Trump admin opposes limit
President Donald Trump's top national security aides pushed back on Monday against US lawmakers calling for a new congressional war authorization, saying it would be a mistake to impose geographic or time limits on the campaign against Islamic State and other militant groups.
"War is fundamentally unpredictable," Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told a Senate hearing about a potential new authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, Congress' most significant step in years toward taking back control of its constitutional right to authorize war.
Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson both told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee it would put US forces at risk if existing authorizations were repealed without new ones in place. They said they do not need a new AUMF to justify ongoing military action.
Republican and Democratic members of Congress have argued for years that Congress ceded too much authority over the military to the White House after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. But divisions over how much control they should exert over the Pentagon have stymied repeated efforts to pass a new AUMF.
Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who proposed an authorization with Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, said Congress should "buy in" to military conflicts by exerting its constitutional authority to declare war.
Concerns intensified this month after four US soldiers were killed in Niger, and previously over Trump's talk about the possibility of an attack on North Korea and an April attack on an airfield in Syria.
Congress has not passed an AUMF since the 2002 measure authorising the Iraq War. But the legal justification for most military action for the past 16 years is the older authorization passed days after the Sept 11 attacks, for the campaign against al Qaeda and affiliates.
Meanwhile, Trump said Monday that US special forces had captured a man linked to the 2012 attack on the American mission in the Libyan city of Benghazi.
"Yesterday, on my orders, United States forces captured Mustafa al-Imam in Libya," Trump said in a statement, which came as the White House was rocked by the indictment of three campaign aides.
The attack killed US ambassador Chris Stevens as well as three other American personnel, and became emblematic of conservative opposition to then secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Clinton was never convincingly tagged with wrongdoing or negligence, but the issue haunted her failed 2016 presidential campaign and may have contributed to Trump's victory.
Comments