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. This chapter identifies a gap within the Canadian Civil-military dialogue–the role of the Public Service in Canadian Armed Forces deployments—and address the subject through a theoretical framework called Bureaucratic Intervention Theory. Using a neo-classical realist approach, I conduct a review of several existing theories and establish a conceptual framework for understanding the context within which Canadian military deployment decisions are made. Through an examination of three theoretical approaches including Civil-Military Relations, Veto Players Theory, and Bureaucratic Politics, the books central research problem is framed, and a theoretical gap in the current academic literature is established to explain what causes variations in how the Canadian government decides to deploy its armed forces abroad (or not). From this, I argue that Bureaucratic Intervention Theory—defined as when the level of bureaucratic consensus (or lack thereof) among self-interested federal organizations is able to delay, prevent, or shape military recommendations to the executive—better explains how the Canadian Armed forces is deployed than currently available in the literature.