Civil–military relations

[8] While generally not considered a separate academic area of study in and of itself, it involves scholars and practitioners from many fields and specialties, although the primary focus is in political science, sociology and history.

[17][18][19][20] The history of civil-military relations can be traced to the writings of Sun Tzu[21] and Carl von Clausewitz,[22] both of whom argued that military organizations were primarily the servants of the state.

Samuel P. Huntington and Morris Janowitz published the seminal books on the subject which effectively brought civil-military relations into academia, particularly in political science and sociology.

[27] In 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.

[29] 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.

[31][32] 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.

Strikes and even some rioting by military personnel at overseas bases in January 1946 pressured President Harry S. Truman to continue the process despite growing concern about the Soviet Union and an increasing recognition that the United States was not going to be able to retreat into the isolationism of the pre-war years.

Attempts in the United States Congress to continue conscription to provide a trained reserve as a replacement for a large standing military force failed and, in 1947, the World War II draft law expired.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the size of the active-duty force had, by 1999, dropped to just under 1.4 million personnel.

The size of the U.S. military in the latter half of the twentieth century, unprecedented in peacetime, caused concern in some circles, primarily as to the potential effect of maintaining such a large force in a democratic society.

[a] Others warned that the ascendancy of the military establishment would fundamentally change American foreign policy and would weaken the intellectual fabric of the country.

Risa Brooks argues that the health of civil-military relations is best judged by whether there is a (i) preference divergence between military and political leaders, and (ii) whether there is a power imbalance.

She argues that the worst kind of civil-military relations is when there is high preference divergence, as well as a power balance between the military and political leaders.

[26] 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.

This hypothesis evolved into the Postmodern Military Model, which helped predict the course of civil-military relations after the end of the Cold War.

[84][85] The Vietnam War opened deep arguments about civil-military relations that continue to exert powerful influences today.

He 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.

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.

McMaster[87] 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.

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.

As discussed above, 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.

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.

After observing that most civil-military theory assumes that the civilian and military worlds must necessarily be separate, both physically and ideologically, Rebecca L. Schiff offered a new theory—Concordance—as an alternative.

[92][93][94] One of the key questions in Civil-Military Relations (CMR) theory has always been to determine under what conditions the military will intervene in the domestic politics of the nation.