To understand how the second Trump administration may use the U.S. military, the best clues aren’t written in the pages of Foreign Affairs or sussed out during panel discussions at Washington think tanks.
Instead, they’re found in the chatter on X, formerly Twitter, where a handful of officials now entering top positions in the Pentagon have posted their takes on defense policy for years.
This group is highly confident, highly online and scornful of Washington’s foreign policy consensus. It thinks America’s military is overstretched in wasteful areas of the world, like Europe and the Middle East. And rather than call for a bigger defense budget alone, its members argue the United States should do less — or reprioritize its scarce resources.
“Our self-righteous establishment has led us to the brink of World War III, a weakened and overstretched military and deindustrialization. We desperately need a change,” tweeted Elbridge Colby, one of the group’s leaders, now nominated to lead Pentagon policy.
Call it the rise of the anti-Vulcans, a clique of similarly assured foreign policy wonks in the George W. Bush administration.
The new group refers to itself as “restrainers” or the slightly different school of “prioritizers” and often uses the Bush administration as a foil. Now helping lead Pentagon affairs from Asia to the Middle East, the officials signify a break in Republican foreign policy, from a party that called for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to one far more skeptical of using the military abroad.
Concentrating so many of these officials in the Pentagon will almost certainly set up fights with more hawkish members of the administration at the State Department and National Security Council. Which group wins, analysts and administration officials said, could spell radical change for how the U.S. uses its military power, and where.
“We’re clearly seeing a struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican party,” said Brad Bowman, who studies defense policy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank.
In many ways, the rise of the Pentagon’s new group of leaders traces the arc of America’s foreign policy over the last 30 years. Many are relatively young, in their 30s and 40s, much like Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality and former Army officer sworn in Saturday as secretary of defense.
Rather than watch America triumph over the Soviet Union in the 1990s, they came of age during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Several of them, such as Hegseth or Vice President JD Vance, even served in those wars.) The result, for some, has been a pressing sense of American decline, especially relative to a more powerful, more assertive China.
“If you grew up with Apollo missions, you believe we can ‘do anything.’ But for those shaped by Iraq, Afghanistan and the ‘08 [financial] crisis the view’s a bit more jaded,” posted Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican adviser and presidential candidate, after debating Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Colby pointed to this exchange while discussing his own views in a podcast late last year, where he critiqued more establishment figures like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who wasn’t invited back into the Trump administration.
Instead, Colby and two of his proteges — Austin Dahmer and Alex Velez-Green, both now temporarily helming top policy roles in the Pentagon — cast the U.S. as a strained, distracted superpower. To avoid losing a conflict with China, they argue, America needs to redirect its military resources from supporting Ukraine and the Middle East and let its allies in both regions shoulder a heavier load.
This is a sharp pivot from traditional Republican policy, especially in Congress. Lawmakers like Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, agree the military is too weak to accomplish its expansive goals. But they argue the best remedy is higher defense spending — close to the 5% of GDP that Trump has said European allies should budget.
A separate but related group of “restrainers” argues that, in today’s world, the U.S. military should do less abroad regardless of its strength.
In a 2023 essay, Dan Caldwell, an adviser to the Trump Pentagon’s transition team, wrote the U.S. should dramatically reduce its military presence in Europe and withdraw nearly all its forces from Iraq and Syria.
Michael DiMino, a former colleague of Caldwell at Defense Priorities — a think tank that advocates a restrained foreign policy — now runs the Pentagon’s Middle East policy.
Critics of this group argue it exaggerates America’s constraints and has too narrow a view of the country’s interests abroad.
“It’s alarming that people can clear vetting after claiming U.S. interests in the Middle East are ‘minimal to nonexistent,’” Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense, told Jewish Insider for a story on DiMino.
Regardless of their presence in the Defense Department — already famous for its inertia — the restrainers can’t reshape American national security policy without the White House’s lead.
“The Pentagon’s not a solitary actor,” said Richard Fontaine, head of the Center for a New American Security think tank, and a former colleague of Colby.
Meanwhile, the top two officials at the department, Hegseth and Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire investor nominated to be the Pentagon’s deputy secretary, are unknown quantities when it comes to implementing national security policy. Officials across Washington are now trying to shape their views.
Evidence of this ambiguity can be found in the president’s preferred national security slogan: “peace through strength.” Ronald Reagan used the same line to justify a massive defense buildup in the 1980s. Now, officials across the Republican party are saying it can mean everything from higher defense spending to an American military more involved in immigration enforcement.
For Colby, Caldwell and the officials who share their arguments, defining the slogan on their terms will take more than convincing other parts of the U.S. government. It will also take a sustained effort in the face of a chaotic, dangerous world. Even more peaceful times have upended the priorities of past administrations pledging drastic change.
On the campaign trail in 2000, George W. Bush argued the U.S. shouldn’t entangle itself in foreign wars that were far from the country’s best interests.
“I believe we’re overextended in too many places,” Bush said of the military while debating Vice President Al Gore.
Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.
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