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Notes -
Ah, that's an interesting fact about the President's armed forces command authority. I didn't realize that the authority wasn't actually as direct-delegated as I had thought. However, isn't it equally true that issues related to this Congress-President tension over the military have never made it to the Supreme Court and have instead mostly played out practically and politically? I know there was some drama over the Iraq-era AUMF but it didn't seem to have stopped the same kind of behavior even after repeal.
I can't speak to the specific history of attempts to take court cases against wars to the Supreme Court, but the distinction between authority to command authority to act is pretty old. It's a relatively common affair for when dealing with the American military internationally for humanitarian assistance / disaster relief efforts, because your American counterpart may have the presence and the means, but not the authority to actually help, except when they can do so for just a few days, before they have to cease and wait for broader authorities, and so on.
(This is actually pretty stereotypical in UN peacekeeper deployments in humanitarian contexts, actually- the authorities for doing anything more than self-defense are often so restricted that Commanders have no legal option but to not retaliate. This is how you get things like peacekeepers best known for just standing around and not stopping belligerents fighting around tehm.)
From what I remember, most of the drama over Iraq-era AUMF for the Americans to deploy to the United States hinged over the legal appeals, i.e. whether Congress needed to call it a war (Formalists), or if a UNSC resolution was required (Internationalists), or if this it was a derivative from the Gulf War 1 authorization and cease fire (since Saddam had by this point repeatedly violated the cease fire, if the previous authorizations were still valid). The AUMF directly references the later, as well as other basis for action, but the AUMF itself was what Bush relied on for the authorization to act.
I dug this up which seems to suggest that post-repeal Biden has resorted to more classic Article II defense for anti-Houthi actions instead of Iraq AUMFs, which is interesting. Previously, I think most drone strikes and similar actions were all authorized using various AUMFs in every post-Bush administration because they were deliberately written to be very broad. Maybe I have this wrong but I think Congress has repealed all but maybe one of the AUMFs?
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