NORTH CONWAY, N.H. — When Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., took the stage to deliver his first in-person reaction to the American killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran, he began with a laundry list of unanswered questions about the airstrike.
“As a military intelligence officer on the ground in Afghanistan,” he told an audience Friday at a community center in this snowy ski resort town, “I was trained to ask these questions before a decision is made.”
It was not surprising that Mr. Buttigieg invoked his military background to buttress his response to President Trump’s decision to kill a senior Iranian official. Mr. Buttigieg, a former naval intelligence officer, has often used his veteran status as a shield against criticism of his relative lack of experience, as an explanation for his domestic policy positions and as evidence he would not be nervous in a general election contest against Mr. Trump.
Not since 2004, when John Kerry, a Vietnam War hero, won the Democratic nomination in a field that included the retired Army general Wesley K. Clark, has a major presidential candidate made military experience central to their candidacy.
Now, with foreign policy emerging as a top priority as tensions with Iran surge, Mr. Buttigieg is leaning even harder on his veteran status as he seeks to become the nation’s commander in chief, threading it through answers with more frequency than he did earlier in the campaign.
[The Iran crisis has ignited a new debate among Democrats about the United States military presence in the Middle East.]
It is a tactic that suits the Midwesterner’s appeal to moderate and even conservative voters for whom the military retains a high level of respect and support. Mr. Buttigieg is competing for many of these voters with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is presenting himself as a seasoned hand on foreign policy crises.
But both men face potential vulnerabilities: Mr. Biden’s evolving descriptions of his stance on the military raid that killed Osama bin Laden have faced scrutiny, while Mr. Buttigieg’s self-promotion as an on-the-ground military officer risks alienating veterans with more extensive records.
“There’s only one candidate who has had to make life-or-death decisions involving American lives, and that’s Vice President Biden,” said Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, a decorated Marine Corps veteran who ended his own presidential campaign in August and had not endorsed anyone else. “There’s no combat veterans left in the race. I have tremendous respect for Pete’s service as an analyst, but analysts don’t make decisions.”
Mr. Buttigieg has often invoked his military service. His first Iowa television advertisement began with him saying, “as a veteran.” During an exchange about gun violence in the October Democratic debate, Mr. Buttigieg told former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, “I don’t need lessons from you on courage, political or personal.” And in December, he responded to a debate barb from Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who said that his devotion to the First Amendment was a “talking point,” by suggesting his time in the military was sufficient evidence of his devotion to the Constitution.
“Let me tell you about my relationship to the First Amendment,” Mr. Buttigieg responded then. “It is part of the Constitution that I raised my right hand and swore to defend with my life. That is my experience. And it may not be the same as yours, but it counts, Senator. It counts.”
Ms. Klobuchar, who had not brought up Mr. Buttigieg’s military service, was immediately put on the defensive and sought to shift the discussion away from it.
“I certainly respect your military experience,” she said. “That’s not what this is about. This is about choosing a president.”
Mr. Buttigieg is campaigning as an antiwar veteran. He is against “endless wars” and in recent days, has attacked Mr. Biden for voting for the Iraq war. “He supported the worst foreign policy decision made by the United States in my lifetime, which was the decision to invade Iraq,” Mr. Buttigieg told the Des Moines public affairs TV program “Iowa Press.”
Veterans represent a relatively small segment of Democratic primary voters, but Mr. Buttigieg uses his status not just as a get-out-of-jail-free card when he is questioned about his experience, but also as a device to connect with voters who may be turned off by candidates from the coasts.
If elected, Mr. Buttigieg would be the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter to have served in the military. He would also be the first veteran of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan to reach the White House after three Vietnam War veterans won major party nominations but lost general elections. Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a major in the Hawaii National Guard who has deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, is also in the race but has not qualified for a debate since November.
“In Middle America and in Iowa, this kind of thing connects to people,” said Jonathan Freeman, an Army reservist from Iowa who was the deputy veterans outreach director for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Not just because he said, ‘I had the flag on my shoulder.’ It’s a sincere experience that other people can connect to because they know the guy down the street who deployed.”
In North Conway on Friday, Mr. Buttigieg cited his military experience four separate times. “Any weapons resembling the sorts of things I trained on in the military have no business being sold” to the public, he said in response to a question about gun violence.
When he spoke of his patriotism, Mr. Buttigieg referred to “values that were encoded in the flag that was on my shoulder when I was deployed overseas.”
And when a New Hampshire voter asked Mr. Buttigieg, a 37-year-old who lost the only competitive general election contest he had ever run in by more than 20 percentage points, how he would handle relentless attacks from Mr. Trump, he promised to not be fazed because he had seen much worse in Afghanistan.
“One thing that you gain, I think, from being deployed into a war zone is you get a different level of perspective on what counts about incoming that you got to worry about,” he said. “There are worse forms of incoming than a tweet full of typos.”
He was more explicit during a subsequent discussion with reporters.
He referred to “friends that I’ve served with” who were endangered by increased tensions in the Middle East. He reiterated that “what I was trained to look at when contemplating” decisions was possible outcomes to military action.
Yet when asked if his presidential rivals understood the gravity of the current situation if they had not served in the military, Mr. Buttigieg was circumspect, pointing to his own qualifications.
“A presidential candidate who has served has a personal understanding of what we’re dealing with,” he said. “I’m not here to say that my qualifications are a prerequisite, but I will say that they make me extremely aware of the consequences of decisions made in the White House Situation Room.”
He continued Saturday in Nashua, responding to concerns that he was too young to handle a major foreign policy crisis by saying that his seven-month tenure in Afghanistan qualified him to navigate the current global crisis.
“I would offer that somebody who has been on the ground as an intelligence officer, understanding what’s at stake in these issues, is bringing the exact kind of bearing that we are going to need,” he said.
Such heavy emphasis on his military experience has the potential to leave Mr. Buttigieg exposed to vicious attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies about his service if he claims the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Kerry, who received three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star in Vietnam, was portrayed as a coward by George W. Bush’s allies, many of whom donned purple bandages to mock his Purple Hearts at the 2004 Republican National Convention.
“If he became the nominee, the Trump people would try to concoct some attack on what he did and on his service,” said Bob Shrum, Mr. Kerry’s campaign manager in 2004, who added that such an attack would not be as effective today as it was 16 years ago. “They’ll say he didn’t really do anything,” Mr. Shrum said.
Mr. Buttigieg’s allies say serving in the military reshapes one’s perspective not just on foreign policy, but on everything.
“It helps define you and it has practical applications for almost everything you do in your life afterward,” said Jon Soltz, a co-founder of VoteVets, a liberal veterans organization that has endorsed Mr. Buttigieg. “The lessons and experience you learn serving in the military are practical every day in the White House, beyond just national security matters.”
At Mr. Buttigieg’s New Hampshire events this past weekend, supporters said they found his military experience reassuring in an unsettled moment.
“We need to be listening to people who have firsthand experience,” Jill Sears, a fourth-grade teacher from Dover, N.H., said after seeing the candidate in Portsmouth.
And Austin Alvarez, a retired engineer from Bretton Woods, N.H., whose grandson is in the Marines, said Mr. Buttigieg must have gained valuable interpersonal experience in the Navy Reserves.
“He had to deal with a lot of different people,” Mr. Alvarez said. “If you’re in the service, you’re going to meet people from all walks of life.”
Jonathan Murray, a Marine veteran who led veterans outreach for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, said Mr. Buttigieg’s military credentials gave him a “special credibility with voters” but did not mean he would necessarily have the support of his fellow veterans.
“Serving in uniform gives candidates a perspective that few Americans have but most Americans trust,” Mr. Murray said. “At the end of the day, though, voters want to see that their elected officials care about veterans and understand their perspective. Any candidate can do that with the right message and the right surrogates.”
Patrick Healy contributed reporting from Nashua, N.H.