[alex_young]

A war? Of course not. It’s a major combat operation. Only congress can declare wars. We haven’t had any in decades. They should call it the Dept. of Major Combat Operations.

[gljiva]

Isn't the currently trendy term "special military operation"?

[SXX]

That's reserved for those lost 200,000* of personnel dead.

* Only verified number with real losses dead higher and even more crippled.

https://en.zona.media/article/2026/02/24/mapofwar

[Gud]

Aged quickly

[zabzonk]

The USA never even declared the Vietnam "conflict" as a war, or Korea, come to that, though that did at least have the backing of the UN.

[riffraff]

It's not just the US, very few wars have been formally declared after WW2, because we all learned war is bad™, so we added more and more rules (both international and national) to make it harder to do it.

But the reasons wars existed didn't go away, so this just resulted in more and more people getting killed in "special military operations" or similar things. See e.g. "Why States No Longer Declare War"[0].

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228896825_Why_State...

[consp]

As soon a country agrees to enter a conflict on a side, which the original axes declare to be a war, it's at war. You can tell the media whatever you want of course.

[dragonwriter]

The occurrence of a war is a fact whether or not it is declared, and whether or not the actor waging war does so consistent with the legal requirements their nation's laws put on doing so.

[helaoban]

I like Special Military Operation better.