Civilian analysts, strategists and diplomats focus on statecraft: how to wield the foreign policy tool kit to achieve national goals and protect American interests. They focus on broader strategy, diplomatic nuance, setting one sticky problem aside to make progress on another.

Both skill sets, military and civilian, are important. The president and his staff coordinate between the two. But filtering all policy decisions through a military lens will compromise the balance in decision making that good statecraft requires.

More fundamentally, our older democracy is in trouble. Over the past 70 years, the military has become the dominant institution in how the United States engages with the world, especially since Sept. 11, the so-called global war on terror and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Special Operations forces are now deployed to more than 80 countries, the counterterrorism apparatus has expanded across the country, and the military conducts cyberwarfare abroad.

Like water to a fish, our militarized medium has become invisible to us. To have generals in charge of the foreign and national security policy agencies looks normal. While it is true that the strategic failure behind the two biggest operational failures of the past 15 years, Iraq and Afghanistan, was a civilian responsibility, it seems ironic that the careers of the three officers so far appointed by Mr. Trump — Generals Mattis, Flynn and Kelly — were bound up with those debacles. If General Petraeus were nominated as secretary of state, that would make four.

It is important for the president to surround himself with senior cabinet-level advisers who are not military men. The president will need that balance, as well as the capabilities of all America’s foreign policy institutions. The challenges he will encounter are broader than the military view can encompass. And most solutions are not military.

Putting military officers in charge of the entire architecture of national security reinforces the trend toward militarizing policy and risks cementing in place “the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of. To borrow the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow’s words, if all the men around President Trump are hammers, the temptation will be “to treat everything as if it were a nail.”