War Policy & Armed Conflict

President Bush's decision in August, 1990, to deploy some two hundred thousand U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and his subsequent reinforcement of those troops and rhetorical movement towards a more offensive stance have raised anew, and in a particularly urgent way, one of the must contentious, sensitive, and complex issues in modern American policy, politics, and law: the war powers of the Presidency. The Constitution reserves to Congress, and to Congress alone, the power to declare war. The Constitution also, however, empowers the President to act as Commander in Chief of U.S. armed forces. As such, he clearly has the authority to direct war policy once war is declared. He also has the peacetime power to order movements of troops, ships, and aircraft, save where specifically forbidden by Congress.1 But wars are not always declared most often they are not and some orders to forces are tantamount to sending them into combat. The Constitution is in fact profoundly ambiguous as to where the President's powers as Commander in Chief end and where Congress' sole power to declare war begins. Since the beginning of the Republic, Presidents have committed American military forces into armed conflict without a declaration of war, and often without even notifying Congress. In Korea and Vietnam, Presidents

1Congress' power to forbid particular deployments for example, its limitation on U.S. "advisors" to

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Category: Government - W