On Obedience: Contrasting Philosophies for the Military Citizenry and Community. Pauline Shanks Kaurin. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020.

In the midst of a fraught and partisan political moment, Pauline Shanks Kaurin has achieved a remarkable feat: she has penned a timeless work that also speaks urgently to vital political and civil-military questions of our time. On Obedience effortlessly moves from examples of civil disobedience in the face of racial injustice to trials of parents lamenting their tween’s messy rooms to mission command orders and the ethical dilemmas of soldiers receiving illegal or immoral orders, all while integrating concepts from ancient philosophy, Shakespearean tragedy, recent movies, and popular #miltwitter accounts. Each page focuses on vital questions about how military service members and regular citizens should respond to immoral laws or orders, and how they should manage competing loyalties.

On Obedience is a triumph. It deserves an enduring spot on the reading lists of senior military leaders and on the syllabi of professional military education institutions around the world. Even so, it is an incomplete—and sometimes flawed—triumph, especially as the argument reaches its apex in describing the obedience as negotiation model in the book’s eighth chapter. Shanks Kaurin too easily concedes that those responsible for giving orders also possess the preponderance of power in these negotiations. In doing so, she ignores or undervalues the insights of both ancient political philosophers and contemporary political scientists who have wrestled with problems of (civilian) control precisely because those who receive orders often are the ones who hold the preponderance of coercive power.[1] Combined with her seeming optimism that education and training alone can overcome the challenges collective action and human frailty pose to sound moral decision-making, the negotiation model threatens to exacerbate some of the problems it seems designed to address.

The significant weakness of the negotiation model itself leaves only a small blemish on the perceptive arguments of the preceding seven chapters and in the clarifying cases of the concluding chapter. Shanks Kaurin elucidates the communal aspects of obedience, the range and complexity of obedience as a continuum, and the active, iterative, and intentional reality of obedience in practice to breathe new life into contemporary debates about ancient questions related to authority, obedience, loyalty, and trust. It is these foundational insights upon which future discussions of critical obedience should begin and to which this review will now turn.

Following Orders May Be Simple, but Obedience Is Not

Shanks Kaurin advances our understanding of obedience beyond the simple notion of immediate and unthinking compliance in the context of a senior-subordinate relationship. That obedience implies a social context—“at the very least it requires a commander and one who is commanded”—perhaps seems obvious.[1] Shanks Kaurin, however, convincingly demonstrates that obedience both shapes, and is shaped by, the moral and political contexts surrounding the broader communities of practice in which it occurs. This social understanding of obedience has critical implications for the military, particularly because it provides a conceptual bridge to connect individual moral decisions with the military community as a profession. Shanks Kaurin’s thoughtful explication of obedience as a virtue that is necessarily embedded within professional values and societal conceptions of the common good should be the foundation on which all future work about the moral development of service members—and the articulation of professional values—should rest.

Shanks Kaurin advances our understanding of obedience beyond the simple notion of immediate and unthinking compliance in the context of a senior-subordinate relationship.

Shanks Kaurin not only recognizes the communal aspects that complicate common understandings of obedience, but also explores the complexity of obedience in practice. In doing so, On Obedience also offers a deft, implied critique of Peter Feaver’s agency theory of civil-military relations. Contrary to Feaver’s binary division of military obedience into strict categories of working or shirking, Shanks Kaurin effectively illustrates obedience as existing on a continuum in “a range of intention and action.”[2] While other scholars of civil-military relations have long recognized that civilian control is not a binary variable, Shanks Kaurin’s taxonomy elucidates civilian control as just one instantiation of a broader concept of obedience. As I will discuss briefly below, she does not fully wrestle with one key implication of her broader framework: that subordinates sometimes might be justified in taking actions that have not been ordered. Nevertheless, her broader taxonomy outlining obedience as a range of behavior and intention reveals the nuance of obedience in communal practice.

Shanks Kaurin’s thesis that the moral, communal, and complex nature of obedience necessitates an intentional and deliberative form of obedience—critical obedience—is compelling and persuasive. This distinction between unthinking and deliberative obedience is essential, because it suggests there exists “an obligation to engage critically before obeying.”[3] And, in some cases, critical obedience requires—or at least involves—non-compliance or partial compliance with an order. It is this active, iterative, and intentional nature of obedience that unifies individual moral autonomy with the norms, obligations, and values of a community of practice. It is also the concept that—if misunderstood or misapplied—provides the risk and possibility an individual or profession could use coercive power to threaten or undermine the very relationships and social institutions which we ask them to obey.

Power: Central to Negotiations, but not Shanks Kaurin’s Model

Although Shanks Kaurin acknowledges power dynamics and coercion can, and sometimes do, shape the outcomes of negotiations, power is not mentioned enough to even warrant inclusion in the book’s index. To the extent power is discussed, Shanks Kaurin seems to imply the balance of coercive power rests with those in positions of authority. In practice, however, those in positions of authority are frequently, if not usually, disadvantaged in terms of their means of coercion. It is precisely this imbalance that Plato suggested is at the heart of the civil-military problematique—and arguably at the heart of the entire western philosophical tradition—when he posed the question, “Who will guard the guardians themselves?”[4] 

In her subtle critiques of both Plato and Huntington, and in her promotion of Hector’s virtue in opposition to Achilles’ self-interest, Shanks Kaurin positions her account in contrast to traditional notions of military professionalism. Nevertheless, by emphasizing so centrally the role of judgment and discretion within the rules, norms, and values of the military profession, she seems less aware than one might hope that her ultimate answer to Plato’s question is that the guardians will guard themselves—through education, practice, and the development of judgment and discretion based on virtues grounded in a societal understanding the common good.

This oversight is somewhat ironic, given the clear Aristotelian influence throughout her work. Aristotle was much more cognizant that social ordering would be necessary to manage the psychological temptations of military leaders toward both autonomy and political rule.[5] A reference she makes to Jack Nicholson’s character, U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Nathan Jessup, in the movie A Few Good Men illustrates the tension. Shanks Kaurin refers to Jessup as the “Platonic form of military virtue of good order and discipline, which involves immediate and willing obedience to orders without question.”[6] Her suggestion is that Jessup demonstrates why obedience as unthinking compliance is deeply flawed. She again highlights the character as an example of what she calls “Military and Veteran Exceptionalism,” the idea that those who have served or sacrificed in the military are imbued with “certain knowledge and moral virtues that make them better.”[7] What Shanks Kaurin fails to recognize, however, is that obedience as negotiation could potentially reinforce or even exacerbate the Military and Veteran Exceptionalism problem. Jessup is not flawed because he believes all orders should be followed immediately and without question; he clearly has no problem ignoring civilian orders or authority when directed at him. Rather, Jessup is flawed because he believes he understands the common good in a way that civilians never could.

Shanks Kaurin’s insightful chapter on the military-citizen duality attempts to square this circle, but it fails to do so, even though it stands alone as a critique of contemporary veteran culture. Whether the insularity and self-righteousness inherent in Military and Veteran Exceptionalism can be resolved purely through professional military education and training reforms grounded in the development of virtue in the service of the common good is an empirical question. As both Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of civil-military relations have suggested, such a program would require a near-revolution in not only professional military education and training programs, but also in broader political institutions and societal culture.[8] Granting members of the military profession the upper hand in the negotiation and then asking them not to use either the immense political power they inherit as the nation’s most-respected institution or the immense coercive power they possess as a military force is a risky proposition. Shanks Kaurin’s account reflects less on these power dynamics or their broader political and social implications than it could, or probably should. Although aligning civilian and military conceptions of the common good through education is a noble goal, there is a reason debates about the causes and consequences of civil-military culture gaps have been around for millennia across many civilizations.

It is not only in her account of obedience in the civil-military context where the omission of power dynamics could be consequential. As any second lieutenant walking into a new platoon recognizes, the leader with positional authority is not always the leader with a monopoly on legitimacy or coercive power. Perhaps more importantly, minority communities or victims of societal injustice typically occupy fundamentally weak positions in societal power structures. Shanks Kaurin’s failure to wrestle with the way that power dynamics might fundamentally alter her negotiation model causes her to see similarities across certain military and civilian contexts where few may exist. The ability of certain civilian groups to embrace or enact critical obedience may be less a consequence of the need for a more-developed sense of judgment and discretion than a need for a more equitable position from which to negotiate—or even the need for other forms of power, such as agenda-setting and the ability to dictate or shape what items are even discussed at the negotiation table. In other words, it is not necessarily that a model of obedience as negotiation is wrong; rather, it is that variation in power dynamics within the model might create significantly different normative implications that remain unexplored.[9]

Nor is the power held by an individual or group in authority the only power dynamic one must consider; social and communal pressures, as well as collective action problems, often make compliance with a law or order more or less likely. In the case of the My Lai massacre, for example, Shanks Kaurin could have paid more attention not only to the moral consequences that obedience to illegal and immoral orders had on those who did not obey, but also to social pressures and collective action problems within the unit that made disobedience—even critical disobedience—harder in practice. Similarly, it often is the case that unit cohesion and positive social pressure can help individuals obey orders even when facing the possibility of death. Obedience, whether critical or unthinking, is unnatural in many contexts. Self-sacrifice, even for the common good, is a significant thing to ask or expect of anyone.

Human Frailty and the Limits of Education

Even in cases where self-sacrifice is not essential, placing the burdens of critical obedience is much—perhaps too much—to ask of any one person. Here, the hypothetical cases in Shanks Kaurin’s final chapter are far more effective than the retrospective judgments she offers throughout the book. At times, her ex post presentation of exemplary historical cases embodying critical obedience sometimes obscures how different the scenario would have looked ex ante. It also minimizes the uncertainty often inherent in moral decisions, sometimes giving the impression that critical obedience provides only upside with no risk.

Consider the well-known case of Stanislov Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. In September 1983, Petrov did not immediately notify his superiors when a new air defense system indicated with high certainty that multiple U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles were headed for the Soviet Union. Petrov waited, and his intuition that the system had malfunctioned was proven correct. Shanks Kaurin highlights this incident as “a clear case of using judgment and discretion to make the right decision, even if it was not the decision that would have been indicated and that did not necessarily please his superiors.”[10] But what if we did not know everything would be okay? Should we expect, or even encourage through professional military education programs, any one man or woman to be up to handling a decision of such magnitude alone—particularly when there was time to consult others in the decision? It is easy to praise this sort of judgment after the fact, but harder to justify holding up a man who acted with such unbridled arrogance as an exemplar which others should follow.

…moral judgment and discretion are often exercised in the face of great uncertainty when success is not guaranteed. And any human being, no matter how practiced or habituated in judgment and discretion, can sometimes be self-interested, weak, and unreliable in the face of fear or the possession of power.

A similar problem arises with Shanks Kaurin’s application of the proportionality and reasonable chance of success doctrines from the Just War tradition to the problem of assessing and exercising judgment with respect to risk decisions about the common good. As Eliot Cohen has noted, military expertise is more uncertain than that of almost any other profession.[11] Still, service members typically possess some ability to assess the likelihood of particular military outcomes based on their experience, knowledge, and direct observation of facts on the ground. Those in the military have no independent or unique basis with which to assess the common good, however, at least not one which is meaningfully differentiated from that of any other citizen. Moreover, their assessment of the common good with respect to the political community may be at least partially at odds with their assessment of the common good with respect to the military, or it may be clouded by their own self-interest.[12] Since decisions about war and peace almost always involve contested value judgments, it is only with great humility that those in a military uniform should presume they can substitute their own perceptions of the common good with those filtered through legitimate authorities and processes in the face of great uncertainty. Perhaps a judgment that success was not reasonably certain during the later stages of the Vietnam War may have spared some wasted lives, but it may also have justified delay or defiance prior to the D-Day invasion during World War II. This comparison may seem extreme in hindsight, but moral judgment and discretion are often exercised in the face of great uncertainty when success is not guaranteed. And any human being, no matter how practiced or habituated in judgment and discretion, can sometimes be self-interested, weak, and unreliable in the face of fear or the possession of power.

Read this Book, and That’s an Order

On Obedience makes anyone who reads it better off for having encountered and considered the ideas within its pages. It is not a flawless book, but it is essential. I expect to return to it repeatedly, and probably over decades, as I wrestle intellectually with the military’s relationship to legitimate civilian authority and as I aspire imperfectly to develop an understanding of my own responsibilities as a citizen in our ever-evolving yet imperfect republic. Shanks Kaurin has addressed many of the exigent circumstances we confront in our contemporary circumstances, and her insights will endure. These insights should, and hopefully will, continue to challenge and inspire military leaders and responsible citizens for many years to come.

The centrality of power dynamics in negotiations surrounding obedience and the consequences of power imbalances can challenge the elegant insights of Shanks Kaurin’s model. As Shanks Kaurin notes, her model relies on at least a measure of interdependence. In many cases, disadvantaged individuals or communities may be lacking the power and agency they need to exercise critical obedience in practice. In contrast, readers focused on the civil-military implications of Shanks Kaurin’s book should recognize it sometimes gives short shrift to the power dynamics underlying the civil-military problematique. Civilian leaders hold the upper hand in the unequal dialogue not because they hold the preponderance of power, but rather because they possess legitimate political authority. Ideas upholding legitimacy contain real power, but they are only one form of power. Future readers of On Obedience should not forget how rare civilian control of the military has been throughout human history or how tenuous it may still be.

Jim Golby is senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security and a lecturer in both the Department of Government and the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Header Image: Movie poster of A Few Good Men (IMDB)

Notes:

[1] Feaver, Peter D. "The civil-military problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the question of civilian control." Armed Forces & Society 23, no. 2 (1996): 149-178.

[2] Shanks Kaurin, Pauline. On Obedience: Contrasting Philosophies for the Military, Citizenry, and Community. Naval Institute Press, 2020, p. 61.

[3] Ibid., p. 111.

[4] Ibid., p. 192.

[5] Plato, trans. Allan Bloom. The Republic of Plato. New York: Basic Books, 1991, 374c-d.  

[6] Aristotle, Politics, 2.5.25 (1264b6-9), 7.7.6 (1328a6-7). I refer to the book, chapter, section, and Bekker numbers of Aristotle’s text in Carnes Lord’s translations of Aristotle’s Politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013 [1984]. Aristotle emphasizes: “but insofar as it is impossible that those who are capable of using compulsion and preventing [its being used against them] will always put up with being ruled, to this extent they should be the same persons. For those who have authority over arms also have authority over whether the regime will last or not.” (7.9.5 (1329a6-12)).

[7] Shanks Kaurin, p. 15.

[8] Ibid., p. 207.

[9] Golby, James and Hugh Liebert. “Making Norms Normal: Ancient Perspectives on Norms in Civil-Military Relations,” paper presented at the bicentennial meeting of the Interuniversity Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, November 2019.

[10] For a thoughtful discussion of how differences the ability to control which options they present to civilian leaders grants military leaders power to shape the orders they receive, see Davidson, Janine. "The Contemporary Presidency: Civil‐Military Friction and Presidential Decision Making: Explaining the Broken Dialogue." Presidential Studies Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2013): 129-145.

[11] Ibid., p 143-144.

[12] Cohen, Eliot A. Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime. Simon and Schuster, 2012.

[13] For an excellent discussion of how one’s professional identity and civil-military norms may paradoxically undermine the ability of military officers to recognize the political consequences of their actions, see Brooks, Risa. "Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States." International Security 44, no. 4 (2020): 7-44.