By Aroop Mukharji

Last month, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced plans to slash the defense budget by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade, reducing the size of the army 14% by 2022. Panetta and the Obama administration simultaneously plan to increase Washington’s fleet of armed, unmanned aircraft by almost 300%, ushering in a smaller force that gets more lightly involved, but is able to intervene militarily in more places. Unmanned aircraft already comprise 31% of all military aircraft, up from 5% in 2005.

The unique nature of drones and the liberal way Obama uses them mean the budget cuts actually increase executive power as they shrink portions of the military. Evading congressional oversight of drone use has permitted the executive branch to expand its mandate to commit force abroad by circumventing the mechanisms of executive accountability.

Take Libya, for example. Last year, the Obama administration maintained that its actions did not necessitate invocation of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 because they did not amount to “hostilities.” Congress designed the War Powers Resolution to be a check on the executive’s mandate to commit American force abroad. Two pillars of the administration’s argument in regard to Libya were the limited scope of operations and the small numbers of potential casualties, both of which drones enabled. The administration claimed that the nature of the campaign was not the sort that Congress had in mind when drafting the War Powers Resolution.

Compare this to ongoing operations in and around Pakistan. In 2011, Obama ordered well over twice the drone strikes he did in Libya. Yet in Pakistan Obama maintains we are engaged in a “non-international armed conflict,” a term Congress itself believed to exceed mere hostilities in scope when drafting the War Powers Resolution. “Armed conflict” implies the existence of hostilities, and falls under the purview of Congressional oversight. The fact that US actions in Libya were not deemed hostilities is clearly contradictory to the administration’s approach in Pakistan: more military force was committed in Libya yet considered a lower threshold of conflict by the executive. Even Obama’s top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department thought Libya was misdefined. He just didn’t listen to them.

This inconsistency compromises public checks on the executive. That no branch of government enjoys excessive power is a hallmark of US democracy and the use of force is the most salient form of that power. Given Obama’s track record and the Pentagon’s vision of an expanded drone program, where are the checks and balances? Drone strikes should not be the exclusive preserve of the executive branch. While Congress probably wouldn’t have shut the door on Obama’s intervention in Libya, he never gave it the choice, and no one made him.

It is not just the War Powers Resolution that the executive branch seems to be maneuvering around. In September 2011, the administration targeted and killed American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen without due process as guaranteed by the 5th amendment. Regardless of how the White House may justify that strike, it is disturbing that even American citizens can be targeted by drones without any judicial or Congressional oversight.

And the records show there’s more to come. A Department of Defense report from March 2011 indicates that in the coming years, the growth of drones will greatly outstrip that of any other category of aircraft.

New technologies may increase US forces’ tactical accuracy, but they will not eliminate the fog of war, nor answer the question of whether or not to intervene in the first place. Committing force is about more than just spending money and risking domestic discontent. It’s also about taking the lives of other people – some of them civilians – and either respecting or threatening international norms of sovereignty. Intervention with high-tech, pointillist weapons is still intervention.

Drones are undoubtedly useful. If President Clinton had used them instead of Rangers in Somalia, he probably wouldn’t have faced anywhere near the sort of popular backlash he did in 1993. In 2011, the American people found it easier to stomach a third theater of war in Libya in times of economic hardship because they didn’t risk great human or financial costs. Drones were a central part of this story.

Without any mechanisms of accountability, the use of drones gives the president too much power to carry the nation to war without considering the consequences. Isn’t that what Obama ran against in 2008? “Future presidents should think through the implications of a military incursion before they launch one,” he said in 2007. By shutting Congress out of the drone equation, Obama is ensuring that doesn’t happen.

About the Author

Aroop Mukharji is a Marshall Scholar at King’s College London and was previously a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.