Broadly speaking, statutory oversight is how Congress ensures that Executive Branch programs meet legislative intent. The inspector general (IG) position provides Congress with a way to independently gather data on Executive Branch programs, as well as a basis for their assessment. To be effective, IGs would need to audit the performance of Executive Branch programs to identify areas for program improvement. For the U.S. military, performance auditing can theoretically result in Congressional intervention in strategy formulation and the conduct of military operations. By extension, military effectiveness might therefore be correlated to effectiveness in oversight. SIGAR provided Congress and Executive Branch leaders with sufficient opportunity to perform effective oversight of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. In order to assess SIGAR’s work and Congressional and Executive Branch response to it—the subject of subsequent chapters—it is first necessary here to establish SIGAR’s historical, legal, and political contexts.