Civil–military relations
Civil–military relations describes the relationship between military organizations and civil society, military organizations and other government bureaucracies, and leaders and the military. CMR incorporates a diverse, often normative field, which moves within and across management, social science and policy scales. More narrowly, it describes the relationship between the civil authority of a given society and its military authority. "The goal of any state is to harness military professional power to serve vital national security interests, while guarding against the misuse of power that can threaten the well-being of its people." Studies of civil–military relations often rest on a normative assumption that it is preferable to have the ultimate responsibility for a country's strategic decision-making to lie in the hands of the civilian political leadership rather than a military.
A paradox lies at the center of traditional civil–military relations theory. The military, an institution designed to protect the polity, must also be strong enough to threaten the society it serves. A military take-over or coup is an example where this balance is used to change the government. Ultimately, the military must accept that civilian authorities have the "right to be wrong". In other words, they may be responsible for carrying out a policy decision they disagree with. Civilian supremacy over the military is a complicated matter. The rightness or wrongness of a policy or decision can be ambiguous. Civilian decision makers may be impervious to corrective information. The relationship between civilian authorities and military leaders must be worked out in practice.
The principal problem they examine, however, is empirical: to explain how civilian control over the military is established and maintained. In the broader sense it examines the ways society and military intersect or interact and includes topics such as the integration of veterans into society, methods used to recruit and retain service members, and the fairness and efficacy of these systems, the integration of minorities, women, and the LGBT community into the military, the behavior and consequences of private contractors, the role of culture in military organizations, voting behavior of soldiers and veterans, and the gaps in policy preferences between civilians and soldiers.
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. 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 behavior, 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 into academia, particularly in political science and sociology.
Despite the peculiarly American impetus for Huntington's and Janowitz's writing, their theoretical arguments have been used in the study of other national civil–military studies. For example, Ayesha Ray used the ideas of Huntington in her book about Indian civil–military relations. 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. Finer observed that many governments do not have the administrative skills to efficiently govern, thus opening 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, 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 and the varied roles of militaries in repressing protests or staging coups in the Arab Spring 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.
Professional organization and journal
The principal professional organization for civil–military scholars is the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. The IUS sponsors Armed Forces & Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which publishes articles on civil–military relations, force diversity, veterans, military families, privatization, officer training, recruitment and retention, public opinion, conflict management, unit cohesion, ethics, and peacemaking. The journal Armed Forces & Society is located at Texas Tech University and is currently edited by Ori Swed. The IUS and the journal are international in scope and have a conference every other year in odd years. The 2025 conference is held in Reston, Virginia.The topics of research in civil–military relations are varied as evidenced by recent scholarship in such topics as:
- Health of the force
- Military cohesion
- Civil–military relations in Russia
- Special forces
- Veterans
- Ethics, professionalism and leadership
- Military families
- Women in the military
- LGBTQ issues
- Force effectiveness
Major theoretical discussions in civil–military relations
By the summer of 1950, the armed forces of the United States had fewer than 1.5 million personnel on active duty, down from a high of 12 million in 1945. By the next year, however, in response to North Korea's invasion of South Korea, the size of the U.S. military was again on the rise, doubling to more than 3.2 million personnel. Reaching a high of 3.6 million in 1953, the total number of personnel on active duty in the U.S. military never again dropped below two million during the 40-plus years of the Cold War. 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. As of February 28, 2009, a total of 1,398,378 men and women remain on active duty in the U.S. armed forces.
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. Some predicted disaster and were concerned with the growing militarization of American society. These writers were quite sure that a distinctly military culture was inherently dangerous to a non-militaristic liberal society. Others warned that the ascendancy of the military establishment would fundamentally change American foreign policy and would weaken the intellectual fabric of the country. However, most of the arguments were less apocalyptic and settled along two tracks. The two tracks are highlighted, respectively, by Samuel P. Huntington's Soldier and the State and Morris Janowitz's The Professional Soldier.
The debate focused primarily on the nature of the relationship between the civilian and military worlds. There was widespread agreement that there were two distinct worlds and that they were fundamentally different from one another. The argument was over how best to ensure that the two could coexist without endangering liberal democracy.
Institutional theory
In his seminal 1957 book on civil–military relations, The Soldier and the State, Samuel P. Huntington described the differences between the two worlds as a contrast between the attitudes and values held by military personnel, mostly conservative, and those held by civilians, mostly liberal. Each world consisted of a separate institution with its own operative rules and norms. The military's function was furthermore inherently different from that of the civilian world. Given a more conservative military world which was illiberal in many aspects, it was necessary to find a method of ensuring that the liberal civilian world would be able to maintain its dominance over the military world. Huntington's answer to this problem was "military professionalism."Risa Brooks argues that the health of civil–military relations is best judged by whether there is a preference divergence between military and political leaders, and whether there is a power imbalance. She argues that the healthiest arrangement of civil–military relations is when the preferences between military and political leaders is low, and political leaders have a dominant power advantage. She argues that the worst kind of civil–military relations is when there is high preference divergence, and military leaders are dominate the power balance.
According to Dan Slater, Lucan A. Way, Jean Lachapelle, and Adam E. Casey, variations in military supremacy in authoritarian states can be explained by the nature in which the military was established in the first place: "Where authoritarian mass parties created militaries from scratch, the armed forces have generally remained subservient. Where militaries emerged separately from authoritarian parties, they enjoyed the autonomy necessary to achieve and maintain military supremacy. The core lesson is simple: Unless an autocratic regime created the military, it will struggle to control the military."