President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
How can civil-military relations be used as a lens for us to understand the outcomes of wars in which multinational organizations are involved? This piece uses civil-military relations as a guide (rather than a strict framework) and the specific case of NATO to show the benefit of applying this approach. It shows, using the example of NATO in Afghanistan, how civil-military dynamics within the organization itself structured the campaign and impacted the alliance’s strategy and operations.
How should senior military officers in democratic states influence their domestic political environments? The flippant answer is that they should not: they should do as they’re told. The American civil-military relations literature, written largely in the shadow of Samuel P. Huntington’s myth of an apolitical military, has consistently downplayed the positive role officers play in politics, to such a degree that we have only a dim outline of what constitutes appropriate and effective political influence by officers Thus, in practice, we fear that too many officers find that their professional military education fails to prepare them for the realities of being a commander.
Given the size of the military is not likely to grow and old bases are not going to come back, the volume of storytellers and their reach will continue to diminish. To repair its relationship with the American public, the military needs to do more to leverage traditional and new media to amplify the stories of servicemembers and communicate better both what life in the military is like and what it does. This should not be a recruitment campaign, but rather a reintroduction.
The recent coups in sub-Saharan Africa have ushered in a new era in civil-military relations in the Francophone states of the continent. While military intervention and insurgency have long been a feature of politics in the region since decolonization, the quick succession of regime change and the seizure of power by a new generation of juntas against long standing personalist dictatorships suggests a break in previous political patterns.
Discussions about civilian control of the military tend to generate mental images of tanks in the streets and coups d’états. Thankfully in Romania this is not a relevant fear. But a close examination of the situation on the ground underscores the need to avoid complacency in evaluating civil-military relations, even countries that are like Romania—staunch NATO allies, EU members, and consolidated democracies. Here, a combination of political consensus, institutional structures, and limited civilian expertise has afforded the Romanian military the autonomy to execute major aspects of defense policy with little in the way of contested democratic oversight.
In most democracies, legislatures have far less oversight power over their militaries than we might expect. The U.S. Congress and its relationship with the American armed forces is the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, many legislatures around the world lack some of the basic instruments required to understand what their armed forces are doing, notably security clearances, subpoena power, and adequate staffing.
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.
The Strategy Bridge explores the state of civil-military relations in the United States and beyond for the final quarterly series of 2023. What are the most pressing issues to consider? What overlooked issues may be key to understanding, influencing, and managing the future of civil-military relations? These two-wide ranging questions could be framed in a number of ways, but we envision publishing essays providing our readers with insights into the broad sweep of contemporary civil-military relations.
Mara E. Karlin’s new book, The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War is a sobering yet necessary read. In looking at the effects of the post-9/11 wars on the U.S. military, she asks—and proposes answers to—two questions. First, “[h]ow did the most capable military in U.S. history—indeed in the history of the world—fight to, at best, a draw in its longest contemporary conflict?” And second, “why has this not been the subject of greater reflection and debate.”
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.
Killing for the Republic is, for ancient history, fairly accessible, and between that and its celebration of civic virtues and the republican spirit it may garner a significant audience. It does speak to fundamental questions: what made Rome special, and how is Rome relevant today? Republics do need citizens invested in military service and in public life generally. In the military sphere, for example, Eliot Cohen has written frequently and recently about civic virtue and citizen soldiering. While Brand's book asks us to consider the place of civic virtue in modern Republics, its mischaracterizations of Rome's military history and the civic virtues of its citizens make it difficult to recommend.
While still a republic, Rome built its empire through the virtues of its agrarian-based citizens and thanks to a political system characterized by the pursuit of liberty through divided sovereignty and participatory citizenship. The foundational element was a valorized civic mindedness, nourished by religious rituals, civic monuments, a commitment to family honor and communal glory, and that agrarian lifestyle. The latter habituated Roman citizens to the essential need of fulfilling their duty. Rome successfully cultivated martial virtues among the populace so that ordinary citizens could pursue their duty toward family and patria while also earning individual glory, but without threatening the delicate balance required to preserve the republican state.
Paula G. Thornhill has written an easily accessible work explaining the origins and evolution of the United States’ armed forces under the Constitution. She aims to make American military institutions more understandable to readers by discussing their foundations, evolving missions and organizations, how they have functioned in war and peace, and the tradition of civilian control.
The professionalism of Western militaries is ripe for another discussion. The practitioners who make up the profession of arms—and those that study and teach them—owe it to their citizens, their governments, and themselves to shape their forces, and educate their professionals, in preparation for the future. It is their duty to ensure they are prepared to ethically and effectively achieve the military objectives their leaders lay before them, no matter the adversary or the context of the conflict.
oday’s long wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and increasingly in the U.S. military involvement in and around Syria’s civil war, demonstrate a failure of the political resolution for which the U.S. military acts. Lacking an attainable political end, the blue whales find the need to continually keep the tiger sharks in action. Without this understanding as we confront the many challenges to U.S. policy aims, we may find ourselves, again, in exactly the wrong kind of limited wars, using limited means—wars that have no fundamental or achievable political aim—with the only option a continuing and bleeding military application for which no end appears.
What obligations do political communities have towards the military and its members? Military members play an essential role in defending political community members’ rights and securing the political community itself, and they risk a great deal doing so. Because of this, political communities incur special obligations towards military members.
The dramatic title of a 2015 magazine article in The Atlantic by Dominic Tierney, “Why has America Stopped Winning Wars?,” underscored a portrayal of the final military deaths in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as both remarkable and poignant. A better question and the focus here is: Why do U.S. military outcomes after 1945 so often fail to achieve the policy objectives for which they are begun?
It is important to view the civil-military problematique through a lens slightly different from that of the United States looking at itself. In this regard, Trinkunas has offered a useful addition to the literature on civil-military relations. And as a history of political transitions, coups, democracy, and civil-military relations in Venezuela from 1945 to 2004, he does not disappoint. But the book doesn't live up to the author's aspirations.
The nomination of James Mattis as Secretary of Defense briefly brought the often overlooked concept of civilian control of the military to public attention. Commentators debated whether Mattis’ qualifications, personality, and presumed influence on the administration justified an exception to the law prohibiting recently retired generals from serving in that post. Reassuringly, in that discussion as well as in the larger conversation about the unusual number of retired and acting general officers now serving in traditionally civilian posts, there has been no discernible challenge to the notion of civilian control of the military. Yet underneath this consensus as to the desirability of civilian control, hide differences in understanding about what it actually entails. In short, we want civilian control but do not precisely know what it is.
Looking to the future, as the military grows to incorporate full benefits to same-sex couples on base and more inclusion of women in combat roles, could the next generation of Military-Americans actually become the country’s most accepting of diversity?
