Or you could read
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Paperback)
by Max Boot
Savage Wars of Peace
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/4487451.html
By Max Boot
Much as we dislike doing so, when necessary we must send our military forces on peacekeeping missions and into regional conflicts. And in the war on terror, it will be necessary. By Max Boot.
As you read this article, America is at war. On distant battlefields, from Kandahar to the Hindu Kush, American soldiers are risking their lives to defeat a shadowy enemy. But it doesn’t feel like a war does it? Industry hasn’t been mobilized, civilians haven’t been drafted. There have been some added security measures at home but nothing like the rationing and other disruptions that the United States experienced during World War II. So what kind of war is this anyway?
It’s a small war, a term used during the twentieth century to describe encounters between small numbers of Western soldiers and irregular forces in what is now called the Third World. When we think of war most of us think of the Civil War or World Wars I and II—conflicts fought by millions of citizen soldiers supported by the total mobilization of the American home front. By contrast, U.S. involvement in places like Kosovo, Bosnia, or Afghanistan barely qualifies as a war in the popular imagination. Yet, as I discovered during the course of researching my book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, such “small wars”—fought by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers—are much more typical of American history than are the handful of “total” wars that receive most of the public attention.
(snip)
You might be suprised just how often we’ve gone to war w/o a declaration
You say: "You might be suprised just how often we’ve gone to war w/o a declaration."
No actually I'm not, I know about pretty much every undeclared small 'war' we've undertaken in the last 100 years. What I am surprised about is that our Commander in Chief can rightfully call Iraq, Iran and NK The Axis of Evil. Yet when we go to "war" with one of these countries and win in three months from the start of the invasion, without the expressed written declaration of war by congress we end up not declaring victory, hanging out on our conquered territory while our other enemies (iran/syria) send in Weapons, Intel, Islamic suicide nuts into iraq, who are bleeding us daily. We meanwhile sit back hamstrung in political debate which harms our troops, divides our country and even has some twits in our congress suggest that we have lost the 'war'.
Iraq deserved a declaration of war. It's not a 'small war'