Abstract
For more than two hundred years, the threat of a military coup has been all but nonexistent in the United States. The country has been truly fortunate that the norms and institutions of civilian control of the military have been so strong as to prevent such an event. However, a state’s safety from coups is hardly an adequate measure of healthy civil-military relations. Indeed, military influence on political outcomes can quietly erode or threaten civilian control even within the framework of a liberal democratic order. Still, few would argue that the military should never influence policy outcomes. Instead, we recognize that the military, as experts in “the management of violence,” should have a voice in the councils of war as well as on the seemingly more mundane issues that affect military institutions.1 However, it is important to consider when, to what extent, and how the military should influence policy decisions.
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Notes
Harold D. Lasswell, The Analysis of Political Behavior: An Empirical Approach (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner& Co., 1948), 26. Lasswell earlier refers to the military as “specialists on violence” and discusses the management of violence in
Harold. D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” American Journal of Sociology 46, no. 4 (January 1941): 455–468.
The most notable among these are Richard Kohn’s article “Out of Control” and the numerous responses to it. See Richard H. Kohn, “Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil-Military Relations,” National Interest 35 (Spring 1994): 3–17;
and Colin Powell, John Lehman, William Odom, Samuel Huntington, and Richard Kohn, “An Exchange on Civil-Military Relations,” National Interest 36 (Summer 1994): 23–31.
Similar discussions are found in Don M. Snider and Miranda A. Carlton-Carew, eds., U.S. Civil-Military Relations: In Crisis or Transition (Washington, D.C.: The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1995);
Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., “Welcome to the Junta: The Erosion of Civilian Control of the U.S. Military,” Wake Forest Law Review 29, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 341–92;
Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., “The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012,” Parameters 22, no. 4 (Winter 1992/1993): 2–22;
James Kitfield, “Standing Apart,” National Journal 30, no. 24 (June 13, 1998): 1350–58;
Eliot A. Cohen, “Civil-Military Relations: Are U.S. Forces Overstretched?” Orbis 41, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 177–86;
Thomas E. Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Scribner, 1997); A. J. Bacevich, “Civilian Control: A Useful Fiction?” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 6 (Autumn/Winter 1994–95): 76–79; Mackubin Thomas Owens; “Civilian Control: A National Crisis?” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 6 (Autumn/Winter 1994–95): 80–83; and articles by a number of scholars in a symposium on civil-military relations in the Spring 1998 edition of Armed Forces and Society. For more recent discussions during the Bush presidency,
see Richard H. Kohn, “The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today,” Naval War College Review 55, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 9–59;
Mackubin Thomas Owens, “Rumsfeld, the Generals, and the State of U.S. Civil-Military Relations,” Naval War College Review 59, no. 4 (August 2006): 68–80;
Damon Coletta, “Courage in the Service of Virtue: The Case of General Shinseki’s Testimony before the Iraq War,” Armed Forces and Society 34, no. 1 (October 2007): 109–21;
Michael C. Desch, “Bush and the Generals,” Foreign Affairs 86, no. 3 (May/June 2007): 97–108;
and Richard B. Myers and Richard Kohn, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Lawrence J. Korb, and Michael C. Desch, “Responses: Salute and Disobey? The Civil-Military Balance, Before Iraq and After,” Foreign Affairs 86, no. 5 (September/October 2007): 147–56.
Don M. Snider and Miranda A. Carlton-Carew, “The Current State of U.S. Civil-Military Relations: An Introduction,” in U.S. Civil-Military Relations: In Crisis or Transition, ed. Don M. Snider and Miranda A. Carlton-Carew (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1995), 16. Likewise, Michael Desch argued that “there is a remarkably broad range of ideas on what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ civil-military relations.”
Michael C. Desch, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 3. And following Snider and Carlton-Carew, the term “effective civilian control” is used as a synonym for healthy or good civil-military relations. See pg. 15.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 84–85.
Kenneth W. Kemp and Charles Hudlin, “Civil Supremacy over the Military: Its Nature and Limits,” Armed Forces and Society 19, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 7–26.
Richard H. Kohn, “The Erosion of Civilian Control,” 16; and Richard H. Kohn, “How Democracies Control the Military,” Journal of Democracy 8, no. 4 (1997): 143.
Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 298–302; see 4–6, 65–68.
Feaver, Armed Servants, 68. On different types of military advice, see Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, Morningside Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 11–12.
Allan R. Millett, The American Political System and Civilian Control of the Military: A Historical Perspective (Columbus: Mershon Center, Ohio State University, 1979), quoted in Dunlap, “Welcome to the Junta,” 344.
See the gap literature discussed in Peter D. Feaver, and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
An example of this argument can be found in Richard Danzig, The Big Three: Our Greatest Security Risks and How to Address Them (Washington, D.C.: NDU Press, 1999), 53–55. He notes there that “while maintaining a professional and merit-based military, responsible decision makers also need to address the need to bring the DoD and American society closer together,” and that “more attention needs to be paid to opportunities to expose members of the military and civilian populations to one another.”
Rebecca L. Schiff, “Civil-Military Relations Reconsidered: A Theory of Concordance,” Armed Forces and Society 22, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 7.
See Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).
Indeed, as Patricia Shields points out, “All theories of democratic civil-military relations have a normative component.” Patricia M. Shields, “Civil-Military Relations: Changing Frontiers,” Public Administration Review 66, no. 6 (November/December 2006): 926. On the “civil-military problematique,”
see Peter D. Feaver, “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control,” Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 150–158.
Including those who rely on norms of subordination to achieve civilian control in a fashion analogous to the inculcation of professionalism. See David Hendrickson, Reforming Defense: The State of Civil-Military Relations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and Kemp and Hudlin, “Civil Supremacy.”
Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (1960; reprint New York: Free Press, 1971); 420–40. For a nice discussion of Janowitz’s argument,
see Arthur D. Larson, “Military Professionalism and Civilian Control: A Comparative Analysis of Two Interpretations” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 2 (Spring 1974): 57–72.
Schiff, “Civil-Military Relations,” 12. It is hard to believe that these things will prevent intervention, given that what will necessitate such cooperation will look a lot like intervention unless the standard for civilian control is the absence of a military coup. For criticism of Schiff’s position, see Richard S. Wells, “The Theory of Concordance in Civil-Military Relations: A Commentary,” Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 269–75.
Feaver coins this term. See Peter D. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
See Peter D. Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 225. Subjective control theorists also commonly utilize this mechanism for civilian control. See Huntington, Soldier and the State, 82; and Feaver, Armed Servants, 81.
Albright highlights the importance of this even within Huntington’s schema. See David E. Albright, “A Comparative Conceptualization of Civil-Military Relations,” World Politics 32, no. 4 (July 1980): 555. On Finer and others who share this view,
see S. E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: Military Intervention into Politics (New York: Praeger, 1962); Kemp and Hudlin, “Civil Supremacy”; and Hendrickson, Reforming Defense.
Although, as Desch reminded me, the military must still be taught to understand that war is continuation of politics à la Clausewitz (private conversation). It does not rule out the necessity of liberally educating military leaders so that they can handle the complexities of the modern battlefield, particularly when dealing with complex situations that they will confront in counterinsurgency warfare. Unfortunately, folks like Sam Sarkesian and Robert Connor think the military should engage in “enlightened advocacy.” The last thing we need is another savvy political interest group that can manipulate civilians, especially given its ease due to the divided control between the executive branch and Congress. See Sam C. Sarkesian and Robert E. Connor, Jr., The U.S. Military Profession into the Twenty-First Century: War, Peace, and Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 71–2.
On the effects of internal orientation, see Stanislav Andreski, “On the Peaceful Disposition of Military Dictatorships,” Journal of Strategic Studies 3, no. 3 (December 1980): 3–10; Dunlap, “Welcome to the Junta;” Dunlap, “The Origins”; and Desch, Civilian Control of the Military.
Snider and Carlton-Carew, “Introduction”1; Coletta, “Courage,” 119; and Suzanne Nielsen, “The Army Officer as Servant,” Military Review 3, no. 1 (January–February 2003): 17.
I think this is generally true about politics. Without certain virtues in the principles and agents, institutional arrangement can have only limited effect. This is an old argument in political science, perhaps nowhere more interesting than in the famous Mill-Macaulay debate. See Jack Lively and John Rees, Utilitarian Logic and Politics: James Mill’s Essay on Government, Macaulay’s Critique, and the Ensuing Debate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).
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© 2008 Derek S. Reveron and Judith Hicks Stiehm
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Ruger, W. (2008). Civilian Means of Control. In: Reveron, D.S., Stiehm, J.H. (eds) Inside Defense. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613782_15
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