Clearly military forces will attempt to develop the most effective toolkit possible to win wars; however, as far as NGOs go, they have a choice – whether to accept funding from belligerents during conflicts or not; accepting funding integrates the organisation into the overarching political-military strategy of the belligerent concerned undermining their ability to be perceived as neutral by other belligerents.

A second but related point: Brauman and others at MSF have argued that assistance provided by the military in a situation such as Iraq a few years ago should not be classified as humanitarian assistance; rather it is assistance required as part of their responsibilities as an occupying power. How and when and by whom the phrase “humanitarian assistance” is used is important; given that military assistance of this type essentially serves military-political objectives, there is an argument to be made for using a different term for this assistance, so as not to confuse it with impartial humanitarian assistance. Not sure what suitable name could be used, but the military are usually pretty good at coming up with suitable acronyms for this kind of thing…

Final point – this is not to exclude the possibility of military delivery of humanitarian assistance when they are not belligerents and / or where there is no conflict (eg in the case of natural disaster)…

I see you are from Ankara Üniversitesi in Turkey. On Thursday, the US just had a big holiday where the traditional meal is turkey (the bird). ‘Turkey leftovers’ is a reference to eating poultry, not a snipe against your country.

I feel a certain style of discrimination and insult in your words ‘turkey leftovers’, and ‘work undercover’.
Do not be prejudiced towards fellow humanitarian missionists from different geographies, only due to American National Security grievances.
Most well educated development experts are well westernized and aware of education, science and global economic considerations being more important than ethnicism and nationalism no matter where they had been born.

There are two basic options regarding the military’s involvement in humanitarian aid and development:

1) If the military has no involvement in humanitarian aid, then the only tactics they are trained to conduct and equipped to employ are kinetic, causing civilian deaths and infrastructure damage. They have a stick but no carrot.

2) If the military is strongly involved in humanitarian aid and development, then they have an additional soft-power toolkit to “win friends and influence people”. That is, they have a stick AND a carrot. But, forces using humanitarian aid and development are less distinguishable from NGOs, since they both use carrots.

Given these two hard options, I prefer the second one.