A comprehensive examination of the foreign military strikes authorized by President Barack Obama that bypassed traditional congressional oversight.
When Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency in 2007, he championed congressional oversight of military action, even sponsoring a resolution to prevent President George W. Bush from taking military action against Iran without explicit congressional authorization. Yet over his eight-year presidency, Obama would authorize hundreds of military strikes across multiple countries without seeking formal congressional approval, fundamentally reshaping the American approach to warfare and executive power.
The Scope of Obama’s Military Campaign
The numbers tell a stark story. Obama authorized 542 drone strikes during his presidency, killing an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush. This represented a tenfold increase in targeted killing operations from his predecessor.
The campaign extended far beyond drone strikes alone. In total, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs across seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. The number of countries being simultaneously bombed by the US increased to seven as a new front opened up in the fight against the Islamic State (IS).
Libya: The Constitutional Test Case
Perhaps no operation better illustrates Obama’s approach to military action without congressional approval than the 2011 intervention in Libya. On 24 June, the House rejected Joint Resolution 68, which would have provided the Obama administration with authorization to continue military operations in Libya for up to one year. Yet operations continued.
The Obama administration argued that its nearly three-month-old military involvement in Libya did not require congressional approval because of the supporting role most U.S. forces were playing there. The administration’s legal justification relied on a narrow interpretation of what constituted “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution.
White House spokesman Jay Carney argued that the United States’ “constrained and limited operations” in Libya do not amount to hostilities because the United States doesn’t have or intend to place soldiers on the ground and has not sustained the casualties typical of such hostilities.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel provided the constitutional framework for this interpretation. In an April 1, 2011, memorandum, the Office concluded “that the President had the constitutional authority to direct the use of force in Libya because he could reasonably determine that such use of force was in the national interest.”
This reasoning centered on two key national interests: preserving regional stability and maintaining the credibility of the United Nations Security Council. The administration argued that “the growing instability in Libya could ignite wider instability in the Middle East, with dangerous consequences to the national security interests of the United States.”
The Drone War Expansion
While Libya represented a conventional military intervention, Obama’s drone program constituted perhaps the most significant expansion of unauthorized military action. On January 23, 2009, just three days into his presidency, President Obama authorized his first kinetic military action: two drone strikes, three hours apart, in Waziristan, Pakistan, that killed as many as twenty civilians.
The drone campaign escalated rapidly across multiple countries. Obama authorized 54 drone strikes alone in Pakistan during his first year in office. One of the first CIA drone strikes under President Obama was at a funeral, murdering as many as 41 Pakistani civilians.
In Yemen, the program proved particularly controversial. Under the belief they were targeting al-Qaida, President Obama’s first strike on Yemen killed 55 people, including 21 children, 10 of whom were under the age of five. Additionally, 12 women, five of them pregnant, were also among those who were murdered in this strike.
The administration consistently maintained that these operations were legally justified under existing congressional authorizations. The Obama administration has acknowledged targeted drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia as well. It has also carried out drone strikes in the border regions of Pakistan, although it is unclear whether the U.S. has officially acknowledged those operations.
ISIS and Syria: Stretching the 2001 Authorization
Perhaps the most legally contentious expansion came with Obama’s 2014 decision to launch airstrikes against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Nearly seven years later, U.S. fighter jets and unmanned drones armed with missiles have conducted, under Obama’s order, more than 150 airstrikes against the Islamic State group over the past five weeks in Iraq, even as the White House has yet to formally ask Congress for authorization for the expanding air campaign.
On September 10, 2014, Obama announced he had authorized the U.S. military to strike ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The legal justification relied on a controversial interpretation of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11.
A senior administration official told The New York Times that “new approval was unnecessary as a legal matter because ISIS still qualifies as an affiliate of Al Qaeda for purposes of the authorization”. However, this reasoning faced significant criticism. Legal scholars argued that “the 2001 law authorized the use of force against al-Qaida and its associates. But the Islamic State and al-Qaida are, in fact, at odds.”
Many Senators were opposed to Obama’s policy of unilateral intervention, which did not require a congressional mandate. Critics argued that “the president’s gambit is, at bottom, presidential unilateralism masquerading as implausible statutory interpretation.”
The War Powers Resolution Circumvented
Throughout these operations, Obama employed various strategies to circumvent the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day limit on unauthorized military action. Seven times, before each 60-day limit has expired, Obama has sent new notification letters to Congress restarting the clock and providing new extensions without invoking congressional approval.
This pattern represented a systematic avoidance of congressional oversight. During President Barack Obama’s eight years in office, he never received his own congressional authorization in the form of an AUMF for military operations he launched in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.
The administration’s approach drew criticism from legal scholars who noted the contradiction with Obama’s earlier positions. As Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman observed, Obama was “acting on the proposition that the president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has unilateral authority to declare war … is not only betraying the electoral majorities who twice voted him into office on his promise to end Bush-era abuses of executive authority”.
The Human Cost and International Implications
The human toll of these unauthorized operations was substantial. The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries, according to reports logged by the Bureau.
These operations included controversial practices such as “double-tap” strikes. Double-tap drone strikes are as disturbing as they sound – attacking first responders and those who come to help victims of the initial strike. These attacks are both morally and legally reprehensible, as they are conscious acts of murder against civilians.
The administration even targeted American citizens without a judicial process. On September 30, 2011, a hunting party of US drones found its quarry while flying over the desert in Yemen. They fired Hellfire missiles at the vehicle carrying Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico–born, firebrand cleric. Completely absent from the proceedings was the judiciary, which acts as a crucial buffer and neutral arbiter between the citizen and the executive.
Congressional Acquiescence and Partisan Hypocrisy
Perhaps most striking was the muted congressional response to Obama’s military actions compared to later criticism of similar actions by his successor. The Democrats’ attacks on Trump for the Soleimani strike simply show, once again, that their views of executive power depend on the party membership of the executive in power.
Democratic leaders didn’t act against Obama’s military overreach as he launched attacks across the Middle East and North Africa. This partisan inconsistency undermined genuine constitutional oversight of executive war powers.
The Institutional Legacy
Obama’s presidency fundamentally transformed the American approach to warfare, normalizing ongoing military operations without congressional authorization. Obama leaves the White House after having vastly expanded and normalized the use of armed drones for counterterrorism and close air support operations in non-battlefield settings—namely Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.
The precedents set during Obama’s presidency created a framework for expanded executive power in military affairs. However, most of his predecessor’s reforms have either been voluntary, like the release of two reports totaling the number of strikes and both combatants and civilians killed, or executive guidelines that could be ignored with relative ease.
Conclusion
Barack Obama’s presidency marked a critical inflection point in the balance between congressional and executive authority over military action. While campaigning on principles of constitutional restraint and congressional oversight, Obama presided over an unprecedented expansion of unauthorized military operations across multiple countries and theaters.
The legal justifications crafted by his administration—from narrow interpretations of “hostilities” in Libya to stretched definitions of “associated forces” for ISIS—created new precedents for executive unilateralism in military affairs. These precedents, combined with congressional acquiescence, fundamentally altered the constitutional landscape governing American military action.
The human cost was substantial, with hundreds of civilian casualties from operations conducted without the democratic oversight the founders intended. More troubling still was the partisan nature of congressional oversight, with opposition often determined more by the president’s party affiliation than by consistent constitutional principles.
Obama’s legacy in this arena represents both the expansion of executive power and the erosion of meaningful congressional oversight of military action. This transformation continues to shape American foreign policy and constitutional governance to this day. The precedents set during his presidency raise fundamental questions about democratic accountability in an era of perpetual, low-intensity warfare conducted largely beyond public view and congressional oversight.
