*Structural constraints.* The framework treats defense-as-protection-of-the-political-community as constitutive infrastructure on the same logic as the legal system or public-health infrastructure: it is not pacifist, and it derives the legitimacy of defense institutions directly from the political community's structural obligation to maintain itself against external coercion, so the constraint falls not on the existence of defense institutions but on their political-economy. Within that political-economy, for-profit defense-contractor configurations that produce the structural-extraction patterns [§9.11.3](<9.11.3 What is Predicted.md>) documents and [§9.11.4](<9.11.4 What is Confirmed.md>) confirms are precluded; specific reform paths (in-house government production, cost-plus-contracting reform, revolving-door restrictions, concentration limits) are underdetermined, but the structural preclusion holds at the design-pressure level. Defense spending is correspondingly constrained to track threat-assessment-derived requirements rather than industry political weight, and while the specific threat-assessment institutions and budget-process systems remain underdetermined, the constraint that those institutions function with independence from industry pressure holds. Veterans care, finally, is healthcare for participants who took on extraordinary structural obligations on behalf of the political community, so the framework derives its non-substitutability as a healthcare-floor item with elevated structural weight, and privatized veterans-insurance configurations that produce extraction at the veterans-care interface are precluded on the same logic that precludes privatizing the healthcare floor generally ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)).

*Cross-domain couplings.* These constraints couple [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) to three adjacent domains. The non-substitutability of veterans care couples it to healthcare ([§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>)) at the veterans-care interface, so that veterans-care reform and broader healthcare reform are not independent, and reform paths that exclude veterans-care from the broader healthcare-floor architecture violate the framework's couplings. It couples to representation ([§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>)) on the democratic-oversight side, since the forever-war prediction depends on defense-industry capture exceeding democratic oversight and the constraint runs through the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) direction-recognition mechanism: defense reform without representation reform underperforms, the two being coupled by the structural-capture mechanism. And it couples to the economy ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)) on the spending-political-economy side: defense spending is one of the largest single budget categories in industrial political communities and therefore one of the largest single sites of the structural-extraction pattern [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) derives at the macro level, so economic reform without defense-spending reform underperforms while defense reform without broader economic reform remains politically reversible.

*Bounded field-engagement.* The framework is not pacifist, and the point bears saying outright: it licenses defense institutions on the structural-obligation account and precludes only the political-economy configurations that produce structural extraction within them, placing it in the field with realist-institutionalist-restrained-defense traditions and with Eisenhower's own structural account, against both unrestrained-defense-industry political-economy and the pure pacifism that would preclude defense institutions altogether. It also predicts its own opposition: defense-industry political resistance to demobilization will be the most ferocious resistance in any defense reform, because the industry's structural redundancy under reduced-extraction configurations is more thoroughly derived than for any private-sector lobby outside the health-insurance industry, so the transition design has to anticipate and route around that resistance, not because it is illegitimate to face but because it is structurally maximal and predictable. And it locates a structural pressure-relief: the framework's environmental and cooperative-infrastructure constraints ([§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>); [§9.6](<9.6 Agriculture.md>)) couple to defense political-economy through the pressure international cooperation places on arms-race dynamics, so reform agendas that strengthen international cooperation reduce the structural pressure for defense-industry overcapacity, while those that exclude it underperform on defense-spending reform specifically.

These implications are derived under engagement with the contested international-relations opposition traditions [§9.11.1](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>) names at premise: pacifism (Tolstoy, *The Kingdom of God Is Within You* 1894; Hauerwas, *The Peaceable Kingdom* 1983), realism (Morgenthau, *Politics Among Nations* 1948; Mearsheimer, *The Tragedy of Great Power Politics* 2001), and cosmopolitanism (Kant, *Perpetual Peace* 1795; Held, *Democracy and the Global Order* 1995), which [§9.11.1](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>) engages at section length, so that the implications stated here apply under that engagement. The *in bello* combatant-equality dispute (Walzer vs. McMahan) adjudicated in [§9.11.2](<9.11.2 What is Required.md>) is additionally staged at [§9.11.1](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>); the implications stated here concern defense political-economy and do not turn on that adjudication.

What the framework leaves open is the specific defense-industry reform path among compatible alternatives (in-house government production, cost-plus-contracting reform, revolving-door restrictions, concentration limits), the threat-assessment institutions and budget-process reforms, the posture, force-structure, alliance-commitment, and doctrine choices, the arms-control treaty architecture, the reform path from current configurations to framework-compatible alternatives, and the calibration of the veterans-care system within broader healthcare reform. Where multiple designs satisfy the constraints, the framework leaves the choice to the design literatures, the empirical record, and the recognized direction of the population through [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) (Representation).

Condensed to a single thesis, the [§9.11](<9.11 Defense.md>) argument across its five subsections comes to this: defense is legitimate constitutive infrastructure and its current political economy is structurally extractive, and holding both of these simultaneously (neither dismissing the apparatus nor accepting its current configuration) is what the framework's structural position on defense consists in. The confirmation record shows that for-profit-contractor capture, revolving-door political weight, and spending-beyond-threat-assessment are structural predictions the comparative record confirms across multiple jurisdictions; countries that have achieved substantially lower defense-to-GDP ratios with maintained deterrent capacity provide operating models rather than speculative alternatives. The institutional-design implications are politically distinctive: the framework derives that the same structural analysis that licenses defense institutions also precludes their current political-economic configuration, which means reform is a structural requirement that follows from the same premises that establish the institution's legitimacy.


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← [9.11.4 What is Confirmed](<9.11.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [9.12 Enforcement](<9.12 Enforcement.md>) →
