William McRaven spent four decades in the U.S. military as a Navy SEAL, a four-star admiral, and head of U.S. Special Operations Command
Podcast
A Warrior’s View of Why War Fails
A Conversation with William McRaven
Published on October 29, 2026DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Bill, it’s wonderful to have you on the podcast and to have your very powerful essay leading off our new issue.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Thanks, Dan. Great to be with you.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
The essay is called The Limits of American Power: U.S. Strategy and the Delusion of Force. It both has really ambitious scope and I think gets at some of the fundamental failures of American statecraft, not just under Trump today, but also more broadly to quote the piece, the Trump administration’s use of military force against the Islamic Republic since February 28 offers a particularly glaring example of a mistake that has often characterized American strategy in recent decades. The results, not surprisingly, have been bad for both U.S. interests and for the Middle East. And of course, you go from there to warn that this might get worse and we’ll get to that warning.
We’ll devote much of this conversation to the more general mistake, but Iran has of course been the dominant foreign policy crisis for the past nine months at least. So I want to start with what you describe as the most glaring of the problems with how American policymakers think about war and power.
As a way of getting at that big question, if you had been a senior military leader, if you’d been back in the military ahead of the February 28 strikes on Iran and President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had asked for your advice, what would you have told them?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
The one thing, Dan, and I’m certainly not an apologist for this president, but I actually understand the allure of wanting to change the regime in Iran. I mean, this is a horrible regime. Let’s make no mistake about it. Since 1979, they have threatened their neighbors. They have used state-sponsored terrorism. They have probably killed hundreds or thousands of American soldiers and our allies through their proxies. They’ve killed tens of thousands of their own people. So we just need to set the record straight that this is a horrible regime that nobody should want to remain in place.
And so I can understand before February 28th, if somebody came to President Trump and said, look, Hamas has been badly battered in Gaza, Hezbollah is down in Lebanon, the Shia militias in Iraq and Syria have been battered badly. And oh by the way, they just had an uprising in Iran where tens of thousands of Iranian citizens were killed. If you’re ever going to change the regime, now is the time to do it. And I actually understand the allure and the draw of wanting to do that.
The problem is, and to your question, if I were a senior military leader advising the president, I would’ve recognized where we are, but I would’ve said, “Mr. President, there’s three things you need to understand. First, regime change is really hard. And if you think taking out the supreme leader is going to change the regime, you don’t understand the IRGC. The IRGC is broad, it is deep, it is in the neighborhoods, and they’ve been waiting for this since 1979. They’ve been building to this.”
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
This is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most elite military part of the Islamic Republic.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Correct. And so this idea that somehow taking out the clerics would all of a sudden change the regime, the answer is yes, it might, but it would probably make them even more hard line. So regime change is hard. The second I would’ve said is, “Look, we’ve never bombed our way to victory in the history of the American military. There is always a time when you’re going to have to put troops on the ground and own the ground that your enemy holds dear.” I mean, that is a statement I put, I think, in the piece a couple of times.
It’s fundamental to military victory. And of course, we were never going to do that. Iran is two and a half times the size of my state of Texas here. This would be very, very challenging. And of course, the third thing they would’ve told the president is you never, ever, ever talk about Iran without talking about the Strait of Hormuz, and they will close the straits as soon as you make your first strike.
So those three things I think would have argued against doing the strikes that the president did on February 28th. I understand the thinking that went into it, but the counter argument I think was powerful enough, should have dissuaded him from doing that.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
And if they’d come back to you and said, thank you, sir, for that military advice, but we think this is important enough to do and we’re going to go ahead, what do we need to do in order to secure the strait? That of course has been the center of the conflict for much of the last eight or nine months. You’ve, I imagine, spent a fair amount of time in that geography and sailing through the strait. What would’ve been necessary to secure it?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, I mean the strait, people don’t realize how challenging a problem set this is. The strait’s about 21 miles wide. You’ve got a couple of main corridors going close to the Iranian side, of course close to the Omani side. But of course, the Iranians would have mined the straits. This is what they have done historically.
Mines are hard to clear and our mine countermeasure capability was deactivated a year or so ago with a couple of mine warfare ships we had. You could have brought them back into play. We do have some mine capability out in the Gulf, not as sophisticated as the mine countermeasure ships, but we have a capability. But it was going to take weeks or months to clear the mines. And there’s a lot of different types of mines. There’s floating mines, there’s seabed mines, there’s influence mines, there’s contact mines. There’s a lot of mines out there that the Iranians could have employed.
So this threat of mining the straits would’ve been pretty significant. And we would’ve told the president, “Yes sir, we can do this, but it’s going to put our forces at risk if the Iranians want to engage us because we’re going to have to be in the straits at the time and probably vulnerable and it’s going to take time and we can’t guarantee 100 percent clearance.” So that’s essentially what the military would’ve told them, that there is risk involved in doing this. We can do it, but it comes at a pretty steep price.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
One focus of your critique, both of Iran, but of other American uses of force in the past few decades especially, is this problem of shifting objectives that we’ll start with one and then go to another. Let me just quote the line in the piece here, which makes it very clear. “The war was launched without a clear rationale and with a constantly shifting set of objectives from changing Tehran’s regime and squelching its nuclear ambitions to more recently reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t closed until the war started.”
Why is that problem of objectives so central and why is that so hard to get right? It seems in some ways very basic, but it’s obviously quite challenging in practice for American policymakers.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, it is. And of course I’m focused on Iran in this particular case in the piece, but make no mistake about it. I mean, every conflict we have had in the last 40 or 50 years, there have been kind of shifting objectives. And part of it is you go into the fight thinking you know exactly what you want to do and then the enemy gets a vote and things begin to change. And when things change, you either have to change with them or you’re not going to achieve your original objective.
So I think when the Trump administration came in, they said, “Well, this is first about regime change.” And then later on Trump says, “I don’t really care about regime change.” It was about the nuclear program and then it was like, “Well, we don’t have to worry about that.” I decimated that back in Midnight Hammer the year before. There’s nothing left but nuclear dust. The Straits of Hormuz, we’ve got plenty of oil. So there was a constant back and forth between, well, what exactly is the goal?
Of course, he has settled on the nuclear program and I’m fine with that. Yes, we don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. No question about it. But in doing that, of course, he initially said, “Well, we’re going to change the regime.” When he took out the supreme leader, the regime was still there. “Well, we’re going to take out the nuclear program, but we know that they still have a nuclear capability somewhere. They’re building nuclear capabilities somewhere in maybe Pickaxe Mountain.” So there’s a lot of things that we have had trouble getting to a conclusion on, and this is, at least in Trump’s public narrative, the goalposts have moved a number of times.
Now, I’m not sure that in the military objectives that they have fundamentally changed. The military knew that you had to destroy the regime as best you could. You had to take out the nuclear program, you had to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. I think the military has certainly tried to do that and had some success in those areas, but the public narrative with Trump has gone back and forth. And so the American people are, well, you talk about regime change, but the regime’s still there. You talk about opening the Straits of Hormuz, but it’s been closed until recently, of course, we’ve got oil flowing again. So these moving goalposts make it hard for the American people and for the world to understand exactly the direction the administration’s headed.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
We’re in a moment ahead of the midterm elections here where there’s lots of chatter and speculation about what the administration might do following the election and how Iran might respond, how Iran is preparing. If you were back in the military, if you were part of that discussion, what would you do now? What do you think the best outcome is for the US?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, the problem is we don’t have a lot of good options, Dan. The fact of the matter is there’s still a lot of targets out there, make no mistake about it, but they would be bridges and power plants and things that are no longer going to be able to influence the outcome of the fight.
As I’ve said a couple of times, we are in a classic military stalemate. And by that, it doesn’t mean that either us or Iran can’t continue to strike and hit targets. The question is, will any of those make a difference to the final outcome of this war? And I think the answer is no.
So yes, after the midterms, we could open up and start strikes again. Do I think that’s fundamentally going to change the outcome? I do not. The Iranians, of course, will respond. They will go after soft targets. So with our Arab allies, they’ll hit desalinization plants and they’ll hit refineries and they will hit other power plants and LNG plants. And so they’re going to come after our Arab allies and make it hard on us. They will also, of course, try to hit one of our capital ships. And that of course, were something like that to happen, it would change the entire dynamic of the fight, I think.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
And what about the Houthis, which have become the other really challenging dimension of this? The Saudis and Emiratis at various points with U.S. support have been fighting the Houthis for more than a decade. It’s pretty close to existential for them, and yet the Houthis seem to still retain the military advantage. What would you do there and why is that so hard? It seems striking how persistent a problem that’s been.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, I’m glad you raised it, Dan, and I should have mentioned that right at the outset. Of course, when you talk about Iran, you can’t talk about Iran without talking about their proxies, and their proxies of course are Hamas and Hezbollah, and of course the Houthis, and then the Shia militias that are still in Iraq and Syria to some degree.
So the Houthis have always been... Now they don’t see themselves as the little brother to Iran. They see themselves as a separate entity, but yes, they are going to listen to Iran. They’re going to help in this fight. They’re going to try to control the Bab al-Mandab, that crucial waterway out of the Red Sea, which they have done. We always have these pictures in our mind that the Houthis are these very unsophisticated Arabs fighting in Yemen. The fact of the matter is they are very sophisticated in some regard.
They have a pretty good capability in terms of their ballistic missile capability, their drone capability, which is being supplied by Iran in many cases. So we shouldn’t underestimate the nature of this partnership between Iran and the Houthis. And if the U.S. strikes Iran again, I guarantee you the Houthis will play a role in this. Maybe it will be to continue to keep the Saudis off guard and strike the Saudi refineries down there in the south, keep Yanbu at risk, which is the primary port in which most of the oil is flowing out of Saudi back up through the Suez.
So all of this becomes problematic for us in terms of can we solve the Iran problem by power, by force? And my answer right now is I do not think we can. This is the limits of American power. We have the most powerful military, I offer in the piece, in the history of the world, and I believe that to be true, but that doesn’t mean that we can win every fight just because we have the strength of the American military.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
I want to get to the bigger question, really the bigger argument of the piece, which is that this is not just about Iran. I’m going to read a lot of passages from the piece because there are a lot of really good ones. So if you’ll indulge me, there’s one that I wanted to focus on here. You write, “A tendency to wish away the limits of power accounted for some of the greatest mistakes of U.S. statecraft during the Cold War with Vietnam the clearest and most consequential example, yet despite an apparent commitment to internalizing the lessons of that overreach, this American delusion, our excessive faith in the capacity of military power to achieve victory and thereby fundamentally political ends, has gotten worse rather than better, especially in the past quarter-century.”
Why has this been such a persistent challenge for American policymakers? And you make very clear in the piece, this is not just about political leaders. This is about military leaders, career diplomats and others. It runs through the entire system.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah. A lot of this I think has to do with technology and this persistent belief that with every new technology, it’s a little bit of the answer we were looking for in solving the hardest of the military problems. So when you went from cavalry to motorized, when you went to the single shot to the Gatling gun, when we went to pick something, pick some technology, there is always this sense on the part of military leaders that aha, here it is. This is going to change the fundamental nature of war. And we’re seeing it today, of course, with drones and autonomous vehicles and this idea, and AI, this idea that somehow the technology is going to change the fundamental nature of war. And I contend in the piece, it will not.
The fundamental nature of war has been the same for as long as men have been fighting men. It changes the tactics on the battlefield, absolutely. And we see that in Ukraine, we see that in Yemen, in Iran. It’s always going to change the tactics on the battlefield, but it won’t change the fundamental nature of war. So every time we get some new revolution in military affairs, we believe that aha, we’ve got the power, this power will overcome the geography and the willingness of the enemy to fight and all the things I mentioned in the piece that are fundamental to winning a war. And we tend to fall into this trap.
I think about it in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, my guys were going out on missions to give your audience an idea. So I have clearly, in my mind, the most talented, well-trained, well-equipped force in the world. They would go out on missions in Afghanistan. We’ve got a combat air patrol overhead of F-18s. We’ve got artillery on call. I’ve got drones that are looking at the situation on the battlefield. We’ve got a command center that is monitoring every movement of the guys, and we routinely got hammered by guys with AK-47s and flip-flops, right?
Now, once again, we won all those fights, but that may have been irrelevant. So the point is, we think that all of this stuff is going to give us a decisive advantage. It clearly gives you a tactical advantage on the battlefield. Make no mistake about that. I mean, having drones, having night vision goggles, having these things give you a tactical advantage. But in the long run, if you’re going to be victorious, you’re going to have to do the things that I outline in the piece, I think.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
You make very clear in the piece that you were subject to this failure to appreciate the limits. You don’t exempt yourself. If you go back to the time you were in Afghanistan, the time you were in charge of special operations command, can you describe the psychology of these years when you thought one more tactical victory, one more tweak to strategy might get you there?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, of course. I mean, again, part of it is you get, I think I mentioned in the article, this desire to win. We are the American military. We are going to win. Make no mistake about it. Again, we’ve got the best military, we’ve got the most talented people we’ve got right on our side, we’re going to win. And so when you find yourself in this situation where we don’t seem to be winning at a pace we thought we were going to be winning at, well then obviously, we just need more.
We need more men on the battlefield, we need more airplanes, we need more drones. And as I said in the article, I mean, I fell into this trap as well in Afghanistan. I felt if only I had more rangers, more SEALs, more Delta operators, and I could put them in more places and I had more drone orbits, I could do a better job of managing and fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Again, it gives you a tactical advantage, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t decisive, clearly.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
There’s been a lot of argument in recent days as we’ve hit the five-year mark since the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, looking back at the moments when America might have done something different, and there’s obviously lots of debate about when that is. I think probably the one that most people focus on is the period right after the death of Osama bin Laden. You oversaw that raid, executed that raid as the head of special operations.
If you could go back to that moment, was that a time when we should have really reevaluated our commitment to Afghanistan and started the drawdown and accepted that we’d achieved what we could achieve and that there wasn’t more to do?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, I actually think that the moment probably came long before then. Look, none of us thought that killing bin Laden would, again, fundamentally change the nature of the fight in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was still conducting operations, which I think did surprise us. We thought at this point in time he was probably a figurehead. This was more about bringing bin Laden to justice. And so we still knew that al-Qaeda was still certainly in the federally administered tribal areas, that they were working with the Taliban, that they had a network globally. So this was not going to stop the fight against al-Qaeda.
It certainly was, make no mistake about it, it was a historic moment in the fight, but I think on the ground, our issue at this point in time and back to the changing goalposts, we had gone in there to get rid of al-Qaeda and to put a stable government in place. We did that pretty quickly. I mean, you think about the Marines and the Green Beret and the CIA and everybody that was on the ground in Afghanistan early, we get rid of the Taliban regime, Karzai comes in, and that could have been a time for us to say, “Okay, we’ve achieved our objectives.” The problem was we said, “But the issue is the Taliban could still provide al-Qaeda a safe haven.” And that was the critical mistake we made.
Yes, the Taliban could provide al-Qaeda a safe haven, therefore we have to eliminate the Taliban so al-Qaeda can never have a safe haven in Afghanistan. The problem was al-Qaeda had a safe haven just about everywhere. I mean, al-Qaeda had a safe haven, again, in Pakistan, in parts of East Africa, in North Africa. I mean, so it was flawed logic on our part. But again, at the time, it’s easy to look back and say, “Well, that was a stupid mistake early on,” but at the time it seemed the right thing to do. And this is, again, I’m always a little bit careful about casting too much doubt on the decisions people made at the time because you’re constrained at the time by the facts you have in front of you. And at the time it was like, “Okay, we got Karzai in power, but we got to keep him in power and the Taliban are always trying to kill him, so let’s see what we can do to keep the Taliban at bay long enough for Karzai to establish a solid government and then maybe we can leave.”
But then after every single year goes on and you haven’t solved that problem, now you’re stuck in the middle of a long-term fight, which we were. And as I said, I’m just as guilty as anyone. I mean, I thought the longer we stayed there, the more opportunity we could have to build up the Afghan national security forces, the more time we had to get rid of the Taliban, et cetera. It just wasn’t true.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Is there something uniquely American to your mind about this optimistic disregard for the limits of American power? Is this something you see in military and civilian leadership more broadly? I guess you could go to World War I as another moment where new technologies made a lot of people think that war would be short.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, I think the reason it seems to be more American is because we have a bigger, more powerful military than anybody in the world. So you don’t see it from Luxembourg. You don’t see it from, in many cases, the French or the modern-day Germans in the sense that their militaries aren’t strong enough to be able to handle some of the massive crisis and conflicts that we deal with. But we believe that our military is so good, and again, it is, that we can overcome any problem out there.
The smaller militaries, they know that they can handle certain conflicts and certain crisis, but they don’t have this belief that they could take on the entire Taliban or al-Qaeda because their military isn’t big enough, so they don’t fall into the trap. And I think this is the difference. So yes, I would say the Germans of World War I, the Germans of World War II, they fell into that trap.
And anybody that has a powerful military that thinks they can overcome these problems with force will fall into that same trap. And today, we are the most powerful military. That’s why we continue to fall into this trap.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Given the likelihood that we will continue to have a powerful military in the years ahead and perhaps a more powerful one given technology and budgets, how do you ensure that we are assessing costs, honestly? So much of this is about this tendency to see a goal that might be alluring in the abstract and be persuaded that we can achieve it at low cost, as you said, with regard to Iran in that first answer. How do you build the mental habits or national decision-making process to avoid that?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Well, that frankly was the basis of the article. And I go back to, of course, Desert Shield and Desert Storm. And in my five decades from the ‘70s through 2010 of spending time in the military, that was the best use of the military and political and intelligence that I’ve ever seen. And so I would offer this as a, maybe not a recipe, but certainly something every leader, military policy leaders should think about before they go into a conflict.
And of course, the first thing is, do we have the moral high ground? And this is a very, very important starting point. I talk about high ground in a military term is when you have a dominant position over the enemy. And the moral high ground means you are in a righteous place if you’re going to go after and attack an enemy. So in the case of Saddam Hussein in 1990, he invades Kuwait. And this was, of course, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there’s this new world order, and now all of a sudden we think that there’s going to be peace and Saddam Hussein decides he’s going to break that and invade a neighbor just because he can.
And so President Bush understood that this can’t stand. We just can’t have neighbors invading neighbors. And everybody in the world saw this. And there was an understanding that this was illegal and immoral, and therefore it needed a response. This was the moral high ground. And so I would offer when President Bush went after the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, he had the moral high ground. No question about it. Every American, everybody in the world would’ve said, “You bet. Go eliminate al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.” And so I have absolutely no issues with his decision to do that. But then of course you’ve got to, as I point out in Desert Storm, there’s a whole bunch of things that got to follow that.
You have to build the coalition, which again, President Herbert Walker Bush did magnificently. You have to understand the limits of the enemy that you’re fighting. They will always fight. People think that, well, they’re just going to throw rose petals when we come in. Well, no. No adversary, no country wants to be overtaken by another country. So I don’t care whether it’s us going into Iran or us going into Iraq, the enemy will fight. You have to understand the nature of terrain. You have to understand why we need good leadership. So this becomes, I think, a little bit of points to consider before the next conflict we might find ourselves in.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
We’ll return to my conversation with Bill McRaven after a short break.
It’s striking the emphasis you put on the moral high ground in the piece looking at both the success in your reading of the Gulf War and some of the subsequent failures. Who determines what the moral high ground is? Obviously, George W. Bush though he had the moral, probably still believes he had the moral high ground in the Iraq war in 2003. Certainly, Israeli leaders now would say they have the moral high ground in Gaza, but have lost that argument of much of the world. How do you think through that question? It’s obviously not a science, right?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, it’s not a science, but it’s also a two-part question. So you generally have the moral high ground if you can build the coalition around whatever you’re trying to do, right? So you take a look at President Trump in terms of going after Iran. Now look, nobody wants Iran to get a nuclear weapon, but I think it was a little bit of a ruse. I mean, I don’t think Iran was going to have a nuclear weapon the next week or the next month, but this was the cause célèbre for us going into Iran this time. And everybody questioned whether or not that was really the reason we were going into Iran. And therefore, he couldn’t build a coalition because there were a lot of skeptics out there. And then of course, it doesn’t help when you humiliate foreign leaders in the Oval Office and you insult them, and then you want them to come together to help you.
So I think the moral high ground and building the coalition are part and parcel to each other. So you’ll know you have the moral high ground when the world gets behind you. And so with Saddam Hussein, we even had a huge Arab contingency going after Saddam Hussein. So it was pretty remarkable. And of course, we also had the Russians and the Chinese.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
This is in 1991, not in 2003.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah. I’m sorry. Yeah, thank you. This is ‘90 and ‘91 with President Herbert Walker Bush. So he knew he had the moral high ground. Intuitively, he understood that. But then by building the coalition with just about everybody internationally, then that reinforced the fact that, “Yeah, I think we do have the moral high ground.” If you think you have the moral high ground, but you can’t get anybody behind you, maybe you better rethink whether or not that’s the moral high ground or not.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Secretary of Defense Hegseth has seemed almost flagrant in his disregard for these questions of ethics and morality. His line I think is that the U.S. military should be guided by maximum lethality, not tepid legality. You’ve focused a lot on lethality in the course of your military career. How do you see any actual tension there? If you could have the argument with Pete Hegseth about this, what is he missing? What does he not understand here?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, he’s missing the fundamental nature of who we are as Americans, and that’s it. Look, we always want to try to be the good guy. And sometimes being the good guy, or all times in being a good guy, you need to follow the law of armed conflict, you need to follow the rules of engagement, you need to do things that, again, moral, legal and ethical. War is ugly.
Yes, you want to have maximum lethality, but you don’t want to be killing innocent civilians. All that does is it incites the enemy even more and makes the fight even harder. But if you’re in a position where you can focus on just the bad guys, you can use the law of armed conflict in a way that seems to be appropriate, then you’re going to help build a coalition.
If every time you go in there, you devastate a large swath of enemy terrain, and in doing so, you end up killing civilians in the course of doing that, then you’re not going to find a whole lot of people that want to be part of this coalition. And so he’s missing the understanding that as Americans and as American soldiers, you don’t want to wake up 20 years from a fight and think that you did something that was egregious that was against, again, the law of armed conflict or what you know to be morally right.
Yes, you’re going to have to get out there and kill people. That is the nature of war. It’s what makes it ugly, but let’s kill the right people. Let’s save the other people. Let’s do what we think is right because at the end of the day, this is America’s strength. If people feel like our values don’t matter anymore, our values as war fighters, our values as Americans, then they’re not going to be there when we need them.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
Are there changes you would make in either the way the military approaches this or American leadership more broadly to restore this commitment to values to the U.S. military and to the use of force?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah. I mean, the great thing is most of these, when we think about the law of armed conflict and we think about the value-based system, this is where the tactical level comes into play. This is where the colonels talk to lieutenant colonels who talk to the majors, who talk to the captains, who talk to lieutenants, who talk to the sergeants, who talk to the privates, that sort of thing. And this is where it’s really important.
At the end of the day, the policymakers may or may not care about what is moral, legal, and ethical in the prosecution of the war. I think they do most of the time. But what really matters is when the sergeant tells the corporal or the private, “I need you to go do this.” And that’s where we need to make sure that the law of armed conflict, the rules of engagement have been reinforced so that the guys on the battlefield are doing the right thing morally and legally.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
When it comes to your forward-looking concern about why this dynamic, this disregard for the limits of power might get worse, one of the things you focus on is the civil military dynamic. So much of the focus right now is obviously on Trump and his, let’s say, idiosyncratic approach to policy and strategy, but there really is a striking, unsettling warning in the piece about the civil military dynamic and how that gets worse.
Talk about the concerns there as you’ve watched both Hegseth and Trump over the past couple of years and what that might mean for that chain of command and that decision making that you were just getting at.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah. And I’m not sure I’ve said it in this piece, but I’ve said it publicly before. Look, the president and the secretary have absolutely the right to relieve or to fire any general or admiral or senior officer that they think is not adhering to the standards that they’ve set. And I don’t have any problem with that.
I mean, you can go back to Lincoln, Truman and in more recent times, Bob Gates made the decision to fire the secretary of the Air Force and the chief of staff of the Air Force. But in every single case, these guys went forward and they explained to the American public why they were making these decisions.
And so if a senior officer is not performing to standards, absolutely, make sure you get rid of them. But in the case of Hegseth, the 30 or so officers that he and the president have retired early or fired or whatever it happens to be, there was no reason given other than they weren’t a good cultural fit, which of course, what it really meant was, well, they had been hired by Biden or Mark Milley had been a friend of theirs, pick something.
It was purely political. I mean, guys like General Randy George and Chris Donahue, but Lisa Franchetti, CQ Brown, I mean the list goes on and on and on and on. I know all of these officers. Many of them worked for me. They were fabulous officers. And so no reason was given for their firing other than they don’t match the culture of what the president and the secretary want.
The problem with this is not that the next man stepping up isn’t going to be capable. The next person that steps up will be absolutely capable. They will know how to run aircraft carriers and submarines and how to fly airplanes. They are going to ensure that the American military stays as lethal as it is. But when you begin to fire generals, it has a chilling effect on the next generation of officers coming up. And your obligation as an officer is to provide your best military advice to the secretary, to the president.
So as a senior officer, I was often asked, certainly on the special operations side, what was my best military advice? Not my best political advice, not the best advice that I think was aligned with the president and the secretary. What’s my best military advice? And I can tell you in 37 years, nobody ever constrained me for giving my best military advice, nor did they ever punish me for giving my best military advice even if they didn’t agree with it.
So the fact of the matter is nowadays I’m concerned that officers that step inside the secretary of war’s office or the president’s office will try to make their advice align with the political objectives of the president and the secretary. And that will get us into a bad place. You hope that the officers are going to come in and continue to give their best military advice.
But look, we need to understand these officers are not immune to the fact that, do they want to get promoted? Of course they do. They’ve got a family to feed. They’ve spent years in the service. They want to continue to move up the chain of command. We’re not immune to that. The fear is that if somehow by giving your best military advice and it conflicts with the secretary’s advice, then somehow you’re not going to continue to move up the chain, then that advice will not be as good as it could be.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
So in the warring scenario, what we’ve seen in Iran with civilian policymakers not heeding or not really hearing the warnings that they should have gotten from their military leadership, that will become more frequent as military leaders will be hedging in various ways. That would be the risk you see going forward.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
That is the risk. And again, I can’t tell you, Dan, whether or not... Again, I know a lot of military leaders. I know Dan Caine, he’s an exceptional officer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I’ve got a lot of faith and confidence in Dan. I feel confident that he is giving his best military advice. Whether that military advice is being taken remains to be seen. It doesn’t appear that it’s always being taken, but I can’t say that. I don’t have any inside information on that. But I do know in general that this purging of the senior ranks is going to have an effect on the next generation of senior officers coming up.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
It’s also striking that so many of the both firings and the blocked promotions have affected women and minorities disproportionately. Not a lot of them are white men unless they happen to have been loyal or perceived to be loyal to Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs. That seems to certainly send some message about diversity in the military. What do you imagine the effects of that are going to be?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, I mean the same effects. There are going to be senior officers, females and men and women of color that wonder, “Well, am I going to get promoted? If I go on this long deployment and I do great, am I going to get promoted or is my promotion going to be stymied because I am a woman or a person of color?” That’s not the way to run a military.
A military has historically been a meritocracy. It’s not a perfect meritocracy. Yes, of course, there are times when the golden boy or the golden woman gets promoted, but it’s generally based on the fact that they had merit as well. But if it’s no longer a meritocracy, then again, you’re just not going to get the very best people at the senior ranks.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
And you’ve, not in this piece but elsewhere, stressed the importance of having a military that looks like the population it serves, the population it represents. And if you imagine that changing, what are the strategic consequences of that downstream?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
It’s not so much that you want to make sure everybody around the staff table looks like a rainbow. I mean, the fact of the matter is you want different opinions, you want different experiences. So in the special operations community, sitting around my staff table, my decision makers, I had pilots and lawyers and infantrymen and scuba divers, and you had a range of different talents and different experiences. And I didn’t care whether the pilot was a woman, I didn’t care whether the submariner was black. You want the experiences that those people have that help you as a decision maker make a better decision.
If everybody is of the same experience and the same background, then you’re going to get a very narrow input into your decision process and that’s just not going to be good. So diversity wherever you are, and I’m in corporate America now, I can tell you having diverse experiences is just as important in corporate America and academic America and healthcare America as it is in the military.
You need that diversity. We don’t want to look so homogeneous that we get the same response every time we put in a new input.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
I’m going to turn to perhaps an outward expression of values in American foreign policy. You’ve written for Foreign Affairs in the past about Ukraine and about the military effort in Ukraine. We’re at a moment when we’ve seen Trump turning pretty sharply against Zelensky and taking a number of steps to help Putin’s cause in the war, whether that’s exactly what’s motivating them is a separate question, but whether it’s cutoffs of some intel or relief from sanctions or other things, that certainly has given Putin some new momentum.
How do you see the consequences of that change, both for the war in Ukraine, but also for America’s ability to acquire the moral high ground strategically beyond this conflict?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Again, if we’re not a country that is values-based, and you think back on the founding fathers, you think how they shaped the constitution, how they shaped who we were as Americans, there were so many important things that came out of that. Yes, we believe in human rights. We believe that all men are created equal, even if we haven’t always proved that, of course, across the 250 years, but that’s the goal. We believe in democracy, we believe in representative government.
These are important, important values and qualities that we as Americans, I think, need to continue to invest in across the world. And if our values don’t mean anything, if we’re only going to be transactional, and that’s what this administration seems to be is transactional. I’ve been at the Munich Security Conference the last couple of years, and that was the word I heard most is America has become transactional. We’re only going to do things if it’s good for America. And if we’re only going to be transactional, then how are you going to separate us from China and Russia? And so our values matter.
Look, Ukraine is not a Jeffersonian democracy. Let’s make no mistake about it. They got a lot of problems, there’s a lot of corruption, but they are driving in that direction and they believe in the same values that we as Americans believe in. And so for us to not support them, I think is a huge mistake, particularly when they have been invaded by an authoritarian government like Putin and the Russians and again, for no good reason. We certainly could have the moral high ground by continuing to support Ukraine, and yet this president has elected not to do that.
Again, he brought the president of Ukraine into the Oval Office and humiliated him, humiliated him. This was one of our allies. I mean, why would you do something like that? And then to have JD Vance pile on, it was embarrassing for me as an American to see that you can have disagreements, have disagreements behind closed doors. If you don’t like what President Zelensky is wearing, have a conversation behind closed doors. If you don’t like his policy, have a conversation behind closed doors. But if you want to support him in public, shake hands, smile, look like you’re behind him, and let’s get moving forward.
So right now, the fact that we are not supporting President Zelensky and the Ukrainians to the fullest extent possible makes us really no better than a lot of other countries that are out there. And again, what it does is it tells all of our allies, it makes them question, will you be there when I need you? Will you be there when the Taiwanese need us? Will you be there when the Estonians need us? Will you be there when NATO needs us? And I think we have lost all sense of respect from our allies and we are no longer a reliable ally because we continue to, again, insult and humiliate our allies across the globe.
And so with Ukraine, we have to continue to support them to show that, yes, we believe in these values that the Ukrainians are fighting for.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
How enduring do you think the damage to our reputation among allies will be?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Well, it’s not going to mend itself in 2028 overnight. I mean, the fact of the matter is the goodness of our democracy is that every four years we get a chance to vote again. The hard part for our allies is, okay, let’s say somebody that is responsive and receptive comes in 2028. Well, who’s going to be there four years later? Are we going to get Trump version 3? So I think it’s going to take four to eight years before our allies begin to believe that we are the America that they can trust again.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
One other dimension of the war in Ukraine that I’m quite interested to get your thoughts on is the way, at least in the broad narrative about the war technology and the Ukrainian use of technology has in some depictions changed the nature of war or offered a new model of war. You are of course skeptical on the piece and more generally about the ways technology can fundamentally change war, but as you’ve watched the Ukrainians, what has struck you about the way they’ve adapted and innovated and what do you think the key lessons coming out of Ukraine are?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah. Well, I had a chance to go to Ukraine a couple years ago and you could not help but be inspired by the Ukrainian people. I mean, here they are being invaded by Russia, 140 million relative to 40 million. They were at the onset of the invasion, they’re undermanned, under equipped, but it gets back to the point I make in the article is never underestimate your adversary’s willingness to fight for their homeland, and the Ukrainians have done that. And of course they have also done a remarkable job of figuring out how to fight in this new environment through their imagination, through their hard work.
Of course, they have built an incredible drone capability and autonomous capability, but it’s not just that. You see the entire country is mobilized. They use their iPhones. They know when inbound missiles are coming. They can track them on their iPhones. So in the case of Ukraine, one of the things that we’ve seen, so if you think about the Donbas and the Ford edge of the battle area there in the eastern part of Ukraine, normally for the Ukrainians to defend that long line, I mean, it would take a brigade of infantry to be positioned all up along that line.
Well, of course, what they’ve been able to do with their drones is they’ve created this 30-kilometer barrier, and instead of having to have a brigade every 100 miles, what they’ve got is they’ve got a manned drone attack force, small, but they’re flying drones overhead and that puts them in a position that if anybody comes into that 30 kilometer buffer, they’re going to get killed. And so the ability to use drones as a force enabler, as a force multiplier has been huge. But again, it’s a new technology.
They have shown us how to use this new technology. It’s a new tactic that we’re going to have to adjust to on the battlefield, but it still doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of war. And this is the case in point. You look at the fact that the Russians have lost 1.5 million men killed or wounded in action. That number again, 1.5 million killed or wounded in action. This is as brutal as World War I and World War II. And the Ukrainians, unknown how many they’ve lost, but probably a couple hundred thousand killed in action and hundreds of thousands wounded. And I compare that in 10 years of fighting in Vietnam, we lost 58,000 soldiers killed in action. In a month, they will lose, the Russians will lose 30,000 men killed in action.
These are horrific numbers and they just show that yes, technology is new, but the nature of war hadn’t changed.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
How could advancements in AI change any of these dynamics? I mean, either enhancing some of these new technologies or reinforcing some of the delusions about power undermining decision making. You see it cutting in lots of directions here.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, it’ll do two things for us, Dan. One, it’ll help speed up the decision making. And in a warfare, decision making is critical. So if you think about a commanding officer on a destroyer out in the straits of Taiwan or off Taiwan someplace, and then all of a sudden you have a hypersonic missile coming in your direction, it’s moving very, very fast. You’ve got to be able to make a decision based on, is it coming at me? What weapons systems should I use? All these sorts of things.
With AI, AI will be able to determine, is that a hypersonic missile or is it just an airplane coming out of an airport nearby? Is it coming to my direction? All these sorts of things, AI will be able to determine very quickly, give you an answer for what weapon system to use, et cetera. And you can think of AI also just for the infantrymen on the battlefield as well.
I mean, somebody that’s planning a battle and they say, look, this is where the enemy is located. What is the best way for us to engage the enemy with weapon systems, et cetera? So AI can certainly make the decision making process a lot faster, and that’s important in warfare.
Of course, the flip side is it can make the enemy a lot better. AI can also build bioweapons. AI can help with the weapon systems that we haven’t considered yet. So it’s like any new technology. Some of it will be good in terms of our ability to fight and defend, and some of it will be bad because it will enhance the enemy’s ability to fight and defend. This is the nature of any new technology, I think.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
I can imagine it will also put an even greater stress on judgment and character of leaders, that it’ll be easier to get distracted by just the sheer number of targets and the speed of decisions and to lose sight of the fundamental questions that ultimately to you are most essential when it comes to determining strategic outcomes.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
So I always talk about the case of, again, the commanding officer of a destroyer. So when you go into a threat envelope, a commanding officer has a decision to make regarding his weapon system. So on a destroyer, on a cruiser, you’ll have an Aegis weapon system. It’s a very sophisticated radar. It is linked to a CIWS, a close-in weapon system. And so if you have an incoming surface missile that Aegis radar swings, sees the incoming missile, the CIWS weapon system slews and engages it, right?
Well, a commanding officer has to make two decisions. Is he going to have weapons tight or weapons free? So in a weapons tight situation, that means he, the commanding officer, has the final decision to make regarding whether or not he’s going to engage that incoming threat. Weapons free means, okay, he has decided that the system, and in the advanced case of AI, the system will make the decision, but ultimately, there is a person in the loop. And I hope that the military always has somebody in the loop that is ultimately responsible for the decision because if we don’t and we can blame it on the machine, that’s where we get into problems.
So with AI, AI can give you all the information you need to make the best possible decision, but a person has to make that decision and you’re not going to be in a position afterwards to come back and say, “Well, I know I inadvertently struck a children’s school or I inadvertently shot down an Iranian Airbus or I inadvertently did something egregious because I trusted the machine.” I got it, you trusted the machine, but you’re ultimately responsible.
Now, maybe you’re not guilty of a bad act, maybe you just overly trusted the machine, but we’ve always got to make sure that the person is in the loop. The problem with that is the Chinese probably don’t care about that, right? And so this is where you’re going to have AI fighting AI, and if we’re the good guys and we believe that responsibility is important and the Chinese or the Russians don’t, we could find ourselves in a difficult situation and therefore put ourselves in a position to be no different than the enemy in terms of, “Hey, we’re not going to make decisions based on law of armed conflict. We’re not going to make decisions based on the rules of engagement. We’re not going to make decisions based on what we think is morally right. We’re going to make decisions based on lethality and who can win this tactical battle.” And I’m not sure that’s always the best way to fight it.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
So you would extrapolate from that it’s better to go a little bit more slowly if it means building in some of those considerations?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Absolutely. I mean, the AI system has got to be aligned with whatever value system that we have. And again, it will be challenging as we move forward because it will be easy to say, “I’d rather have an AI system that is maximum lethality and doesn’t really consider the moral implications of the maximum lethality because at the end of the day, I’ve got to win the fight.” And again, that’s a hard argument to overcome. You want to win the fight so that American soldiers can live, and therefore that means maximal lethality. And that means, “Okay, sorry, I don’t care whether or not civilians get killed on the enemy side. I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do to save Americans.” Understandable, but it gets us into a deep moral predicament.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
As you watch all of these dynamics, both kind of technological and geopolitical, the effect on alliances, the American military bogged down in the Middle East once again, do you worry about deterrence in Asia? And how do you think Xi Jinping is watching all of this and changing his calculations in Taiwan or more broadly?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Yeah, I’m actually not worried that much about China because I still think what he’s looking at is, “My gosh, this is an incredibly powerful military.” Yes, I mean, you can look at how the special operations guys went into Venezuela and they were remarkable, but what was unremarkable was a lot of the systems the Venezuelans were using were Chinese systems. So those got put to rest pretty quickly. And I’m sure Xi’s going, “Well, how come our integrated air defense systems didn’t work against the Americans?”
When you take a look at the Russian invasion in Ukraine, a lot of the command and control systems the Russians were using early on were Chinese-based systems that did not work well. So I think Xi’s beginning to question whether or not his military is as powerful and as good as he had thought it was. Of course, he’s fired a whole lot of generals for corruption and for malpractice and just not being good generals. So I don’t think he’s prepared to take on the American military at this point in time. And so I do think our deterrent effect is still pretty strong in the Pacific.
My concern really is more about Taiwan now as President Trump and Xi have two more opportunities to get together this year. The question’s going to be, what is Trump’s position behind closed doors vis-a-vis Taiwan? And I don’t think Xi’s going to try to invade Taiwan anytime soon. I think what he’s hoping is that over time the KMT will rise up in Taiwan. That’s the party that’s not in power now, more aligned with the Chinese mainland and that they will be more inclined to reach an agreement with China. I think that’s what Xi would rather see. But of course, if Trump gives him an opening by saying, “Yeah, you help me with Iran, I’ll help you with Taiwan” or, “maybe I’m just not prepared to defend Taiwan,” that could leave Xi with an opening.
I don’t think that’s going to happen, but you can’t dismiss it.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
I want to close by going to a question which in some ways struck me as being really at the center of the essay. You quote Norman Schwarzkopf, the key general in the Gulf War who wrote after his time in Vietnam, “Nobody is more anti-war than an intelligent person who’s been to war, and when they get ready to send me again, I’m going to have to stop to ask myself, is it worth it?” You write that grappling honestly with that question, is it worth it is the imperative of good leadership.
What’s your framework for thinking through that question of whether the use of force, of military risk is worth it?
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
So to Schwarzkopf’s point, I mean, he was a young probably army captain coming out of that. He’d been wounded a number of times. He was incredibly heroic during his time in Vietnam, and he was absolutely the right guy to lead us for Desert Storm because of his incredible experience. But before you go into any fight, you better ask, is it worth the price of the lives of the young men and women in America?
I mean, you think back on World War II, we made the decision that sending millions of men to fight in Europe and Asia was worth it, and it was worth it at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Americans lost, but it changed the world for the good, right? You look at World War I, was it worth it? Yes, it was worth it. I mean, we lost a lot of doughboys in Europe, but it was worth it.
So these questions have got to be asked right up front, and it does get back to the initial discussion about Iran. Do we want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? Of course, we do not want them to have a nuclear weapon. The question is there a better way to go about doing it than trying to bomb them into submission? Again, none of this is easy.
I teach a class at the University of Texas LBJ School on national security decision making, and I give them a framework for thinking about how to make decisions. And the first question they have to ask themselves is, who are we? Who are we as a country? So they invariably start writing, they say, “Well, we’re democracy.” Right. “We’re a republic.” That’s correct. “We’ve got a constitution. We believe in freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.” Yes, yes, yes. And then invariably somebody will say, “And we’re the good guys.” And that gets back to this moral high ground and is it worth it question?
So I think before we go into combat, we’ve got to always ask ourselves, is it worth the blood and treasure of young Americans to do this? And in many cases, it is. It is worth the stability of the world that America risks its most treasured assets, its young men and women, to do things. But then in some cases, it is absolutely not.
It’s a hard decision, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you, Dan, that I think these are easy decisions to make. They’re not. We get them wrong a lot of times. We have shifting goals and shifting priorities, and I generally think that the man in the White House is trying to do the right thing. In the case of this administration, I have some questions about that.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
That’s a good, if unsettling note to end on. Bill, thank you for doing this today and thanks for the really powerful piece that’s called The Limits of American Power, and it is in our new issue.
WILLIAM MCRAVEN
Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.
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