Why do states who are not threatened deploy their armed forces in various speeds and sizes? After the closure of the Afghanistan mission in March 2014, and the return of almost all military personnel to Canada, the government was presented with a distinctive opportunity to “re-set” the overseas posture of its armed forces. Through an examination of the literature regarding Canadian defence policy, this introductorily chapter sets the conditions to ask how the public service of Canada defines and shapes military commitments, implements foreign policy choices, and identifies the need for additional research into both the principal-agent relationship and the deployment decision-making process. Relying on anonymous interviews with select members of the Canadian Public Service and the Armed Forces, I identify and explain the civil-military relations of bureaucratic influence on post-Afghanistan non-combat interventions. Each empirical case study establishes that there were specific bureaucratic interests at play and that certain departments dominated decision-making, either in promoting a military deployment or acting as a veto player to hold back the decision-making process because their own interests were not being met. Subsequently these deliberations determined the speed to deploy forces and the size of the Canadian military contribution. By examining the time required to announce a deployment and the deployment’s composition/size in places like Iraq/Kuwait, Ukraine, and Mali (as well as a non-deployment to Colombia), I explain when, why, and who in the public service in terms of federal departments acts as both an agent and a veto player, and through a theoretical framework called Bureaucratic Intervention Theory, how departments managed the post-Afghanistan military deployment decision-making process