WHEN REPORTS EMERGED LAST WEEK that hackers had penetrated water systems across multiple American states, public attention immediately turned to the question of responsibility. Was it Iran, Russia, China, or—as President Trump wildly suggested—Democrats within the affected states? While Iranian-affiliated cyber actors are widely considered the leading suspects, federal investigators have yet to make a formal attribution. More importantly, so far there is no evidence that drinking water has been contaminated or that public health has been endangered. What the attacks did demonstrate, however, was that malicious actors have the capacity and, at times, desire to compromise the operational systems that control essential public infrastructure.

Yet the greatest significance of these attacks lies not in their novelty but in their familiarity. For those who have spent careers in the military or national security space, the reports were unsurprising: The attacks represent precisely the kind of threat that American strategists and analysts have anticipated for more than two decades. Long before cyberwarfare entered the public vocabulary, successive administrations, military planners, and allied governments repeatedly warned that America’s greatest vulnerabilities would not necessarily be found on distant battlefields but at home, embedded within the civilian infrastructure that underpins modern society.

That conclusion has appeared consistently in a range of national security planning documents, in various threat assessments by all agencies, and within the National Cybersecurity Strategy. The specific language has evolved over the years, but the underlying assessment has remained strikingly consistent. America’s critical infrastructure—including energy grids, communications systems, transportation networks, financial institutions, health care ecosystems, pipelines, and water systems—would become targets for adversaries seeking strategic advantage while avoiding direct military confrontation. These systems support every other element of national power while often remaining lightly defended compared with traditional military targets, which makes them soft targets.

Within the military, recognizing this has fundamentally changed how campaigns are planned. Leaders no longer view cybersecurity as a technical specialty to be delegated to communications experts after operational plans have been completed. Instead, it has necessarily become an integral part of campaign design from the outset. While joint doctrine describes offensive cyberspace operations, defensive cyberspace operations, and the operation of the Defense Department’s own information networks as distinct missions, commanders tend to think about cyber in broader operational terms. More and more, however, the military integrates cyber capabilities into comprehensive campaigns in which diplomacy, intelligence, economic pressure, information operations, and military force are all synchronized to achieve strategic objectives. Cyber has become another asymmetric capability available and integrated into virtually every modern campaign plan rather than treated as a supporting specialty.

Some cyber operations are conducted independently to collect intelligence, penetrate networks, or create strategic effects without employing conventional military force. Others directly support combat operations by disrupting the enemy’s command-and-control systems, logistics networks, air defenses, or communications, thereby allowing friendly aircraft, ships, and ground forces to maneuver inside the disrupted space.

The strategic evolution of cyber operations reflects a broader truth about contemporary conflict: Adversaries no longer need to destroy a nation’s military to impose real strategic costs; they can instead undermine the systems upon which civil society itself depends. On the face of it, a water-treatment facility may appear to have little connection to national defense until one considers the cascading consequences of disabling it. Hospitals rely upon clean water. Fire departments rely upon water (and water pressure). Manufacturing plants depend upon reliable municipal systems. Citizens expect government to provide potable water every day without interruption. Even a temporary disruption to that confidence forces governments to divert resources, commands attention at the highest political levels, and reminds the public that essential services are more fragile than they are believed to be. The strategic objective is often less about physical destruction than about eroding confidence and trust in government and its institutions. A cyber attack that causes the public to question its drinking water, for example, becomes psychological as much as operational.

WHILE SERVING AS CHIEF OF OPERATIONS for U.S. Army Europe nearly twenty years ago, I was present as Estonia experienced what many military professionals now regard as the opening chapter of modern strategic cyberwarfare. In April 2007, the Estonian government decided to relocate a statue called the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn that many ethnic Estonians viewed as a symbol of decades of Soviet occupation. The decision ignited protests and diplomatic outrage from Moscow, and, within days, a wave of coordinated cyber attacks unlike anything the world had previously witnessed.

The attacks targeted far more than government websites. The Estonian parliament, ministries, banks, newspapers, broadcasters, telecommunications providers, and other essential services found themselves overwhelmed by distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that flooded networks with malicious traffic. Financial transactions slowed or stopped. News organizations struggled to communicate. Government agencies found it difficult to provide public services. Emergency communications were affected. It wasn’t war. Nothing exploded, no missiles crossed the border, and no Russian armored columns rolled toward Tallinn. Yet millions of Estonians experienced something deeply unsettling all the same: the realization that a hostile power had found a way to disrupt the daily life of an entire society without firing a shot.

These attacks were particularly acute because of their target. In 2007, only sixteen years had passed since Estonia had regained its independence from the Soviet Union. During that short period, the country had reinvented itself as one of the world’s most digitally advanced democracies. Citizens filed taxes online, voted electronically, managed financial transactions digitally, and embraced technology as a symbol of both national progress and independence from Moscow. The cyber attacks struck at Estonia’s confidence in the very institutions that had defined its remarkable post–Cold War transformation. For many Estonians, the attacks felt less like electronic vandalism than a reminder that geography alone could no longer protect sovereignty.

Rather than retreating from the digital frontier, Estonia invested more deeply in resilience (as well as other counterintelligence programs). Estonian planners redesigned networks with redundancy in mind. Government agencies strengthened partnerships with private industry and facilitated cybersecurity education throughout society. Reserve cyber capabilities were developed. Estonia shifted the emphasis from an impossible goal of preventing every intrusion to an achievable one of ensuring that society could continue functioning despite them. Estonia understood that resilience—not invulnerability—was the true measure of national security.

NATO drew the same conclusion from the lessons of 2007. The alliance established the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, where military officers, civilian experts, and researchers from across NATO now study cyber doctrine, conduct advanced research, and participate in multinational exercises. (I was proud to have later participated in one of those events as commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe.)

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I HAVE WRITTEN REPEATEDLY in The Bulwark about the importance of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency here in the United States, about the value of Estonia’s whole-of-society resilience model, and about the growing disconnect between our strategic understanding of cyber threats and our willingness to sustain the institutions responsible for defending against them. Cybersecurity rarely commands public attention when it succeeds because successful cyber defense is measured largely by crises that never occur: The absence of headlines is evidence that the system is working.

No network can ever be made completely secure. The objective isn’t perfect defense but resilient defense—the ability to continue operating despite persistent attacks. That distinction has become important because our adversaries know they don’t need to destroy infrastructure to achieve strategic effects; they only need to convince citizens that they are vulnerable. An attack on water infrastructure will certainly do just that.

It is difficult to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion highlighted by the widely reported attacks last week. They aren’t a failure of imagination or intelligence. America’s security thinkers correctly identified the threat years ago. It’s been assessed, tracked, incorporated into plans, and publicly discussed. Allied nations like Estonia have demonstrated both the vulnerability and the solution. The problem has never been recognizing the danger. It has been sustaining the political will, institutional continuity, and long-term investment necessary to build resilience before a crisis forces our attention.

It’s an old military adage that generals often prepare to fight the last war. The greater danger today may be that democratic societies remember the last cyber attack only until the next crisis arrives. Strategic documents are written, conferences are held, after-action reports are published, and warnings are issued. But then budgets tighten, institutions are reorganized, priorities shift, and the urgency gradually fades. The result is strategic amnesia.

This reported attack—no matter who conducted it—should remind us that cyberwarfare is not a future threat. It is part of the operational environment in which every modern democracy must function. Professionals in the military, intelligence agencies, and national security have long understood this reality. The question is whether we as a nation possess the strategic discipline to defend and protect the approach that we must take. That, more than the identity of this week’s attackers, will determine how well prepared we are for the next campaign that arrives not with bombs or missiles, but through the networks that sustain our daily lives.

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DOES CHARACTER COUNT FOR ANYTHING in public life anymore? It’s a question that’s come up, it seems, more and more frequently in the past decade, as almost every politician seems eventually to face one kind of scandal or another. Ditto celebrities, professional athletes, leading scholars and scientists, business leaders, and other prominent people. As David French recently summed it up on an episode of The Focus Group Podcast: “Do American voters really care about character? No. . . . Does character really matter? Yes.”

I’ll leave it to David and others to analyze the priorities and virtues of the American voter. But I think, when considering the role of character in our society and politics, it’s important to keep in mind that good character isn’t a finite natural resource, but something that can be—and must be—developed intentionally in every person.

Character is easy to admire when it appears and easy to condemn when it fails. But it does not suddenly emerge when an individual runs for office. It is not conferred by elections, and it should not be judged because of promotions, uniforms, titles, wealth, or fame. It is, rather, built patiently over years, long before it is ever tested. The real question may not be whether we still value character, but whether we still understand what it is and how it is formed.

For me—like, I think, for many Americans of my generation—character formation started at home and continued at school, in athletics, in church, and in other civic institutions (in my case, the Boy Scouts). By the time I entered West Point in the summer of 1971, my family and a whole series of institutions had already imprinted themselves on me. The United States Military Academy did not begin the work of building my character; it assumed that work had already started and deliberately sought to deepen it.

WEST POINT’S MISSION WAS NEVER simply to educate engineers or produce tactically proficient Army officers. Its larger purpose was to prepare young men—and, beginning soon after my graduation, young women—to bear extraordinary responsibility for the lives of others and the trust of the nation.

What distinguished West Point is not that it claimed a monopoly on character development, but that it recognized that technical competence without moral development can become dangerous. The academy could teach engineering and history, the proper employment of artillery, and how to write a clear operations order. But none of those skills matter if the person exercising them lacks integrity, humility, and an unwavering sense of duty.

Nowhere was that pedagogical philosophy clearer than in the Honor Code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”

Those words establish that trust is the currency of leadership. A leader who cannot be trusted with the truth can never be trusted with soldiers’ lives. Every future decision—reporting casualties honestly, assessing an enemy accurately, advising a superior candidly, accepting responsibility for failure—rests upon that foundation.

The academy reinforced that lesson through its motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.” Those three words described an order of priorities. Duty came before personal ambition. Honor governed how duty was carried out. Country reminded future officers of the purpose that was larger than themselves.

There was one more influence that has remained with me for more than five decades. When I entered West Point, chapel attendance was still mandatory. A federal court later ended that practice on the grounds that it violated the Constitution, but to me, the lasting lesson was never about compulsory worship. It was the academy’s belief that officers entrusted with the lives of others should regularly reflect upon questions larger than themselves. They should wrestle with humility, conscience, courage, and moral responsibility long before confronting those challenges in combat.

That conviction found its clearest expression in the Cadet Prayer:

Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking and suffer not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretense ever to diminish.

Make us choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong and never be content with a half-truth when the whole truth can be won.

Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy . . .

Written by Chaplain Colonel Clayton Wheat in 1920, those words have stayed with me far longer than engineering equations or military history lessons. They endure because they speak not to what a leader knows, but to who a leader is.

West Point isn’t the only institution of higher education that seeks to develop the character of its students in addition to their minds, nor is it always successful—either in forming good leaders or in living up to its own standards. No institution composed of human beings ever reaches perfection. But the academy’s expectation, its aspiration, is unmistakable: Leadership begins not with authority but with trustworthiness. I now realize that West Point was not replacing the lessons I learned from parents, teachers, coaches, or scoutmasters. It was building upon the foundations others laid. The academy assumed that character formation had already begun and sought to deepen it for a greater purpose.

In the 1970s, this was somewhat countercultural. So much of that era was about self-expression and psychological authenticity—much like today. When so much of society urges, Be true to yourself, West Point demands, Improve yourself. It’s still countercultural. And it’s still, to my mind, better advice.

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THE ARMY HAS LONG DESCRIBED ITSELF as a profession of arms, and rightly so. Like medicine, law, education, journalism, or the ministry, it is a profession because society entrusts it with responsibilities carrying profound consequences for others. Technical competence is indispensable, but character ultimately determines how that competence is exercised. That is why I have come to believe that service in the military does not create character, but tests it.

Sometimes those tests appear in quiet, almost invisible moments: admitting a mistake no one else noticed, giving honest advice when a superior hopes for a different answer, accepting responsibility for a failed mission instead of blaming a subordinate. Those decisions seldom attract attention, but they shape organizations and establish trust.

Occasionally the tests become far more demanding. Combat strips away pretense with remarkable efficiency. Exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, and grief have little patience for carefully constructed public personas. Soldiers quickly discover whether their leaders possess moral courage to match their physical courage. They watch to see whether leaders share risk, tell the truth when the news is bad, care for the wounded before themselves, write the letters no commander wishes to write, and remember that every casualty report represents a family whose life has changed forever. Those moments do not suddenly produce character. They reveal whether it was there all along.

Thinking back across nearly four decades in uniform, the officers and noncommissioned officers I admired most were rarely remembered for dramatic speeches or outsized personalities. They earned confidence through consistency. They treated people with dignity regardless of rank. They accepted responsibility without hesitation. They remained calm in crises because their values had already been settled long before a crisis arrived. Soldiers followed them not because regulations required it, but because experience had convinced them those leaders could be trusted.

Only after leaving active military service did I fully appreciate that those lessons extend well beyond the Army. For more than a decade after leaving active military service, I spoke about leadership to a variety of audiences, initially healthcare providers, now graduate business students. The dean of a business school invited me to join their faculty because he believed that modern MBA programs devoted enormous attention to finance, strategy, and management while spending far too little time discussing ethical leadership and character. He wanted me to help change that, and that is a worthy mission.

The private sector “uniforms” are different, the language is different, and the tasks are different. But the essential requirements of character and leadership remain unchanged. Competence is expected in every profession, in every industry. Great organizations define what competence looks like and usually train and teach it well. What separates good organizations from exceptional ones is their understanding that competence alone is insufficient. Character—one of the key attributes of any leader—determines whether knowledge is used with wisdom, whether authority is exercised with humility, and whether success is measured not only by achievement but also by service.

Looking back across that journey—from family and school to coaches and scoutmasters, from West Point to the Army and eventually the private sector—I realize that none of those institutions believed character development was someone else’s responsibility. Each accepted a share of the task. Each expected young people to become a little more than they had been the year before. Most importantly, each reinforced lessons that had begun elsewhere.

Most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, still admire leaders whose actions consistently match their words, whose integrity survives public pressure, and whose decisions reflect something larger than personal ambition. We may disagree passionately about policy or ideology, but few would argue that honesty, humility, courage, and responsibility are obsolete virtues.

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FOR GENERATIONS, AMERICANS BENEFITED from an informal partnership among families, schools, faith communities, youth organizations, athletic programs, neighborhoods, professions, and military service. Together, they created countless opportunities for young people to practice responsibility, to show their character, before being entrusted with a leadership role. Some of those institutions remain vibrant today. Others struggle. Technology, social media, and cultural change have transformed the environment in which young people mature.

I’m not suggesting we can—or should—recreate the America of my youth. Every generation must prepare its citizens for the world they will inherit, not the one their parents knew. But one principle has not changed: Character development doesn’t just happen. It grows where families, schools, coaches, employers, congregations, professions, and communities intentionally cultivate it and then expect it. Parents who insist that integrity matters when no one is watching. Teachers who refuse to lower standards. Coaches who value sportsmanship as highly as championships. Mentors who teach service before recognition. Employers who reward honesty as much as performance. Professionals who understand that authority is ultimately an act of stewardship.

Am I living in a dream world to think we can somehow recreate or strengthen all of these? Not for a minute. But if we want character to matter, and I think we do, we all need to contribute to its growth in others. If we want better character in our leaders, there is only one solution: to promote better character in each other, especially young people. If each person sees teaching others, especially the next generation, wisdom, humility, respect, conscientiousness, duty, and service as part of their basic responsibility as a citizen—as a person—then we will end up with fewer individuals of low character seeking positions of power. And those who do will have smaller constituencies.

Character is rarely noticed while it is being formed. But it becomes unmistakable when it stands before us—and its presence is every bit as obvious as its absence. And that matters. Forming character has always been the quiet work of a free society. It’s necessary work if we are to remain a free society.

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AFTER THIRTEEN CONSECUTIVE NIGHTS of American bombing of Iran, the fourteenth night was quiet.

That silence has generated almost as much speculation as the strikes themselves. The New York Times reported that President Trump ordered the halt out of concern that the United States is running dangerously low on missile interceptors. But that concern doesn’t preclude other reasons for pausing the strikes: Are nascent diplomatic efforts indicating a path beyond military operations? Did America’s regional partners quietly urge restraint? Or did the president’s advisers conclude that continued bombing was no longer advancing America’s strategic objectives?

We may not know the answers for months, perhaps years. But it may be getting through to the administration that the strategy of air strikes it has pursued against Iran for five months isn’t advancing political objectives.

The moment military action begins producing diminishing strategic returns, leaders face one of the hardest decisions in war: whether to continue pressing the attack or adapt before events force them to. Military professionals still use Carl von Clausewitz’s term for that moment: the “culminating point” of an offensive, when continued attacks begin consuming more military capability than the strategic advantage they produce. Modern military commanders, rather than awaiting the culminating point, now seek evidence that they are approaching culmination, because recognizing the signs in advance helps prevent strategic overreach and potential failure.

That distinction matters. Adaptation is one of the defining characteristics of successful military campaigns; the military that adapts first often prevails. And the most important adaptations occur at the strategic level. Adversaries change their methods. Allies reassess their interests. Resources become constrained. Diplomatic opportunities emerge and disappear. A campaign designed to solve one problem frequently evolves into something else, usually something larger. Continuing yesterday’s operational design simply because it worked yesterday is not persistence; it is wrongheaded.

HISTORY OFFERS AN INSTRUCTIVE EXAMPLE. In February 1991, after only one hundred hours of ground combat during Operation Desert Storm, President George H.W. Bush, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell, and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf agreed to halt the offensive. Coalition forces retained overwhelming combat power, and they almost certainly could have continued their assault, even driving toward Baghdad. But liberating Kuwait—not toppling Saddam Hussein—was the coalition’s political objective, and that objective had been achieved. Continuing the attack would not have simply extended the campaign; it would have fundamentally changed its purpose.

Images from what later became known as the Highway of Death reinforced another uncomfortable reality. Coalition airpower continued destroying Iraqi forces that were already retreating from Kuwait. Those attacks undoubtedly remained militarily effective, but they also illustrated the growing gap between tactical success and strategic necessity, punishing an enemy unnecessarily. Additional destruction promised little additional political advantage but would have increased humanitarian costs while risking the cohesion of the international coalition. The decision to stop reflected the judgment that military operations had accomplished the mission assigned.

Iran’s military power today is nowhere near as broken as Saddam’s was at the end of Operation Desert Storm. It remains capable of influencing events across the region, particularly through its network of proxy organizations. The Houthis, who at first largely stayed out of the conflict, are now threatening international shipping and attacking Saudi ports and facilities. Their strikes against Aramco refineries and other facilities have widened the conflict, and American naval forces are now protecting both the Strait of Hormuz and the approaches to the Bab el-Mandeb.

The American campaign initially appeared focused on degrading Iran’s conventional military capability. Increasingly, however, the conflict is being shaped by Tehran’s actions and those of its proxies. Every Houthi attack against commercial shipping, every strike against Gulf energy infrastructure, and every disruption of maritime commerce broadens the war geographically while allowing Iran to impose additional costs on the United States. Continuing to concentrate military effort where the conflict began rather than where it is expanding risks fighting yesterday’s campaign while the enemy adapts.

At the same time, the Times report and others indicating that America’s weapons stockpiles are being used up perilously fast deserve attention. Precision-guided munitions are not merely tactical assets. They are strategic resources underpinning deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, reassuring allies in Europe and the Levant, protecting American forces worldwide, and preserving the nation’s ability to respond to crises that cannot yet be predicted. Every Tomahawk missile launched at Iran, every long-range standoff weapon fired from an American bomber in the Middle East, and every interceptor expended defending U.S. forces in Jordan or Kuwait or the UAE must eventually be replaced. The question is not whether America possesses overwhelming military power; it’s whether continuing to expend some of its most sophisticated capabilities produces strategic gains commensurate with the opportunities they foreclose elsewhere. That’s the difference between having more weapons to use and having as many as you might need.

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NO COMMANDER—CIVILIAN OR MILITARY—can simultaneously track operational progress, logistical sustainability, alliance implications, resource consumption, and global readiness alone. That job of integrating those perspectives, identifying approaching risks, and recommending adaptation before success on today’s battlefield creates unnecessary vulnerability tomorrow falls in large part to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who commands no combat forces but has a large staff responsible for understanding these kinds of strategic tradeoffs. The joint staff, with its numbered departments, exists to help civilian and military leaders think strategically rather than operationally. The J3 continuously monitors military operations around the world. The J4 evaluates logistics, sustainment, and the consumption of critical resources, including precision-guided munitions. The J5 examines long-range strategy and assesses how today’s operations affect commitments in all the theaters around the world. The J8 evaluates readiness, force structure, industrial capacity, and future requirements.

The president isn’t obligated to listen to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or the joint staff, or anyone. As commander-in-chief, his judgment predominates. If the Times’s reporting is correct, and President Trump ordered the strikes against Iran paused or even ended due to concerns about weapons stockpiles, the question for future historians will be: Why now?

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STRATEGY HAS ALWAYS REQUIRED military operations to create political space rather than to substitute for political solutions. Bombs and missiles destroy targets; they do not negotiate agreements, reassure allies, stabilize energy markets, or restore international confidence in freedom of navigation. Those responsibilities belong to diplomacy, economic policy, intelligence, and coalition management. Hints that the Trump administration is considering renewed diplomacy, combined with the growing concerns of Gulf partners about the regional expansion of the conflict, suggest that military operations may finally be creating opportunities for those other instruments of national power to assume greater prominence.

Perhaps that is what makes the silence after thirteen nights so significant. It may have reflected concerns about ammunition inventories. It may have resulted from growing proxy activity, expanding diplomatic efforts, or pressure from regional partners. Most likely, it reflected some combination of all those factors, which together suggest that the campaign was approaching—if not past—its culminating point and was unlikely to produce strategic returns.

We may eventually learn exactly why President Trump ordered the bombing campaign paused. Whatever the explanation proves to be, the more enduring lesson extends well beyond this conflict. Successful governments do not demonstrate strength by refusing to change course. They demonstrate strength by recognizing when circumstances have changed, by adapting before operational success becomes strategic overreach, and by understanding that the purpose of military power is not to maximize destruction but to achieve clearly defined political objectives.

If the halt in bombing reflects that realization, history may judge it as the moment strategy finally began catching up with operations. The silence of the fourteenth night may ultimately prove more consequential than the explosions of the previous thirteen.

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WHEN SEN. GARY PETERS QUESTIONED Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the administration’s handling of the conflict with Iran, Hegseth responded by accusing Peters of denigrating the military.

That wasn’t what Peters was doing. In fact, even before Peters asked Hegseth a question, he offered comfort to the families of those who had given their lives in the Iran war. “I want to begin by first echoing my colleagues’ comments,” he said, “and joining them in mourning the loss of American service members who were killed in action these few days. My thoughts are with their families, with the service member who remains missing, and with all those injured during the strike. And I will continue to pray for their families.” He very quickly went out of his way to express admiration for the service members carrying out extraordinarily difficult missions: “I have long said the United States has the strongest military in history, in the world, and I have no doubt that our brave service members can execute any mission and prevail in any battle.” His criticism was directed not at the troops, but at the civilian leadership responsible for defining the mission, establishing the strategy, and honestly describing the results. That distinction matters.

When I was a young lieutenant, stationed in Germany on my first assignment, I had a conversation with an old veteran in my unit who had been a medevac helicopter crew chief in Vietnam. He was highly decorated, and he was relaying some of the adventures that were reflected in the medals he wore on his chest.

He was young when he got drafted. He didn’t want to go to war, but he answered his country’s call. He flew hundreds of missions, saved untold numbers of lives, was wounded, recovered, and after a year of service, eventually came home. He told me he was proud of all he did in service to his country—proud enough to choose to make a career in the military—but when his plane landed in San Francisco and he stepped into the terminal wearing his khaki uniform, he experienced something disheartening. As he walked through the airport, strangers cursed him, called him baby killer, and even spat on him.

Then, in a changing mood, he looked down and quietly said something that has stayed with me ever since: “It made that whole year seem like a waste. I didn’t agree with the war, either, but it seemed my fellow citizens were confusing the war with the warrior.”

His disappointment wasn’t rooted in the hardship of combat, because soldiers understand hardship. It was his realization that many Americans could not distinguish between the man who had served and the policy that had sent him there. That confusion reappeared during Secretary Hegseth’s testimony this week.

In our constitutional system, the military does not choose the wars it fights. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, guardians, and coasties execute lawful orders issued by civilian leaders. Their professionalism lies in carrying out those missions to the best of their ability, regardless of the politics and the policies surrounding them. Supporting the military does not require supporting every military operation, nor does questioning the wisdom of a campaign diminish the courage of those asked to fight it.

In fact, the opposite is true.

One of the highest forms of respect all citizens can show our military is demanding that our armed forces be committed only to missions with clear objectives, realistic plans, sufficient resources. This is especially true for those who serve in government who make the decisions—or non-decisions—about war and peace. For our leaders, respecting the military means telling the American people the honest truth about progress and setbacks, casualties and costs. For the rest of us, holding civilian leaders accountable for those responsibilities is our way of honoring those in uniform.

Too often, political leaders blur these lines. When strategy is challenged, they wrap themselves in the valor of the troops. When operational shortcomings are exposed, they imply that criticism somehow insults those risking their lives. This may be an effective political argument, but it is a dangerous civic one. The sacrifice of those in uniform should never become a shield protecting policymakers from legitimate scrutiny.

We owe our warriors gratitude, respect, and every resource necessary to accomplish the missions. We owe our civilian leaders rigorous oversight, honest debate, and accountability for their actions and the missions they assign.

We also owe ourselves, as citizens of a great republic, a government that is responsive to our needs and expectations. That applies to the military as much as to anything else. We respect the troops by ensuring that their missions are aligned with the priorities of the country, and we respect ourselves by ensuring that the bravery and sacrifice of those in uniform doesn’t cause us to forget why their calling is called “service.”

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