This Friday, the U.S. and Iran are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU), turning a page on this conflict’s chapter, which military families hope leads to peace.
Having recently welcomed my service member home from a 272-day deployment to the Middle East, diplomacy is an immense (albeit temporary) relief. But before Americans move on from the news cycle surrounding this war, there are two painful lessons I want my civilian neighbors to carry forward from this conflict: the dangers of gamifying war and of waging it unconstitutionally.
While most Americans passively consumed headlines about Operation Epic Fury, military families like mine lived through it.
For over 100 days of active war, I existed 12 hours at a time, waiting for texts confirming my husband — a father and a soldier, on his fourth deployment — was safe. I carried an intense dissonance on my shoulders: pride in how he handled a conflict suddenly dropping into his lap, with simultaneous disappointment at my government for unnecessarily plunging him into it.
Despite being a seasoned military family with 15 years of service, the recent chaos was unprecedented.
On Feb. 28, U.S. leadership abruptly broke its own diplomatic timeline with Iran, throwing U.S. service members into hot water, in some cases with no warning. Then, when military families needed bipartisan cooperation and oversight from Congress, we instead witnessed devastating paralysis on Capitol Hill.
Even though we find relief in this MOU, our military family community is still healing from the whiplash of an entirely avoidable conflict — still reconciling our grief over a divisive political establishment that chose partisan silence over keeping constituents in uniform safe.
This political failure paved the way for our first lesson: the dangerous gamification of war. In March, video-game-style reels of U.S. airstrikes against Iran flooded social media. That trend has since evolved into online commentary that treats active conflicts like a simulation, reducing our loved ones in uniform to pawns on a chessboard.
This gamification was deeply insulting to those of us anxiously waiting by our phones for news of safety. On social media and television, supporters praised military maneuvers as “5D chess.” This rhetoric mirrors the White House, where the president has boasted he holds all the cards to secure a win, as though active war were a casual round of poker.
Impersonal comments like these desensitize Americans to the real-life costs of war, silencing families like mine who carry the weight of these conflicts.
Debate on the Hill often reduced the human component of war to a balance sheet, focusing on the monetary cost of aid packages and missile defense systems.
While Congress debated dollars, they ignored the true price of human life, a cost felt deeply across the military community with the recent loss of thirteen service members: Sgt. Declan Coady, Capt. Cody Khork, Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan, Sgt. Benjamin Pennington, Maj. John “Alex” Klinner, Capt. Ariana Savino, Sgt. Ashley Pruitt, Capt. Seth Koval, Capt. Curtis Angst, and Tech. Sgt. Tyler Simmons.
They are not numbers; they leave behind entire family networks permanently changed.
Americans’ cultural desensitization to war is the byproduct of decades of forever wars. This abstraction makes it easier to look at conflict without flinching, but we cannot afford to be fans of war. That detachment has created a smokescreen, obscuring the executive branch’s exercise of sweeping power without congressional accountability. In fact, the U.S. has not seen a formal declaration of war from Congress since 1942, as every administration since has stretched these powers.
This brings us to our second lesson: Congress must continue working to reclaim its constitutionally-appointed war powers.
Recent votes in the House and progress on a similar Senate resolution show real momentum to challenge this executive overreach, even in the face of political gamesmanship like the abrupt cancellation of the initial House vote right before Memorial Day recess. These votes bring us one step closer to Americans winning back their representation, and to a legislative branch taking accountability for putting American lives on the line.
Honoring our military requires more than platitudes; it requires real transparency and accountability from those who send our loved ones into harm’s way. On behalf of military families, I thank every member of Congress who has embraced that responsibility by supporting these Iran War Powers Resolutions over the last few months.
I say this from a place of service and family, not politically-sided rhetoric: Military life is not an aesthetic, a game or a political tool. The recent votes on Capitol Hill prove our leaders can choose a path toward peace.
As we look toward Friday’s expected MOU, it is my profound hope that this is a genuine, bipartisan step forward, and not a rare exception.
Brittney Haddix is an Army spouse and volunteer military family advocate with Secure Families Initiative. She serves as a voting ambassador and also sits on the voting rights leadership team, supporting both programs to expand voting access for military-connected voters.
