Pentagon plans to rename Iran war 'Sledgehammer' to restart the War Powers 60-day clock

On May 12, 2026, NBC News reported that the Pentagon is preparing a contingency plan to rename the U.S. war with Iran. According to two U.S. officials cited by the network, the operation currently known inside the department as "Operation Epic Fury" — the joint U.S.–Israel air campaign launched February 28, 2026 — would be relabeled "Operation Sledgehammer" if the current ceasefire collapses and President Trump orders a resumption of major combat. A White House official told NBC that any new combat operations against Iran would be conducted "under a new name and operation," and that the administration's view is that doing so would "effectively restart the clock with Congress." Sledgehammer is not the only candidate name, the officials said, but it is the option under serious consideration.

This entry is recorded for the present-tense administration posture the reporting documents, not for the contingent future rebranding. The 1973 War Powers Resolution requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. armed forces into hostilities and, absent congressional authorization, to terminate the deployment within 60 days. The 60-day window on Operation Epic Fury closed on or about May 1, 2026. The administration's response has been to inform Congress that hostilities had terminated at the early-April ceasefire — treating the clock as paused — while the United States has continued to enforce a blockade of Iran that critics, including Antiwar.com, argue constitutes ongoing hostilities under any plain reading of the statute. The reported renaming maneuver is the operational mechanism by which the administration would assert that resumption of the same war begins a fresh 60-day window. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the interim National Security Adviser, has stated on the record that Epic Fury "is over"; the Pentagon's continued internal use of the Epic Fury designation suggests the public framing and the operational reality have come apart.

The abuse-of-power character of this story does not depend on inference about motive. A White House official explicitly told NBC News that operating under a new name would, from the administration's viewpoint, restart the congressional-authorization clock. That is, on the record, a stated strategy to evade a statutory check on executive war-making — the mapping to bypassing-congress is direct, while ignoring-statutory-requirements captures the paused-clock interpretation already in effect and executive-overreach captures the broader claim of unilateral war-making authority that the maneuver instantiates. Congress's response so far has been ambiguous: the House failed on May 15 to advance a War Powers Resolution by a 212–212 tie, and House Republican leadership pulled a follow-up vote on May 21 when absences appeared poised to tip the resolution to passage. That sequence is contextual rather than the abuse itself, but it goes to the live constitutional question the renaming maneuver is designed to neutralize.