A Warrior’s View of Why War Fails: A Conversation With William McRaven

The Foreign Affairs Interview · Oct 29, 2026 · 57m

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 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.”…