Soldiers and Civilians edited by Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn
Crespino, Joseph
Who's in charge here? Joseph Crespino How events in American his-tory have so fundamental-ly changed public life as the terrorist attacks of Septem-ber 11. Long is the list of issues that seemed...
...In the last days of the Clinton administration, when Feaver and Kohn first undertook this study, such a view had particular resonance...
...For the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, veterans con-stituted a higher percentage of the U.S...
...Feaver and Kohn speculate that such a devel-opment may have grave implications for congressional understanding of militaiy affairs and legislative oversight of the armed forces, though they provide no evidence that such a thing has hap-pened yet...
...The mountain of evidence presented in this volume-including comparative studies of the attitudes and opinions of civilian versus military elites as well as military leaders versus a cross-section of the U.S...
...In the face of that response, the important question is not whether or not there is a gap, but whether the gap has implications for American na-tional security...
...It was easy to imagine buttoned-down army brass privately denouncing their commander-in-chief as a draft dodger while Clinton staffers casually parodied military leaders as the fluoridation-ob-sessed stereotype of Dr...
...Americans know now better than they ever have that an open society is a privilege that carries a cost...
...The number who describe them-selves as Republican has nearly doubled, from 33 to 64 percent...
...this ratio compares to an almost even split among the civilian popula-tion...
...Such a comparison tends to reinforce the notion that Republican administrations know how to handle military matters better than the De-mocrats-thus, only increasing the par-tisan loyalties of the military...
...Proponents of such ideas should be wary of the trends dis-cussed in this study...
...The real prob-lem for the military these days, they argue, still revolves around issues such as recruitment, organization, and mod-ernization-none of which is affected by the gap...
...Even so, there is at least one scenario in which the civil-military gap could move to the frontlines of the American public debate...
...As several of the authors in Soldiers and Civilians point out, the concern over the civil-military gap has its roots in the clas-sic debate-initiated in the early cold-war years and exacerbated during the tumult of Vietnam-over the nature of the military in a democratic society...
...But the terrorist attacks changed all that...
...The terrorist at-tacks of September 11 have shattered Americans' sense of personal safety...
...Feaver and Kohn are quick to point out that the high rates of political asso-ciation do not necessarily translate into a high level of partisan activity among military officers...
...Or at least that is one way of reading it...
...The attacks of September 11 exemplified a new and sinister threat to national security, and the war on terrorism is an issue that civilians and mil-itary personnel can rally around...
...In some of the pro-posals, draftees would have the choice of serving in either the military or some civilian alternative...
...For instance, the Republican admin-istration has been widely praised for its handling of the current military situa-tion-particularly in retrospective com-parison to the Clinton administration's bungled attempt to take out Osama bin Laden in 1998...
...Long is the list of issues that seemed so important on September 10 that the events of the following day ren-dered impotent...
...In these terms, the civil-military gap de-rives from the culture wars that have been played out in any number of are-nas of American public life in the past thirty years...
...Eight times as many military officers identify them-selves as Republicans than as Democ-rats...
...Over the last generation the percentage of rising military officers who describe themselves as Independents has gone from 46 to 27 percent...
...Since September 11, various lead-ers and public commentators have re-vived calls for some form of mandatory national service...
...It boils down to how one defines the social and cultural mainstream of the nation...
...By the mid-1990s, however, veterans were un-derrepresented rather than overrepre-sented among congresspersons...
...On the face of things, what Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn call the "civil-military gap" seems like one such issue...
...Strangelove lore...
...Negative perceptions of the mili-tary have been erased by television im-ages of the burned-out hull of the Pen-tagon...
...Take, for exam-ple, the military experience of members of Congress...
...The issue remains an important one for future researchers be-cause recent trends would seem only to accelerate this partisan divide...
...Congress than in the comparable age group of the general population...
...On this point the authors hedge their bet...
...Does an all-volunteer mili-tary, with its self-selected dogmatism and inherent tendency toward uncriti-cal rigidity, drift too far away from the civilian norm, as Janowitz holds...
...Such a dual track approach to national service could have the effect of institutionalizing what at this point remain only cultural trends, creating a new generation of Americans with conflicting values that go far be-yond the culture wars of the late twen-tieth century...
...The argument here is not that the gap currently has an effect, but that it has the potential-given the continua-tion of current trends-to undermine military morale, hinder recruitment, and erode the trust between military and civilian decision makers...
...The intellectual background for this debate is provided by the long-standing argu-ment between the academics Samuel P. Huntington and Morris Janowitz (and carried on by their respective follow-ers...
...A civilian population forced to live with the uncertainty of terrorism at home is much better prepared to understand the price the military pays to protect Amer-ican interests abroad...
...Feaver and Kohn have collected articles from twenty-some scholars describing a growing cultural divide be-tween a civilian world that fails to un-derstand the mission of the military and a military that scorns the values and pri-orities of civilian life...
...But if we know anything about current trends, it is that they do not continue...
...Or does the liberal and individualistic civil-ian society stray from the bedrock of cul-tural values long at the heart of American democracy, as Huntington argues...
...Feelings of imminent danger may re-cede with time, but it is almost impos-sible to imagine ever recovering the sense of domestic safety that existed before September 11...
...More disturbing is the growing par-tisanship of military leaders...
...President George W. Bush has received almost universal support for his administration's military action in Afghanistan, and patriotic fervor among American civilians has reached levels once thought impossible in post-Viet-nam America...
...In truth, however, there is more to the civil-military gap than meets the eye...
...Combine this with events of the 2000 presidential election, when some military personnel accused the Gore campaign of trying to discount late-arriving military ballots from overseas because they were pre-sumed to be Republican votes, and there is all the more reason to suspect that Re-publican loyalties within the American military will only increase...
...Yet critics of this line of analysis will freely admit that cultural differences between military and civilian life have always existed in America...
...Yet there are also more specific ways of explaining the gap...
...population-leaves little doubt that the gap between the culture and ideology of military and civilian life is real...
Vol. 129 • April 2002 • No. 8
