War & Peace Quote by Stephen Cambone

Bureaucratic fog can be a weapon, and Stephen Cambone wields it here with practiced precision. The sentence performs a familiar Washington move: it acknowledges that something has shifted ("driven by any number of factors") while refusing to name agents, choices, or accountability. History becomes weather. Events happen, pressures mount, demands continue. No one decides.

The specific intent is defensive and managerial. Cambone is framing policy change, institutional strain, or expanded authority as an inevitable response to circumstances rather than a contestable strategy. By elevating "combat experience" in Afghanistan and Iraq as the "most prominent" factor, he casts the post-9/11 security state as a set of lessons learned in the field - gritty, empirical, reluctant. That rhetoric launders controversial decisions through the moral credibility of soldiers and sacrifice. It also treats two optional wars as though they were natural disasters the government simply had to endure.

The subtext is that debate is a luxury. "Ongoing demands" and the capacious phrase "global war on terrorism" create a timeline with no endpoint, which is the point: if the emergency is permanent, extraordinary measures can become routine. The line’s rhythm mirrors that normalization, stacking campaigns and demands into a chain of necessity.

Context matters because Cambone, a Pentagon official in the Bush era, spoke from inside the machinery that built and defended expanded surveillance, detention, and military posture. The quote isn’t trying to persuade with moral argument; it’s trying to close the argument by presenting power as paperwork and war as a forcing function.