In the twenty-first century, providing humanitarian assistance to other nations forms an essential part of the U.S. military's mission. Designed to “relieve or reduce endemic conditions such as human suffering, disease, hunger, [and] privation,” the military's humanitarian tasks include such activities as assisting refugees, delivering food and medical equipment to partner nations, and removing unexploded landmines.1 But among the most recognized—and best publicized—of the U.S. Armed Forces’ humanitarian activities are its foreign disaster relief operations. In response to such recent catastrophes as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2011 tsunami in Japan, 2019's Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, and the 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, the Department of Defense launched extensive humanitarian operations. Taking advantage of the U.S. military's vast global footprint, military leaders dispatched ships and aircraft, service personnel, relief supplies, equipment, and other material and logistical aid to the scene of these crises and to many others like them globally.2 Carried out for the humanitarian goals of saving lives and reducing suffering, each of these foreign disaster aid operations also shared a critical diplomatic objective: “generating goodwill” for the United States and creating a “favorable impression” of its armed forces.3 Never purely altruistic, the U.S. military's responses to global disasters also function as a valuable instrument of contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

The U.S. military is not usually identified as a humanitarian force, and indeed the very concept of military humanitarianism strikes one as a paradox. According to conventional wisdom, at least, modern humanitarianism emerged as a direct response and even an antidote to military violence. As the story goes, Geneva businessman Henri Dunant's efforts to redress the horrors of war after seeing the terrible aftermath of the Battle of Solferino (1859) eventually gave rise to the Geneva Conventions and the Red Cross movement. The two world wars reinforced this violence-breeds-care logic, as the vast scale of wartime suffering generated ever greater humanitarian counter-efforts. By the 1940s, an array of national, international, and supranational organizations increasingly aspired to provide neutral and impartial relief to the victims of war, thereby counteracting, or so they hoped, the violence and partisanship of armed conflict. Even if, on closer inspection, humanitarianism and warfare have always had a more symbiotic relationship—after all, in an era of citizen armies it was only the relative humanization of warfare that guaranteed its survival as an instrument of statecraft—the conceptual divide between the military and the humanitarian remains strong.1

During the night of January 17–18, 1955, the rain-swollen Rhine and Neckar rivers crested. At their confluence, inhabitants of the German city of Mannheim scrambled to protect their homes and property. Residents of the small islands on the outskirts of the city faced imminent disaster.

While the United Nations (U.N.) is typically seen as a major humanitarian actor—that is, an organization committed to alleviating human suffering and improving human welfare, it is not often thought of as a military power. But that is one of the many functions that the U.N. has adopted since its origin in 1945. For over seventy years, the U.N. Secretariat—the international bureaucracy responsible for the U.N. organization's executive and administrative functions—has conducted long-term expeditionary military operations across the globe in the form of peacekeeping and observer missions. The military wing of U.N. operations has only continued to grow in the twenty-first century. As of July 2023, 87,544 peacekeepers were deployed on active operations. And that number is lower than in the recent past, down from a height of 107,805 in April 2015.1 During that time, only the United States has regularly maintained more foreign-deployed forces than the U.N.

Since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. military has been among the most important providers of humanitarian assistance, particularly in the wake of natural disasters and conflict. Yet, aid organizations rarely consider the U.S. military a humanitarian actor, and military personnel do not identify primarily as humanitarians. Nevertheless, the logistics and manpower capacities of the U.S. military have often pushed it into humanitarian spheres. Once involved, however, the traditional humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence do not drive the military provision of humanitarian assistance. Instead, military personnel approach humanitarian assistance through their training, namely, moving items, building things, and managing people. They often pair a training-based framework with a general sense of helping those in need. The U.S. military is a humanitarian actor, but coming to grips with that requires reimaging humanitarianism. To explore the military as humanitarian, this essay first examines how the demands of logistics pushed the U.S. military into becoming a provider of refugee assistance in Albania during the 1999 Kosovo crisis. It then uses the 2021 evacuation and resettlement of Afghans to explore how the U.S. military's ready pool of manpower led it to become more deeply involved in humanitarian responses. Humanitarian crises are almost invariably complex and messy. The moral imperative to help those in need interacts with political and security priorities in often uncomfortable ways. That confluence helps explain why the U.S. military assists with some, but not other, crises.