The Quiet Wars: How Trump Built a Shadow Empire of 20+ Military Conflicts Without Congressional Authorization

The United States has not formally declared war since 1941, when Congress voted after Pearl Harbor. Since then, the executive branch has waged near-continuous combat operations on every inhabited continent, relying on a patchwork of Cold War-era statutes, post-9/11 emergency authorizations, and outright secrecy to circumvent the constitutional requirement that only Congress can send the nation to war.

Under Donald Trump, this architecture of undeclared conflict has reached a scale without precedent. An analysis published by The Intercept on March 30, 2026, documents more than 20 distinct military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars conducted during Trump's five-plus years in office - spanning two terms, five continents, and a staggering array of legal pretexts. The White House and Pentagon refuse to tell the American public where U.S. forces are engaged in hostilities. Trump has never sought congressional authorization for any of them.

The list reads like a world atlas of violence: Afghanistan, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and at least one undisclosed country in the Indo-Pacific region. In addition, the administration has attacked civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, bullied Panama, and threatened military action against Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.

This is the story of how one president, who campaigned on the promise of peace, built the most expansive shadow war apparatus in the history of the American republic - and how the institutions designed to prevent exactly this have been hollowed out, circumvented, or simply ignored.

I. The Architecture of Secret War

The machinery that enables a president to wage global war without congressional approval did not spring into existence overnight. It was assembled across decades, layer by layer, each addition designed to give the executive branch more latitude while reducing the visibility of American combat operations to the public and to lawmakers.

Three legal mechanisms form the backbone of this system. The first is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Written to target the perpetrators of 9/11, it has been stretched by four successive administrations to cover dozens of terrorist organizations that did not exist when the towers fell. Under this single page of legislation, the United States has justified counterterrorism operations - including ground combat, airstrikes, and support of partner militaries - in at least 22 countries, according to a 2021 report by Brown University's Costs of War Project.

The second is the covert action statute, which provides authority for secret, unattributed, and primarily CIA-led operations that can involve the use of lethal force. Despite a series of Cold War-era executive orders that prohibit assassinations, this statute has been used throughout the war on terror to conduct drone strikes outside declared combat zones. It was apparently employed in the first U.S. strike on Venezuela in late December 2025 - a CIA drone strike on a dock area linked to the Tren de Aragua gang that served as a prelude to a full-scale invasion days later.

The third - and least understood - is a category of security cooperation authorities enacted after September 11. The most consequential of these is Section 127e of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which authorizes the Department of Defense to provide "support" to foreign forces, paramilitaries, and even private individuals who are in turn "supporting" U.S. counterterrorism operations. Under 127e, U.S. commandos - Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders - arm, train, and provide intelligence to foreign forces, then dispatch them on U.S.-directed missions targeting U.S.-designated enemies to achieve U.S.-defined objectives.

Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, has described this system in blunt terms: "Congress has not authorized conflicts in this wide array of contexts, and indeed many lawmakers - to say nothing of members of the public - would be surprised to learn that hostilities have taken place in many of these countries."

The Brennan Center's own research has documented how the full extent of U.S. war-making remains unknown even to Congress. The Department of Defense provides mandated disclosures to only a small number of legislative offices. Sometimes it fails to comply with reporting requirements entirely. After U.S. forces took casualties in Niger in 2017, members of Congress were shocked by the very presence of American troops in the country. The State Department, nominally responsible for diplomatic relationships with the nations where the Pentagon is fighting, often cannot get information about what the military is doing in those countries.

II. The 127e Machine: America's Proxy War Network

If the 2001 AUMF is the legal skeleton of America's forever wars, the 127e authority is the muscle. And under Trump, that muscle has grown enormous.

During Trump's first term alone, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the globe. The Intercept has documented many of these efforts in Africa and the Middle East, including a partnership with the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), a notoriously abusive unit of the Cameroonian military. That partnership continued long after BIR members were connected to mass atrocities - extrajudicial killings, torture, and the burning of villages. The U.S. military knew. The program ran anyway.

In addition to Cameroon, confirmed 127e programs have operated in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and at least one undisclosed country in the Indo-Pacific region. Each of these programs involves American commandos creating, training, arming, and directing foreign proxy forces to conduct missions designed in U.S. military headquarters.

The Pentagon's official position is that 127e programs do not constitute authorizations for the use of military force. This is a legal fiction. In practice, American Special Operations forces have used these authorities to engage in combat alongside their proxy partners. The distinction between "advising" and "fighting" collapses the moment bullets start flying.

That collapse was laid bare on October 4, 2017, in Tongo Tongo, Niger, when ISIS fighters ambushed a team of American soldiers, killing four and wounding two. The U.S. initially claimed troops were providing "advice and assistance." The truth was different: the ambushed team had been slated to support another group of American and Nigerien commandos attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, a 127e program. The soldiers were not advising. They were hunting.

Five months earlier, in May 2017, Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other Americans wounded during a raid on an al-Shabab camp in Somalia. The Pentagon initially claimed Somali forces were operating ahead of the Americans. That fiction collapsed too. Milliken was fighting alongside the Somali troops, not behind them. Then-Defense Secretary James Mattis responded by ordering U.S. operations in Africa to be kept "off the front page."

This month, Special Operations Command chief Admiral Frank M. Bradley told Congress that these "below the threshold" capabilities were essential for American security. "Small footprints are necessary to enable denial strategies, strengthen allied resilience, and contribute to deterrence without triggering escalation," Bradley said in his March 2026 posture statement. The irony is thick: America's enemies are accused of "blurring the lines between competition and conflict" - precisely what the United States has done systematically for decades.

For almost a year, the White House has refused to respond to The Intercept's requests for information about current 127e programs. The American public has no idea how many of these proxy wars are running, where they are, or how many people have died in them.

III. Iran: The War That Isn't Called a War

The most visible of Trump's undeclared conflicts is the full-scale military assault on Iran, now grinding through its second month. More than 40,000 U.S. troops are stationed in the Middle East. Dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft have been deployed. Two carrier strike groups patrol the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, though the USS Gerald R. Ford had to abandon operations after a fire onboard. More than 2,000 Marines arrived over this past weekend, with 2,000 more en route by ship. A similar number of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division are expected to arrive soon.

The Pentagon has requested $200 billion in supplemental funding to pay for the operation. The ultimate cost is projected to run into the trillions.

Despite all of this, the Trump administration refuses to call it a war. Earlier this month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told lawmakers: "I think we're in a military action at this point." Trump himself has alternated between calling it a "war" and an "excursion," and has claimed - erroneously - that refusing to use the word "war" circumvents Congress's constitutional authority.

"We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It's for legal reasons. I don't need any approvals. As a war you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that."- Donald Trump, March 28, 2026

"Something like that" is doing an extraordinary amount of work in that sentence. What the president is describing - with casual contempt for constitutional structure - is a unilateral decision to wage open warfare against a nation of 88 million people, involving tens of thousands of American troops, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, without the consent of the people's elected representatives.

Trump has also threatened to commit what would constitute war crimes under international law. In a Truth Social post on Monday, he threatened to blow up "all of [Iran's] Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)" The deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure - water purification systems that serve millions - would violate the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

On Sunday, Trump claimed the war had already achieved regime change: "We've had regime change if you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they're all dead. The next regime is mostly dead." He told the Financial Times: "To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: 'why are you doing that?' But they're stupid people."

The seizure of another nation's natural resources through military force has a name in international law. It is called pillage. It is a war crime.

IV. The Western Hemisphere: Kidnapping, Regime Change, and Gunboat Diplomacy

Iran is the loudest of Trump's wars. But the Western Hemisphere has become its own theater of undeclared conflict, and what has happened there is, in some ways, more alarming - because it demonstrates the willingness to use military force against sovereign nations with no pretense of defensive necessity.

In January 2026, U.S. Special Operations forces invaded Venezuela, conducted airstrikes against Caracas, and kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro. The operation was preceded by a CIA drone strike on a dock area in late December 2025, apparently conducted under covert action authority. The sitting president of a sovereign nation was seized by American commandos and removed from his country. Congress was not consulted. No war was declared. No legal authorization was sought.

The administration has since reportedly undertaken a regime-change operation in Cuba, attempting to push out President Miguel Diaz-Canel. Trump has spoken repeatedly of "taking" Cuba. He has threatened to annex Greenland - a territory of Denmark, a NATO ally - and possibly Iceland as well. He has proposed turning Canada into a U.S. state. He has threatened military strikes inside Mexico against drug cartels.

The Special Operations Command chief recently referenced the "perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico." The word "perceived" is doing heavy lifting. Either U.S. Special Operations forces are conducting operations in Mexico, or they are not. The refusal to confirm or deny is itself an exercise of the secrecy that defines this entire enterprise.

Trump has also deployed what The Intercept describes as attacks on "civilians in boats" in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Details are sparse. The military refuses to elaborate. But the pattern is consistent: the use of lethal force in international waters, against targets that may or may not be legitimate, without public accountability or legal authorization.

Sarah Harrison, who served as associate general counsel in the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel during Trump's first term, summarized the situation: "While Trump claims to be the president of peace, he is actually the conflict-in-chief, waging many pointless and deadly wars, ensuring generational animosity towards a rogue U.S. His actions are not just unconstitutional and in violation of international law, they make Americans less safe and their wallets less full."

V. Africa's Invisible Wars: Drone Strikes, Body Counts, and Silence

Africa has been the laboratory for America's secret war machine since the post-9/11 expansion of Special Operations. Under Trump, it has become something closer to a shooting gallery.

During his second term, Trump has ordered overt airstrikes in Nigeria and Somalia - two countries where the American public has little awareness that U.S. forces are engaged in combat. In Nigeria, the world's sixth-most-populous country, the U.S. conducted airstrikes against ISIS-affiliated fighters in December 2025 with no public debate, no congressional notification that reached the broader legislature, and no discussion of what strategic objective was being served.

Somalia has been a continuous target of U.S. military operations for over a decade. Trump dramatically escalated drone strikes during his first term, conducting more strikes in Somalia during a single year (2019) than the Obama administration conducted over its entire eight years. The pattern has intensified further in his second term. In February 2025, the U.S. conducted airstrikes in Somalia that killed an unknown number of people - "unknown" because the Pentagon's system for counting civilian casualties in its African operations is virtually nonexistent.

The broader African theater includes 127e programs in Cameroon, Kenya, Mali, Niger, and Tunisia, all involving U.S. Special Operations forces directing local proxy forces on combat missions. The Cameroon partnership is particularly disturbing. The Rapid Intervention Battalion has been credibly accused of mass atrocities in the Anglophone conflict, including extrajudicial executions, torture, and the destruction of entire villages. The United States continued partnering with this unit even after these reports were confirmed.

When the Niger ambush exposed the extent of American military operations in West Africa in October 2017, Senator Lindsey Graham - then the chairman of the Senate subcommittee overseeing defense spending - admitted he had "no idea" the U.S. had 1,000 troops in Niger. Neither did most of his colleagues. The Pentagon's response was not to increase transparency. It was to increase secrecy.

More than 6,500 U.S. Special Operations "operators and enablers" are currently deployed across more than 80 countries worldwide. The vast majority of those deployments involve operations that the American public will never learn about unless something goes catastrophically wrong - and sometimes not even then.

VI. The Constitutional Crisis Nobody Is Talking About

Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution is unambiguous: "The Congress shall have Power... To declare War." The Founders placed this power in the legislature deliberately. They had watched European monarchs drag their nations into ruinous conflicts on personal whim. They designed a system where the decision to wage war - the gravest decision a nation can make - required the consent of the people's elected representatives.

That system is now functionally dead.

The last formal declaration of war by the United States Congress occurred on June 5, 1942, when the U.S. declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. In the 84 years since, the United States has fought in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Cameroon, Venezuela, Iran, and dozens of other countries. Congress authorized the use of force in a handful of these - the 1991 Gulf War, the 2001 AUMF, the 2002 Iraq AUMF. For the rest, presidents simply acted.

Under Trump, even the pretense of legal authority has been abandoned. The Iran war - the largest U.S. military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq - has no congressional authorization whatsoever. Trump has not sought it. Congress has not demanded it. The result is a $200 billion war, involving tens of thousands of troops, targeting a nation of 88 million people, waged entirely on one man's say-so.

"Congressional authorization isn't just a box-checking exercise," said the Brennan Center's Ebright. "It's a means of ensuring that the solemn decision to go to war is made democratically and accountably, with a clear purpose and goal that the American people can support."

The failure is not merely legal. It is structural. When Congress does not authorize wars, it does not define their scope, their objectives, or their limits. There is no mechanism for the public to evaluate whether a conflict is achieving its stated purpose - because no purpose has been stated through democratic channels. There is no legal framework for ending the conflict - because it was never formally begun. There is no accountability when the mission expands, when civilians die, or when the costs spiral beyond all projections.

The 2001 AUMF - now 25 years old - has been stretched so far beyond its original purpose that it functions less as a legal authorization and more as a blank check. It was written to target the perpetrators of September 11. It is now used to justify combat operations against groups that did not exist in 2001, in countries that had no connection to the attacks, against targets that have no relationship to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The executive branch has long withheld from Congress - and continues to withhold from the public - the full list of groups it considers covered by this authorization.

What exists now is not a system of constitutional war powers. It is a system in which the president wages war wherever he wishes, for whatever reason he chooses, and Congress watches from the sidelines.

VII. The Civilian Cost: Schools, Detention Facilities, and "Collateral Damage"

Wars waged without democratic accountability tend to produce civilian casualties without democratic accountability. Trump's undeclared conflicts are no exception.

In Iran, U.S. military strikes have hit an elementary school. The Intercept reported on a March 2026 investigation into the strike, which killed an unknown number of children. The Pentagon has not provided a public accounting of the casualties. In Yemen, a U.S. strike hit a migrant detention facility in October 2025, killing an unknown number of people who were being held in captivity at the time of the attack.

The pattern extends across every theater of operations. In Somalia, the U.S. military's system for tracking civilian casualties has been described by independent monitors as inadequate to the point of uselessness. The Pentagon regularly claims zero civilian casualties in strikes where independent investigations subsequently document dead women and children. In Nigeria, the December 2025 airstrikes were conducted against targets in a densely populated area, with no subsequent assessment of civilian harm made public.

The absence of congressional oversight means there is no institutional mechanism for demanding accountability when civilians die. When Congress has not authorized a war, it has limited leverage to demand information about how that war is being conducted. The result is a feedback loop: secrecy enables impunity, impunity enables further secrecy.

Trump's threat to destroy Iran's desalination plants represents a potential escalation of civilian harm on an entirely different scale. Iran's population of 88 million depends on these facilities for drinking water. Their deliberate destruction would constitute an attack on the civilian population itself - not on military targets that incidentally affect civilians, but on infrastructure whose sole purpose is keeping people alive.

The Geneva Conventions specifically prohibit attacks on "objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population," including "drinking water installations and supplies." The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classifies the intentional starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime. Trump's public statement of intent to destroy desalination plants is, in legal terms, a confession of premeditated war crimes published on social media.

VIII. The Money: $200 Billion and Counting

Wars cost money. Secret wars cost money that nobody is tracking.

The Iran conflict alone has prompted a Pentagon request for $200 billion in supplemental funding - a figure that dwarfs the annual budget of every federal agency except the Defense Department itself. Analysts at Brown University's Costs of War Project project the total cost of the Iran operation, including long-term veteran care and interest on debt, will run into the trillions of dollars.

But the Iran war is only the most expensive of Trump's conflicts. The 127e proxy war programs, the Special Operations deployments across 80+ countries, the drone campaigns in Africa, the ongoing operations in Syria and Iraq, the Venezuela intervention - each of these carries its own costs, funded through a labyrinth of defense appropriations, supplemental requests, and classified budgets that are invisible to all but a handful of lawmakers.

The Congressional Budget Office has not been asked to score the cost of most of these operations, because most of them have not been submitted for congressional authorization. The Government Accountability Office has limited ability to audit programs it does not know about. The result is that the American public is funding a global war machine of unknown scope at unknown cost, with no mechanism for determining whether the money is achieving anything.

Meanwhile, the domestic consequences are tangible. The $200 billion supplemental request for Iran arrives as the administration proposes cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and federal education funding. The tradeoff is stark: money that could fund healthcare, infrastructure, or debt reduction is instead being spent on military operations that no elected legislature has approved.

"His actions make Americans less safe and their wallets less full," said Harrison, the former Pentagon lawyer. The observation is not partisan commentary. It is arithmetic.

IX. The Precedent: What Happens After Trump

Every expansion of executive war powers becomes a precedent for the next president. This is the structural danger that transcends any single administration.

The 2001 AUMF, written by the Bush administration and passed by Congress 60 hours after the September 11 attacks, was never intended to authorize wars in countries that had no connection to al-Qaeda. But once the Bush administration stretched it to cover associated forces, the Obama administration stretched it further, and the Trump administration stretched it further still. Each expansion became the new baseline.

The 127e authority, enacted as a niche special operations tool, has metastasized into a global proxy war network. The covert action statute, designed for intelligence operations, now provides cover for air strikes and military invasions. The kidnapping of a foreign head of state - Maduro in January 2026 - sets a precedent that any future president can invoke to justify seizing the leader of any country deemed hostile.

The failure of Congress to assert its constitutional war powers during the Trump era does not merely affect the current conflicts. It establishes - in practice if not in law - that the president of the United States can wage unlimited war without legislative approval, and that Congress will acquiesce. This is not a Republican or Democratic problem. It is a constitutional crisis that both parties have enabled through decades of abdication.

The Brennan Center has documented how this dynamic accelerates: "During the global war on terror, the Department of Defense built out its capacity, and secured legal authorities, to operate 'by, with, and through' foreign militaries and paramilitaries. These smaller-scale, unauthorized hostilities through or alongside foreign partners may seem quaint compared to the Iran War and other recent public and persistent hostilities, but for years they deepened the perception that the president may use force whenever and wherever he pleases, even without specific congressional authorization."

The trajectory is clear. Each undeclared war normalizes the next. Each precedent removes a constraint. The constitutional framework that was designed to prevent a single individual from dragging the nation into conflict has been rendered ceremonial. What remains is a system in which the United States is perpetually at war, in countries most Americans cannot name, at a cost most Americans will never see itemized, for objectives that have never been submitted to democratic debate.

This is not how republics are supposed to work. It is, historically, how empires operate in their late stages - when the machinery of war has become self-sustaining, when the political class has been captured by the military-industrial apparatus, and when the public has been conditioned to accept permanent conflict as the natural state of affairs.

X. Timeline: The Escalation

XI. What Comes Next

The trajectory is escalation. Additional U.S. forces are being sped to the Middle East. Trump has threatened to seize Iran's oil fields - a military objective that would require a ground invasion and long-term occupation of territory that 88 million people consider their homeland. The regime-change rhetoric has intensified. The threats against civilian infrastructure have become explicit and public.

Meanwhile, the proxy wars continue in the shadows. Somewhere in West Africa, American-trained commandos are conducting operations directed by U.S. Special Operations headquarters. Somewhere in East Africa, drones are circling targets identified by American intelligence. Somewhere in the Indo-Pacific, a 127e program is running that the Pentagon will not even name. In the Caribbean, boats are being attacked under authorities that no one outside the Pentagon understands.

Congress could stop all of it. Article I of the Constitution gives the legislature the power not only to declare war but to fund it. A single vote to cut off appropriations for unauthorized military operations would force the executive branch to seek the democratic consent the Founders intended. But that vote is not coming. Both parties have too much invested in the machinery of permanent war - the defense contracts, the campaign contributions, the political calculus of appearing "strong" on national security.

And so the quiet wars continue. Not because they serve the national interest. Not because they make Americans safer. Not because they have been debated and approved by the people's representatives. They continue because the system that was designed to prevent them has been systematically dismantled, and because the people who benefit from permanent conflict have more power than the people who pay for it.

Trump promised no more wars. He delivered more wars than any president in modern history. The difference is that most of them are invisible - fought in countries Americans cannot find on a map, by forces Americans do not know exist, under legal authorities Americans have never heard of, at a cost Americans will be paying for decades.

That is the architecture of the quiet wars. It was not built to protect the republic. It was built to bypass it.