intervention. Crucially, the fact that the president often initiates military campaigns without express authorization by Congress does not mean that congressional checks are altogether absent. Political science and history strongly suggest that, notwithstanding the often-weak electoral incentives of congressional members to formally approve or disapprove military interventions at their outset, congressional politics weigh heavily in presidential decision-making. Studies show that congressional politics affect both the frequency with which presidents use force abroad and the probability that they will respond militarily to crises. There are many ways in which Congress influences presidential uses of force, which include not only the introduction of legislation to authorize or curtail a use of force but also congressional oversight hearings and influencing public debate over military policymaking. Congressional action or inaction also sends signals about domestic resolve to foreign parties — both adversaries and allies alike — thereby affecting the president’s calculus regarding using force. Such political checks are especially pronounced when Congress and the presidency are controlled by opposing parties. Focusing solely on whether and how Congress formally approves military action on the front end often neglects these other significant ways Congress can influence the use of force and how they might be enhanced. Military conflicts and interventions arise in too many ways and forms to regulate them effectively with a single statutory scheme or a single form of authorization. For the existing War Powers Resolution and some of the proposals to strengthen it, relatively clear lines are often seen as a virtue, because they reduce — though don’t eliminate — opportunities to interpret away requirements. However, trying to draw statutory lines at specific thresholds like armed “hostilities” (as in the War Powers Resolution) or “significant armed conflicts” (as in the proposed War Powers Consultation Act) is a poor way of deciding which types of conflicts should require formal congressional approval. From the earliest days of the republic, the United States faced varied military contingencies for which neither war declarations nor simple congressional force authorizations were well suited. In the modern era, American conflicts and security crises are even more diverse. They could begin because of a U.S. first strike or an enemy first strike, an attack by or against a U.S. ally, or a breakdown in deterrence or a miscalculation. They might include large-scale ground wars, one-off airstrikes, or a combination of the two, and increasingly they feature cyber operations as well. They can be overt or covert, or both. They may be geographically confined or global, or expected to be short or long. They are waged against states or nonstate groups, with or against a state’s proxy forces, and with or without the help of allies. Recent controversies over war powers illustrate this point. In 2019, concerns about insufficiently checked presidential war powers have arisen in three vastly different contexts: continuation of a geographically sprawling and indefinite war against terrorist groups, support for a Saudi war in Yemen, and the possibility of a major U.S. war with Iran. The first began after a direct attack on the U.S. homeland, the second is a regional proxy war, and the third could arise through deliberate preemptive U.S. action, a miscalculated spiral of violence, or some other way. Stepping back, the key policy questions about force in each case differ widely. The first is mostly about where and what type of force is used, the second has to do with whether to cut off operational support to a partner, and the third is about how to wield threats of force for deterrence and coercive diplomacy. Although recent war powers debates have sometimes focused on regional conflicts in which the United States does not put many troops directly in harm’s way (at least not initially), a key aim of war powers reform is often said to be making sure that “big” wars — those that put many vulnerable American boots on the ground — are formally authorized by Congress. Historically, however, the Korean War stands out as the only exception to the tendency of presidents to seek congressional authorization in advance of large ground wars. In any event, these are the types of conflicts for which political checks often work most effectively. Smaller-scale and less visible conflicts attract less public attention, but their consequences can be significant. “As a matter of democratic principle,” Jack Goldsmith and I have argued, treating low-intensity warfare waged stealthily and from a distance (or in cyberspace) as more appropriately conducted unilaterally than large-scale ground campaigns “probably has matters backwards”: Light-footprint warfare is still lethal and very consequential warfare, and the lightness of the tools make them easy for a President to deploy extensively. Light-footprint warfare thus has large foreign policy, strategic, and reputational consequences for the United States, akin to much heavier deployments, yet much less public examination. The President’s legal theories treat this as a feature of such warfare. But it is also a bug for U.S. democracy, since the stealthy features mean that public debate and political checks—which reduce error as well as excess, and promote legitimacy—function ineffectively. This arguably indicates the need to expand or clarify the War Powers Resolution’s definition of the situations requiring explicit congressional approval. But any politically plausible attempts to delineate with bright-line rules which types of military action require specific forms of congressional authorization will probably function poorly in practice, where contextual variables are complex and fast-moving. Such attempts may also still exclude those conflicts for which stronger congressional scrutiny is appropriate. Alternatively, a more flexible legal standard would likely be even easier for the executive branch to bypass. A wide range of military conflicts and challenges warrant a wide range of congressional oversight tools. Moreover, as explained below, requiring congressional approval at the beginning of a military intervention often fails to encourage the right kind of congressional scrutiny. The Purposes of Legislative Checks Periodic pushes from both members of Congress and the public for stronger congressional checks on war powers can conceal divisions and uncertainty about why those checks are needed. Some of the goals of these efforts for congressional oversight also point to different solutions. Sometimes, supporters of war powers reform are pushing for change simply as a matter of constitutional principle. If one believes that Article I’s directive that Congress has the power to declare war includes any use of military force (other than in defending against invasion), and one believes that the president’s Article II roles as chief executive and commander-in-chief confer no authority to initiate such actions, then nothing short of formal congressional authorization for any military intervention is likely to be satisfactory. But there have always been gaps and ambiguities in these constitutional clauses, and many (though not all) war powers reformers believe in evolving constitutional interpretation to meet evolving national conditions in other areas of law. There are good arguments to justify adapting the original allocations of military powers given the dramatic changes over 200 years in American military power, strategy, and interests, as well as dramatic changes in the way other, related constitutional powers are exercised.