Amerikalı Gaziler Askeri Öncelikli Dış Politikanın Bedelini Ortaya Koyuyor

American veterans know the cost of a military-first foreign policy

My nearly 32-year career in uniform has taught me many lessons. One of the most important is that the gap between operational military success and strategic political outcomes can be significant and is rarely, if at all, closed by increased military activity. It is common to invoke military voices when arguing for military force and to treat restraint as a “civilian” position. But the reverse is often true. Those who have served, and seen and felt the impacts of warfare, are the most cautious about resorting to it. Leading with, and relying on, the military has never been a foundational U.S. value. Throughout much of its history, the country has rightly regarded the use of force as a last resort. In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned that "overgrown military establishments" were "inauspicious to liberty." U.S. professional military education teaches Carl von Clausewitz’s theory that military force must remain subordinate to political ends. Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that military force should only be used to achieve clear, definable objectives supported by public opinion. Other retired military officers, including those cited by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel Sjursen in Paths of Dissent, have offered similar arguments. The imbalance in U.S. statecraft The U.S. military is taught to think about national power through the DIME or DIMEFIL models: diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement. In theory, those elements are designed to work together. But, in practice, the post-9/11 wars have left the military far more ready and resourced than its civilian counterparts, which are the elements necessary to shape political outcomes. This imbalance is documented by past and current funding requests and appropriations bills. Recent military budgets are nearly $900 billion a year, with upwards of another $600 billion requested in 2026. By contrast, international affairs budgets (funding diplomacy, development, and security assistance) are closer to $50–60 billion. The disparity is therefore roughly 15-to-1, or upwards of 25-to-1 if indeed a $1.5 trillion defense budget is approved. In “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything,” Rosa Brooks bluntly states the challenge: when the military is the only fully resourced instrument of foreign policy, every problem starts to look like it has a military solution. In 2008, two colleagues and I published a complementary argument in American Diplomacy, citing then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates' appeal for "a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security." In the nearly two decades since, the spending gap has only widened, and diplomacy and development funding has been cut to historic lows. Too often, military operations are initiated to “send a message,” and troop deployments are announced without clear political aims or criteria for their withdrawal. This over-reliance on military solutions has become an expensive habit. Where military tools meet political reality After an initial decade in the infantry, I spent most of my career working at the civilian-military seam of multiple U.S. agencies and with foreign military forces operating under their own political environments. That experience offers a unique perspective — one the restraint community draws on too rarely. U.S. law divides foreign military engagement into three distinct categories of assistance, each with their own unique legal and political requirements and associated costs: training and equipping; advising and assisting; and direct employment of U.S. forces. Several observations apply across all three: First, security cooperation relationships tend to outlast the political rationales that created them. The State Department's 2024 International Security Advisory Board stated the problem concisely: “Security cooperation commitments are easy to initiate but remarkably difficult to draw down, restructure, or terminate responsibly when a partner’s strategic alignment degrades.” Second, over time, every relationship opens a gap between Washington's intent and what is achieved on the ground. One key analysis in 2017 described it as a principal-agent problem or the “divergence between the outcome the principal seeks and the outcome the principal obtains.” The difference can be reduced only when those managing the relationship frankly acknowledge that its original objectives are no longer being met. One example of this, according to the Journal of Strategic Studies report, is that despite massive assistance from the U.S. during the Iraq War, the Iraqi Security Forces that emerged from the training mission “proved far less proficient than was hoped.” Third, military forces operate inside specific political environments that they did not create or fully understand. While training and equipping can improve foreign security force capabilities, these efforts have little influence on civil-military relations, corruption, or other governance challenges. A 2018 comparative study, “Building Militaries in Fragile States,” and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction both drew the same conclusions from different environments. When civilian instruments of national power are not resourced to support a functioning political environment, the military takes on tasks it is neither designed nor trained to do. I served in Iraq when the U.S. military, the Iraqi army, and the Kurdish peshmerga built Combined Security Mechanisms along one of Iraq's most dangerous fault lines in 2010, creating a series of checkpoints and shared patrols that kept armed actors who did not trust each other operating toward a common purpose. They were designed as a temporary solution, not a permanent presence, and they helped manage a security seam; they could not resolve the political disputes beneath it. The lesson was not that U.S. forces should have stayed, but rather that when a military operation concludes, fully resourced diplomatic and political entities need to be deployed. By June 2014, the Islamic State was able to exploit that seam as it seized Mosul and drove toward Baghdad. Restraint as strategic discipline Restraint means using U.S. military power in a disciplined, deliberate way to achieve clear objectives grounded in an honest assessment of likely costs and consequences. The foundation of responsible statecraft is that foreign policy should not be organized around the objective of global military dominance. In “A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy,” Barry Posen argues for a strategy focused on protecting core security interests. But restraint is not just theoretical; it must be practically applied. It cannot be achieved when the military is fully funded but the civilian elements of national security are under-resourced. The civil-military divide is important. The decision to use force belongs to elected civilian leaders, and the military should not get a veto. The military's obligation is to offer its best operational advice, execute lawful orders, and respect constitutional authority. This is a discipline running from former Secretary of State George Marshall's example through Kori Schake's contemporary analysis. Veterans don’t have more authority to decide, but they enjoy more political space to speak out. What those who have served add to the discussion is perspective: not of how recent conflicts should have ended sooner, but rather whether the military must keep shouldering the burdens for which other, now severely depleted instruments of national security were originally built. The cost of a military-first policy U.S. wars and conflicts over the past quarter century have resulted in an estimated 30,000 service-member and veteran suicides (more than four times the number killed in operations), and veteran long-term care costs are one of the largest components of military compensation. Defense budgets that outgrow those of their civilian counterparts are not fiscally responsible; the differences result in even greater costs tomorrow. Those costs are largely paid by the post-9/11 military cohort as well as their families and communities. I have seen firsthand a part of the price we pay through adaptive scuba diving instruction with disabled veterans whose injuries result from policy decisions made years before. A military-dominated foreign policy, without clearly defined political goals and adequately resourced civilian institutions to achieve them, will result in many more veterans needing care for decades to come. A country that leans so heavily on its military owes it to those who serve to fund and resource the other elements of national security, so when military force is deployed it is used appropriately and not because the other tools of national security are not ready. Political leaders protect the military service members they deploy by ensuring this balance exists. Force can be a precise instrument, but its consequences can be unpredictable. Treating the military as the first tool of statecraft, while the other instruments of national security are under-resourced, will remain costly in both dollars and lives.