Generally, the implication is that chickenhawks lack bravery to participate in war themselves, preferring to ask others to support, fight, and die in an armed conflict.
"[4] The 1983 bestselling book Chickenhawk was a memoir by Robert Mason about his service in the Vietnam War, in which he was a helicopter pilot.
Mason used the word as a compound oxymoron to describe both his fear of combat ("chicken") and his attraction to it ("hawk").
Matthew Yglesias describes it as "a species of hypocrisy charge, a tempting rhetorical ploy that in practice proves almost nothing.
"[7] John Bolton,[8][9][10] Donald Trump,[11][12][10] Dick Cheney,[13][14] Newt Gingrich,[15][16] Rush Limbaugh,[14] Mitt Romney,[17] and Ted Nugent[18][19][20][21] are modern examples of those being called chickenhawks by critics.