If you can operate under normal civilian law, you are not yet at war. If warrants and judges and men in suits can handle it, you are not yet at war.
If you are at war, you have moved beyond normal civilian law. War is the state of affairs that exists when civilian law is no longer adequate to the circumstance. That is what war is.
When you declare war, you are making a public acknowlegdement of that fact, and you are putting your own people on notice that for the time being, against a defined threat, you are going to do whatever it takes, you are going to identify the threat, identify its support system, and then you are going to destroy it. You are going to re-shape the facts on the ground, overthrow governments, re-draw borders, push whole peoples from one place to another, and kill anyone who won't surrender.
When the circumstances have been re-shaped, the die-hards are dead, and their pals have given up the fight, when in other words it has become possible to return to civilian law, by definition the war is over.
Yes but the liberals have a short memory. They forgot we are still at war.