2026-10-29
59 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Phelan and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
As Americans and as American soldiers, you don't want to wake up, you know, 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.
That'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 warfighters, our values as Americans,
then they're not going to be there when we need them.
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.
He both led the 2003 operation that captured Saddam Hussein and oversaw the 2011 operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
But in a new essay in Foreign Affairs,
McRaven focuses not on the potential of military force, but on its limits.
Limits that American policymakers frequently disregard at immense cost.
He warns of a persistent American delusion,
our excessive faith in the capacity of military power to achieve victory and thereby fundamentally political ends.