Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a myriad of books, articles, and speeches have examined the creeping militarization of American foreign policy. In 2008, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly lamented the reliance on military tools over civilian diplomacy, advocated a major increase in the State Department budget, and emphasized the importance of the military being—and being seen to be—subordinate to civilian agencies and departments. After staying on at the start of the Obama administration, Secretary Gates testified and appeared together with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to advocate for a stronger State Department, better integration of their departments’ efforts and to emphasize the State Department’s primacy in U.S. foreign policy.

Despite these efforts, the militarization of U.S. foreign policy appears to be expanding. Why is this the case?

It would be wrong to assume individual or bureaucratic ambition is responsible. Any activity, initiative, or plan the military undertakes derives from an assigned task or responsibility, and their conduct is institutionally constrained by official guidance and doctrine; the military’s foreign engagement and policy advocacy is no different. The military defines diplomacy and engagement as part of its organizational mission and requires it by operational doctrine. In essence, the military orders itself to pursue its own foreign engagement in ways that can bleed over into broader U.S. foreign policy.

The U.S. military’s stated purpose is “to protect our Nation and win our wars.” It may be a surprise, then, that the National Military Strategy’s vision for achieving that warfighting function includes “support[ing] diplomatic, informational, and economic activities that promote our enduring national interests.” Some of the formal military objectives that result have clear foreign policy overlap like deterring aggression and supporting global partners and allies. As the military defines it, even “winning wars” has a substantial diplomatic component that is separate from, and sometimes larger than, (though notionally complementary with) the State Department’s efforts.

The key to understanding the military’s foreign policy activity is its operational Phasing Model. The model conceives a six-phase spectrum of military operations:

• phase 0 – shape, includes peacetime operations and engagement to both prevent the conditions for crisis and enable the success of potential combat operations;
• phase 1 – deter, includes specific, targeted deterrence activity to prevent the outbreak of hostilities;
• phase 2 – seize initiative, is the transition to combat if deterrence fails;
• phase 3 – dominate, is the conduct of major combat operations;
• phase 4 – stabilize, is instituting post-combat political and civil services and stability; and
• phase 5 – enable civil authority, transitions military administration back to civilian or local authorities.

Fully, four of these phases drive the military’s foreign policy activity: the two phases that precede conflict, ‘Shape’ and ‘Deter,’ and the two phases that follow conflict, ‘Stabilize’ and ‘Enable Civil Authority.’

Shaping and Deterring

The military sees a variety of engagement activities—what one might call military diplomacy—as crucial to the shaping and deterring phases of a conflict. Joint military doctrine states: “Maintaining peace and preventing conflict/crises are as important as waging major combat operations. Consequently, in addition to crisis response, the future joint force must be more involved in proactive engagement/crisis prevention.” Such operations and foreign engagement activities could be aimed at spreading democracy, promoting peace, stability, and goodwill, or even destabilizing adversarial regimes.  Ideally, this effort would prevent crises from emerging through peaceful resolution, or by building a willing and capable network of regional partners and allies to deter aggression (and who would also meaningfully participate in any potential operation).

In the event military conflict becomes necessary, combat forces require “operational access” to the crisis region. Access permits forces to rapidly and safely deploy, including a base of operations, transit permissions and logistical support. Waiting to establish partner relationships and negotiate access at the outset of a crisis is extremely risky. Thus, the military recognizes that “success in combat often will depend on efforts to shape favorable access conditions in advance, which in turn requires a coordinated interagency approach.”

The military achieves those ‘access conditions’ by engaging with partner countries and establishing “forward” presence in the region of interest. Activities like building relationships with key foreign leadership or policy institutions, conducting exercises with foreign militaries, and providing training and equipment to partners helps ensure that the U.S. military can rely on access to conduct combat operations in the region, and ideally secure an effective partner.

Military access and partnership requirements all require engagement beyond the parameters of the Department of Defense (the aforementioned “interagency approach”). The military nominally sees itself as “supporting” other agencies and departments in national foreign policy during peacetime. However, the need to pursue “access” and prepare for potential conflict before the fact means the military, in practice, not only conducts its own independent foreign engagement, but also needs the diplomatic services of the State Department for its own ends.

Stabilization and Enabling Civil Authority

National strategic objectives are not met if battlefield victories do not subsequently produce a safe and functioning political environment. To that end, phases 4 and 5 require the military to “provide security, initial humanitarian assistance, limited governance, restoration of essential public services, and similar types of assistance” after combat operations are complete. As the post-conflict insurgency and violence in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate, these phases can be even more complex, costly, or even more dangerous than the initial combat operations themselves.

Meeting post-conflict civic needs means the military must have a stable of ostensibly non-combat capabilities that were more traditionally the province of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Rosa Brooks, a former Counselor to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, is the author of a new book about the problem of the blurring definitions of war and peace, and describes her experience at the Pentagon discovering the extraordinary range of civil functions the military fills: programs to prevent sexual violence in the Congolese military, instituting agricultural reform in Afghanistan, promoting micro-enterprise for women, and helping contain the Ebola outbreak in Africa and providing healthcare in Malaysia, among other examples.

The military has thus defined the scope of its mission and responsibilities in ways that require deep foreign engagement and the tailoring of national foreign policy to achieve success.

Subsequent posts will examine how the military’s advocacy for conducting “shaping” operations, engaging and building up desired foreign partners, and preparing to conduct post-conflict civil functions affects the national foreign policy conversation, and how the weight of the military’s efforts and capacity influences the de facto conduct of that policy.

Steven Stashwick is a writer and analyst based in New York City. He spent ten years on active duty as a U.S. naval officer with multiple deployments to the Western Pacific. He writes about maritime and security affairs in East Asia and serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve. 

The views expressed in this post reflect those of the author and not that of the EastWest Institute.​