Civil-military Relationship

Now and Then

Jonatan Rudolph

• Publisher: Alpha Editions
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9789386834430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A Civil–military relation describes the relationship between civil society as a whole and the military organization established to protect it. More narrowly, it describes the relationship between the civil authority of a given society and its military authority. Studies of civil-military relations often rest on a normative assumption that civilian control of the military is preferable to military control of the state. The principal problem they examine, however, is empirical: to explain how civilian control over the military is established and maintained. Civil-military relations are those interactions between the military and civilian actors that in some way relate to the power to make political decisions. Traditionally, the study of civil-military relations levitated around questions of who is master and who is servant in civil-military relations and who "guards the guardians" of the nation. In other words: the question of civilian control is at the heart of civil-military relations. Even though in recent years, especially with the fall of the Berlin Wall, democratization processes in eastern Europe, the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the proliferation of peace-building missions and programs in so-called post-conflict societies, the concept of security sector governance or security sector reform has gained prominence in the academic and policy-oriented literature, civilian control remains the central issue in civil-military relations in emerging democracies. The book deeply highlights the civil-military relation and its strategies.

Civil-military Relationship

Now and Then

Civil-military Relationship

Now and Then

Jonatan Rudolph

Alpha Editions

Copyright © 2017

ISBN : 9789386367525

Design and Setting By

Alpha Editions

email - [email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The views and characters expressed in the book are of the author and his/her imagination and do not represent the views of the Publisher.

Contents

Preface

1. Civil–military Relations

2. Use of Force and Civil–military Relations

3. Trends in Civil-Military Relations

4. Comparative Look at Civil-Military Relations

5. Civilian Control of the Military

6. Civil-Military Relations: A Peacebuilding Issue

7. Civil Military Relations in Nepal and India

8. Civil-Military Relations in Latin America

9. Civilian Supremacy or Military Domination

10. Civil-Military Relations in China

11. Civil-Military Coordination Practices

12. Humanitarian Principles and Civil Military Relation

13. Civilian and Military Structures in the Field of Defence

14. Civilian-military Relations in Consolidated Democracy

15. Civil-Military Cooperation

16. Syria: Civil-military Relations during Civil War

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Civil–military relations describes the relationship between civil society as a whole and the military organization or organizations established to protect it. More narrowly, it describes the relationship between the civil authority of a given society and its military authority. Studies of civil-military relations often rest on a normative assumption that civilian control of the military is preferable to military control of the state. The principal problem they examine, however, is empirical: to explain how civilian control over the military is established and maintained.

At the heart of civil-military relations is the problem of how a civilian government can control and remain safe from the military institution it created for its own protection. A military force that is strong enough to do what is asked of it must not also pose a danger to the controlling government. This poses the paradox that “because we fear others we create an institution of violence to protect us, but then we fear the very institution we created for protection”.

Civil-military relations are those interactions between the military and civilian actors that in some way relate to the power to make political decisions. Traditionally, the study of civil-military relations levitated around questions of who is master and who is servant in civil-military relations and who “guards the guardians” of the nation. In other words: the question of civilian control is at the heart of civil-military relations.

Even though in recent years, especially with the fall of the Berlin Wall, democratization processes in eastern Europe, the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the proliferation of peace-building missions and programs in so-called post-conflict societies, the concept of security sector governance or security sector reform has gained prominence in the academic and policy-oriented literature, civilian control remains the central issue in civil-military relations in emerging democracies. All the matter is just compiled and edited in nature. Taken from the various sources which are in public domain.

As the book addresses this crucial issue quite deftly, it is hoped that it would prove to be a source of great information for the reader.

—Editor

1

Civil–military Relations

Introduction

Civil–military relations describes the relationship between civil society as a whole and the military organization or organizations established to protect it. More narrowly, it describes the relationship between the civil authority of a given society and its military authority. Studies of civil-military relations often rest on a normative assumption that civilian control of the military is preferable to military control of the state. The principal problem they examine, however, is empirical: to explain how civilian control over the military is established and maintained.

While generally not considered a separate academic area of study in and of itself, it involves scholars and practitioners from many fields and specialties. Apart from political science and sociology, Civ-Mil (CMR) draws upon such diverse fields as law, philosophy, area studies, psychology, cultural studies, anthropology, economics, history, diplomatic history, journalism, and the military, among others. It involves study and discussion of a diverse range of issues including but not limited to: civilian control of the military, military professionalism, war, civil-military operations, military institutions, and other related subjects. International in scope, civil-military relations involves discussion and research from across the world. The theoretical discussion can include non-state actors as well as more traditional nation-states. Other research involves discerning the details of military political attitudes, voting behaviour, and the potential impact on and interaction with democratic society as well as military families.

History

The history of civil-military relations can be traced to the writings of Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz, both of whom argued that military organizations were primarily the servants of the state.

Concerns about a growing militarism in society, largely coming from the experiences of the first half of the twentieth century, engendered an examination into the impact of military organizations within society.

The ramifications of the Cold War, specifically the American decision to maintain a large standing army for the first time in its history, led to concerns about whether such a large military structure could be effectively maintained by a liberal democracy. Samuel P. Huntington and Morris Janowitz published the seminal books on the subject which effectively brought civil-military relations intoacademia, particularly in political science and sociology. Despite the peculiarly American impetus for Huntington’s and Janowitz’s writing, their theoretical arguments are often used in the study of other national civil-military studies. However, in his book The Man on Horseback, Samuel E. Finer countered some of Huntington’s arguments and assumptions, and offered a look into the civil-military relationships in the under-developed world. Finer observed that many governments do not have the administrative skills to efficiently govern which may open opportunities for military intervention—opportunities that are not as likely in more developed countries.

The increased incidence of military coups d’état since World War II, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, brought about a growing interest in academic and journalistic circles in studying the nature of such coups. Political upheaval in Africa led to military take-overs in Dahomey, Togo, Congo, and Uganda, to mention just a few. Political unrest in South America, which involved military coups in Bolivia (189 military coups in its first 169 years of existence), Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, was largely a result of forces attempting to stem the increasing influence of left-wing and communist led uprisings. The 2006 military coup in Thailand engendered continued interest in this area.

The end of the Cold War led to new debate about to the proper role of the military in society, both in the United States and in the former Soviet Union. However, as before, much of the discussion revolved around whether the power of the state was in decline and whether an appropriate level of civilian control was being brought to bear on the military.

Convergence Theory

The other principal thread within the civil-military theoretical debate was that generated in 1960 by Morris Janowitz in The Professional Soldier. Janowitz agreed with Huntington that separate military and civilian worlds existed, but differed from his predecessor regarding the ideal solution for preventing danger to liberal democracy. Since the military world as he saw it was fundamentally conservative, it would resist change and not adapt as rapidly as the more open and unstructured civilian society to changes in the world. Thus, according to Janowitz, the military would benefit from exactly what Huntington argued against – outside intervention.

Janowitz introduced a theory of convergence, arguing that the military, despite the extremely slow pace of change, was in fact changing even without external pressure. Convergence theory postulated either a civilianization of the military or a militarization of society However, despite this convergence, Janowitz insisted that the military world would retain certain essential differences from the civilian and that it would remain recognizably military in nature.

Janowitz agreed with Huntington that, because of the fundamental differences between the civilian and military worlds, clashes would develop which would diminish the goal of civilian control of the military. His answer was to ensure that convergence occurred, thus ensuring that the military world would be imbued with the norms and expectations of the society that created it. He encouraged use of conscription, which would bring a wide variety of individuals into the military. He also encouraged the use of more Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs at colleges and universities to ensure that the military academies did not have a monopoly on the type of officer, particularly the senior general officer and flag officer leadership positions, in the military services. He specifically encouraged the development of ROTC programs in the more elite universities, so that the broader influences of society would be represented by the officer corps. The more such societal influences present within the military culture, the smaller the attitudinal differences between the two worlds and the greater the chance of civilians maintaining control over the military. Janowitz, like Huntington, believed that the civilian and military worlds were different from one another; while Huntington developed a theory to control the difference, Janowitz developed a theory to diminish the difference.

In response to Huntington’s position on the functional imperative, Janowitz concluded that in the new nuclear age, the United States was going to have to be able to deliver both strategic deterrence and an ability to participate in limited wars. Such a regime, new in American history, was going to require a new military self-conception, the constabulary concept: “The military establishment becomes a constabulary force when it is continuously prepared to act, committed to the minimum use of force, and seeks viable international relations, rather than victory…” Under this new concept of the military establishment, distinctions between war and peace are more difficult to draw. The military, instead of viewing itself as a fire company to be called out in emergency, would then be required to imagine itself in the role of a police force, albeit on the international level rather than domestically. The role of the civilian elite would be to interact closely with the military elite so as to ensure a new and higher standard of professional military education, one that would ensure that military professionals were more closely attuned to the ideals and norms of civilian society.

Institutional/Occupational Hypothesis

Charles Moskos developed the Institutional/Occupational (I/O) hypothesis as a means to promote comparative historical studies of military organization and military change. This hypothesis evolved into the Postmodern Military Model, which helped predict the course of civil-military relations after the end of the Cold War. The I/O hypothesis argued that the military was moving away from an institutional model towards one that was more occupational in nature. An institutional model presents the military as an organization highly divergent from civilian society while an occupational model presents the military more convergent with civilian structures. While Moskos did not propose that the military was ever “entirely separate or entirely coterminous with civilian society”, the use of a scale helped better to highlight the changing interface between the armed forces and society.

Agency Theory

The Vietnam War opened deep arguments about civil-military relations that continue to exert powerful influences today. One centred on a contention within military circles that the United States lost the war because of unnecessary civilian meddling in military matters. It was argued that the civilian leadership failed to understand how to use military force and improperly restrained the use of force in achieving victory. Among the first to analyse the war critically using Clausewitz as the theoretical basis, Harry Summers argued that the principal reason for the loss of the Vietnam War was a failure on the part of the political leadership to understand the goal, which was victory. The Army, always successful on the battlefield, ultimately did not achieve victory because it was misused and misunderstood. Summers demonstrated how the conduct of the war violated many classical principals as described by Clausewitz, thereby contributing to failure. He ended his analysis with a “quintessential strategic lesson learned”: that the Army must become “masters of the profession of arms,” thus reinforcing an idea along the lines of Huntington’s argument for strengthening military professionalism.

H.R. McMaster observed that it was easier for officers in the Gulf War to connect national policy to the actual fighting than was the case during Vietnam. He concluded that the Vietnam War had actually been lost in Washington, D.C., before any fighting occurred, due to a fundamental failure on the part of the civilian and military actors involved to argue the issues adequately. McMaster, who urged a more direct debate between civilians and the military on defence policy and actions, and Summers, who argued for a clear separation between civilians and the military, both pointed out controversies over the proper roles of civilian and military leaders.

Despite those controversies and the apparent lessons learned from the Vietnam War, some theorists recognized a significant problem with Huntington’s theory insofar as it appears to question the notion of a separate, apolitical professional military. While there is little argument that separate civilian and military worlds exist, there is significant debate about the proper interaction between the two. Huntington proposed that the ideal arrangement was one whereby civilian political leaders provided objective control to the military leadership and then stepped back to permit the experts in violence to do what was most effective. He further stated that the most dangerous arrangement was one whereby civilian leaders intruded extensively in the military world, creating a situation whereby the military leadership was not politically neutral and security of the nation was thus threatened both by an ineffective military and by provoking the military to avoid taking orders.

Arguably, however, and despite Huntington’s urging otherwise, U.S. civilian leadership had been intrusive in its control over the military, not only during the Vietnam War, but also during much of the Cold War. During that time, the military elite had been extensively involved in the politics of defence budgets and management, and yet the United States had managed to emerge successfully from the Cold War. Despite that, none of Huntington’s more dire predictions had proven true.

In response to this apparent “puzzle,” Peter D. Feaver laid out an agency theory of civil-military relations, which he argued should replace Huntington’s institutional theory. Taking a rationalist approach, he used a principal-agent framework, drawn from microeconomics, to explore how actors in a superior position influence those in a subordinate role. He used the concepts of “working” and “shirking” to explain the actions of the subordinate. In his construct, the principal is the civilian leadership that has the responsibility of establishing policy. The agent is the military that will work – carry out the designated task – or shirk – evading the principal’s wishes and carrying out actions that further the military’s own interests. Shirking at its worst may be disobedience, but Feaver includes such things as “foot-dragging” and leaks to the press.

The problem for the principal is how to ensure that the agent is doing what the principal wants done. Agency theory predicts that if the costs of monitoring the agent are low, the principal will use intrusive methods of control. Intrusive methods include, for the executive branch, such things as inspections, reports, reviews of military plans, and detailed control of the budget, and for Congress, committee oversight hearings and requiring routine reports. For the military agent, if the likelihood that shirking will be detected by the civilian principal is high or if the perceived costs of being punished are too high, t...