Devastating Military Cuts Endanger Readiness--While Obama Bypasses Congress With Covert Action

by Monica Davis

The ongoing budget battles between Congress and the White House endangers readiness, overextends old planes and equipment and creates a dangerous, expensive reliance on military contractors and intilligence agences with allegedly alternative sources of revenue.

The miitary, that is the entities which survive at the behest of Congressional funding, are at a distince disadvantage, when covert agencies utilize off the books, covert sources of funding.

On the other hand, those pesky little spies in the CIA can allegedly violate international law, where the military can not. And, President Barack Obama is using the CIA to bypass international law and UN restrictions, just like his predecessors.

“Obama opted to approve the program as a CIA covert action to avoid international law restrictions on military efforts to overthrow another government and the need for wider congressional approval.”  This is a rich sentence which deserves serious analysis but that I lack time to give.  (The place to start is Bobby’s great Title 10/50 article .)  In brief: (1) the notion that military support via covert action skirts the need to get full congressional authorization for involvement in the Syrian Civil War begs the question whether the covert action statute can be a stand-alone congressional authorization for military action abroad independent of any other statutory basis (such as the AUMF) or constitutional basis (such as Article II) for the intervention; and (2) it remains unclear under what legal theory the government thinks that the CIA can violate the international law restrictions of the UN Charter even while DOD cannot (or, perhaps, will not). morehere

 

Senator Bob Coker wrote: 

Covert action must also not be a substitute for major military operations. While the Pentagon conducts a publicly acknowledged drone campaign targeting terrorists in Yemen, published reports suggest that the intelligence community runs a parallel program of significant scope and scale. While the success of many of these operations is not in dispute, it is also clear that our broad counterterrorism efforts — visible and obvious as they are — should not be handled primarily through covert action designed for unique circumstances where the role of the United States must truly be hidden. MOREHERE