Chickenhawk (also chicken hawk and chicken-hawk) is a political term used in the United States to describe a person who strongly supports war or other military action (i.e., a war hawk), yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age.

The term indicates that the person in question is hypocritical in nature for personally dodging a draft, seeking a deferment or otherwise shirking their perceived patriotic duty during a time of armed conflict and then (often later in life) politically advocating aggressive military and foreign policies seen as likely to provoke conflict with other nations.

The general implication is that chickenhawks lack the moral character or physical courage to participate in military service during wartime personally, preferring instead to publicly encourage armed conflicts in which others will presumably be ordered to fight and possibly die, while the chickenhawks themselves remain committed only politically or ideologically. This supposed lack of first-hand experience with the complex and often harsh realities of military conflict contributes to the further criticism of chickenhawks as being fundamentally naïve about the effectiveness of military power and reckless in regularly promoting it's use as an instrument of national policy.

Those who avoid military service and continue to oppose armed aggression are not considered to be chickenhawks.

In political usage chickenhawk is a compound of chicken (meaning coward) and hawk (meaning someone who advocates war, first used to describe "War Hawks" in the War of 1812). The earliest known print citation of chickenhawk in this sense was in the June 16, 1986 issue of The New Republic.^[1] An association between the word chickenhawk and war was popularized several years earlier in the 1983 bestselling book Chickenhawk, 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"), a slightly different use of the term which nonetheless might have inspired the current usage.^[1]

The term gained widespread use during the administration of President George W. Bush (2001-2009), principally following the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. This was widely due to the fact that several high-ranking and prominently pro-war Bush administration officials, Vice President Dick Cheney, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and others had never served in the military during the Vietnam War. Cheney himself receiving five separate draft deferrals. Bush himself had served as a pilot with the Alabama Air National Guard during the war but remained in the United States and never saw combat.

Previously, the term war wimp was sometimes used, coined during the Vietnam War by Congressman Andrew Jacobs, a Marine veteran of the Korean War. Jacobs defined a war wimp as "someone who is all too willing to send others to war, but never got "round to going himself".