The Forever Wars: How 60 Words Changed Everything

How 60 Words Became a Blank Check for Global War

The AUMF was drafted in haste and passed in trauma. Three days after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering, Congress gave the President unlimited military authority against anyone connected to 9/11. The vote was 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House.

The key phrase is “he determines.” The President — not Congress, not the courts, not the public — decides who “aided” the 9/11 attacks or “harbored” those who did. This subjective determination has been stretched to cover organizations that didn't exist in 2001, in countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, against enemies that are themselves enemies of al-Qaeda.

The phrase “in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism” is even more elastic. Since terrorism can theoretically come from anywhere, this clause has been used to justify preemptive military action against any group, in any country, that the President labels a potential terrorist threat. The authorization has no meaningful boundary.

How “Temporary” Became Permanent

The AUMF was passed as an emergency measure. Three days after 9/11, in a moment of national trauma, Congress acted with understandable urgency. The assumption — stated and unstated — was that this was temporary. The US would find those responsible, bring them to justice, and the authorization would become moot.

But temporary authorizations become permanent through a simple mechanism: political incentives favor continuation. Every president benefits from having unlimited military authority. No president has ever asked Congress to repeal an AUMF. Meanwhile, most members of Congress prefer not to vote on war — a “yes” vote can haunt you if the war goes badly; a “no” vote can end your career if there's a terrorist attack. The path of least resistance is to do nothing, and that's exactly what Congress has done for 25 years.

The forever wars also became self-perpetuating through blowback. US military operations create new enemies. New enemies justify continued operations. Each intervention destabilizes a region, creating power vacuums that extremist groups fill — which then become targets for the next intervention. Afghanistan created al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Iraq War created ISIS. The Libya intervention created a failed state that became a hub for arms trafficking across the Sahel. The cycle never ends because the cycle feeds itself.

Why Americans Don't Notice

The forever wars have been deliberately designed to be invisible to the American public. Three mechanisms make this possible:

1. No Draft

The Vietnam War ended partly because the draft meant every American family had skin in the game. The all-volunteer military ensures that only a tiny fraction of Americans — disproportionately from poor and rural communities — bear the burden of combat. In 2024, less than 1% of Americans served in the military. For the other 99%, war is an abstraction.

2. Deficit Spending

Unlike WWII, which was partly funded by war bonds and tax increases, the post-9/11 wars have been funded entirely through borrowing. There has been no war tax, no rationing, no economic sacrifice asked of the public. The costs are pushed onto future generations through debt. When war costs nothing now, there's no political pressure to stop it.

3. Remote Warfare

Drones, special forces, proxy militias, and cyber operations have replaced large-scale deployments. The US can wage war in a country without most Americans — or most members of Congress — even knowing about it. When four US soldiers were killed in Niger in 2017, most Americans and many senators were stunned to learn that US troops were operating there at all.

Historian Paul Kennedy documented this pattern in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: empires expand their military commitments beyond their economic capacity to sustain them. The military spending that once protected trade routes becomes a drain on the treasury. The security establishment becomes a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that demands ever-larger budgets. Eventually, the cost of maintaining the empire exceeds the benefits it provides.