The shadow of major scholars in the field of civil-military relations like Samuel Huntington—especially his privileging of the officer corps’ relationship with civilian leadership and that same corps’ professionalism as the most important guarantor of sound civil–military relations—may still loom too large for students and practitioners of national security. Scholars conversant with civil-military relations, however, have pushed and continue to push us to expand our frameworks for understanding and practicing civil-military relations. Civil-military relations can include but is also far more than the study of coups or the explosive and tendentious interactions between prominent generals and U.S. presidents. It is also the study of the daily and ongoing inter-relationships between a nation’s population, its government, and its military—that timeless trinity Clausewitz identified—that can unfold in a myriad of dynamic ways.[1]
As such, The Strategy Bridge wanted to explore the state of civil-military relations in the United States and beyond for the final quarterly series of 2023. This quarterly’s articles take new perspectives on issues both familiar and unexpected.
In our first piece, provocatively entitled “Legislative Oversight Over the Armed Forces Is Overrated,” Stephen M. Saideman and Philippe Lagassé leave the U.S. behind to take a more global look at civil-military relations. They argue that U.S. legislative oversight over its military is a model that is fruitless to seek around the world, where countless national legislatures lack the same infrastructure, even within democracies. The authors provide practical solutions as to how nations can take small steps to provide more oversight.
Eoin Lazaridis Power then turns our attention to the specific case of Romania, pointing to how it can be problematic to assume civil-military relations are healthy in nations. Romania appears to be a “consolidated democracy” not meriting special attention. But, reiterating a point made by Saideman and Lagassé, serious oversight is lacking that could lead to a myriad of problems. Power proposes that the U.S. expand its security assistance program to provide stronger civilian oversight of the military.
Our focus then shifts to the continent of Africa to explore a recent string of coups in a specific context. In “Guardianship and Resentment in Precarious Civil-Military Relations,” Naman Habtom-Desta and Julian Waller explore the strong scorn many African militaries have increasingly cast upon their civilian governments, resulting in a rise of coups, especially in former French colonies. These coups have been partially enabled by the changing context that is the West’s seeming floundering with the simultaneous rise of competing, non-Western models from peer competitors.
From a traditional focus on coups but in a new context, we pivot to how new technology may fundamentally reshape civil-military relations. In “The Normativity of State-Sanctioned Killing: Why the Hard Case against Machine Learning in Military Intelligence Production is Institutional,” Zac Rogers describes the potential results of a “sprawling public-private sector digital ecosystem.” The military’s use of vast amounts of seemingly innocuous information collected on its citizens through machine learning potentially disrupts the foundation of civilian interaction with the military. Where a citizen’s right to obscurity had been assumed before the arrival of the digital age, it now has to be reexamined and secured. Rogers contends that we must engage thoughtfully with this new realm of civil-military relations because it connects each civilian more deeply with the act of killing than has been the case before because of the changing context of a new kind of digital total war.
The Strategy Bridge then returns to the more traditional realm of civil-military relations, although once again focused on the specific context of today in exploring the relationship of U.S. society to its military. In “Finding a New Big Picture,” Ben Griffin explores the U.S. Army’s past attempts to connect with its civilian stakeholders and suggests how it and the U.S. military as a whole can work to minimize an increasing gap between a professional military and a society increasingly unfamiliar with that professional military. He does that by exploring one of the longest-running television shows in U.S. history, The Big Picture, produced by the Army beginning in 1951.
The next article continues in a similar vein although flipping the script. Thomas Crosbie and Anders Klitmøller, both instructors of professional military education, discuss not what servicemembers should not say but what they should say in ”Beyond the Neutral Card: From Civil-Military Relations to Military Politics.” Pointing out the long shadow of Samuel Huntington’s flawed insistence on apolitical officers, they argue that there is no shared understanding of what “constitutes appropriate and effective political influence by officers.” They embrace the notion of military-political agency, which relies on the assumption that the military fully operates within domestic politics whether it wants to or not. A more active approach, counterintuitively, may result in healthier civil-military relations than simply seeking to be apolitical at all costs.
Finally, Davis Ellison concludes the series by applying civil-military relations to the specific context of coalition operations in Afghanistan to identify the gap in the literature on relationships between the civilian and military authorities within multinational organizations. In particular, Ellison argues that General Stanley McChrystal undermined civil-military relations when he discarded NATO’s strategic guidance.
Taken together, the articles in this quarterly series guide the reader through three continents to offer multiple perspectives on civil-military relations. They do so while touching on multiple intersections of Clausewitz’s trinity of the government, military, and society, an arguably more useful and timeless perspective than Samuel Huntington’s increasingly dated ideas. We hope this provides a historically-informed and analytically insightful set of accounts of civil-military relations.
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Header Image: Champs-Elysees, Paris, France, 2017 (Manu Sanchez).
Notes:
[1] Jessica D. Blankshain, "A Primer on US Civil–Military Relations for National Security Practitioners," Wild Blue Yonder 1, no. 4 (2020): 1-30: 3.