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setback in Iran has renewed a pointed question about the future of American war-making: when voters stop punishing failure, does that change how the government fights?
Political accountability, the mechanism by which an electorate punishes a government at the ballot box for military decisions gone wrong, has historically been one of the few real constraints on how Washington wages war.
Veterans and voters enforced that constraint for decades, but many Americans today don't appear to be applying the same pressure. How the accountability mechanism worked The pattern held across multiple administrations.
Costly foreign wars produced backlash. Veterans brought firsthand accounts home, their experience shaping community opinion and, eventually, the electoral math facing whoever sat in the White House.
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