Lee Harris asks the question. An excerpt:

To us, it may seem bizarre that President John Adams could nominate another man to be Commander in Chief, and that the Senate could approve this nomination. We have all been taught the principle that “the buck stops here” when it comes to the office of the President. Our first response may well be something like, “Is it even constitutional for the President to delegate someone else as Commander in Chief?” Yet both Adams and Washington surely knew the original intent of the founders better than any of us could claim—they were the founders. John Adams’ experiment in delegating the office of Commander in Chief was short-lived. The menace of a war with France soon disappeared from the horizon and Washington returned to private life at Mount Vernon, where he died not long afterwards. Yet the experiment offers us a tantalizing, if perhaps quixotic, method by which we might avoid the impending power struggle of deciding who’s in charge of decision-making in Iraq. All that is needed is for President Bush to imitate Adams’ own example. Let him nominate a man to be Commander in Chief in his place. Let the Senate then vote on his nomination. If two-thirds of the Senators agree on him, then he becomes the sole decider of all issues relating to Iraq. If he wants more troops, he gets them. If he wants the troops pulled out, slowly or rapidly, then he gets his way on that, too. In fact, he would be permitted to have all the authority that Adams and the Senate of his time were willing to repose in Washington himself.