Democracy at Arms

...Huntington writes that this period constituted the “dark ages” of the Army and the “period of stagnation” for the Navy...

...The prescriptive or normative element of Huntington’s theory was to suggest a way for the United States to deal with the dilemma raised by what Peter Feaver has called civil-military probl?matique: How to address the tension between the desire for civilian control and the need for military security, or how to minimize the power of the military and make civilian control more certain without sacrifi cing protection against external enemies...

...He further contended that liberalism was “the gravest domestic threat to American military security...

...Of course, autonomy is not absolute: Huntington argued that while the military has responsibility for operational and tactical decisions, civilians must decide matters of policy and grand strategy...

...The problem for the United States in a protracted contest such as the Cold War (or the war against radical Islam) is that, while transmutation may work for short periods of time during which concentrated military effort is required (a world war, for example), it will not assure adequate military capability over the long term...

...Indeed, “the evidence shows that American society as a whole almost certainly became even more individualistic and more anti-statist than when Huntington warned of the dangers of liberalism in 1957...

...West Point, for example, gradually lost contact with the rest of American education to which it has made such signifi cant contributions, and went on its own way...

...On the other, “a highly professional offi cer corps stands ready to carry out the wishes of any civilian group which secures legitimate authority within the state...

...This is not surprising, given the middle-class origins of the offi - cer corps...

...His prescription, which he called “objective civilian control,” has the virtue of simultaneously maximizing military subordination and military fi ghting power...

...and a prescriptive or normative element that provides a guide to policy based on the descriptive and predictive qualities of the theory...

...First, as Feaver points out, elegant as it may be, his theory doesn’t fi t the evidence of the Cold War...

...Gates found that a signifi cant number of offi cers served in or near large urban areas during this period and that there was much greater civil-military social intercourse than the conventional wisdom would suggest...

...During the Cold War, the military became more “civilianized,” the offi cer corps more politicized, and civilians habitually intruded into the military realm: “According to many of the indicators Huntington cited as critical,” writes Feaver, “civilians did not adopt the objective control mechanism he claimed was the crucial causal mechanism between the explanatory variable of ideology and the dependent variable of adequate national security...

...His core claims— that there is a meaningful difference between civilian and military roles...

...Huntington was the fi rst to attempt a systematic analysis of the civil-military probl?matique: the paradox arising from the fact that, out of fear of others, a society creates “an institution of violence” intended to protect it, but then fears that the institution will turn on society itself...

...Accordingly, the entire burden of explaining any change in civilian control or level of military armament would have to rest with the functional imperative...

...According to Huntington, America’s antimilitary liberal ideology produces “extirpation”—the virtual elimination of military forces—when the external threat is low and “transmutation,”— the refashioning of the military in accordance with liberalism, which leads to the loss of “peculiarly military characteristics”—when the external threat is high...

...Huntington identifi ed four ideologies—conservative pro-military, fascist pro-military, Marxist antimilitary, and liberal antimilitary—and argued that the fourth was the dominant ideology of the United States...

...Of those not serving in the East, a substantial proportion were serving in urban areas of signifi cant size, including such cities as Chicago, Omaha, St...

...Mackubin Thomas Owens is associate dean of academics and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College...

...This contact between offi cers and civilians, including powerful and prestigious individuals, was a part of military life in both urban and frontier assignments...

...and that the key to military professionalism is military autonomy—have been contested on numerous occasions...

...In the context of the Cold War, Huntington argued that the ideological component of America’s societal imperative—liberal antimilitary ideology— would make it impossible to build the forces necessary to confront the functional imperative in the form of the Soviet threat to the United States and to permit military leaders to take the steps necessary to provide national security...

...There is also a practical problem arising from the military’s reading of Huntington’s theory...

...history...

...that is, the external threat...

...BY MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS While the average political scientist is lucky to make a name for himself in one area of the fi eld, Samuel Huntington has made major contributions to three: civilmilitary relations, democratic theory, and international relations...

...Only an environment which is sympathetically conservative will permit American military leaders to combine the political power which society thrusts upon them with the military professionalism without which society cannot endure...

...And yet, despite its fl aws, The Soldier and the State continues to provide useful insights into the nature of civil-military relations, especially our own...

...He argued that subjective control was detrimental to military effectiveness and would lead to failure on the battlefi eld by forcing the military to defer to civilians in the military realm...

...This constitutes a bargain between civilians and soldiers...

...And its best empirical insights—the civilian-military distinction, the idea of military subordination, essential to democratic theory, the importance of military professionalism—do not depend on the problematic parts of Huntington’s model...

...But the United States did prevail during the Cold War despite the fact that the country did not abandon liberalism...

...Huntington claimed that, because they were middle-class, offi cers were affi liated with no social group...

...One should not consider individuals posted to such locations isolated...

...And despite the claims of many of those who look at civil-military relations through the lens of sociology, analytically distinct military and civilian spheres do appear to exist...

...On the one hand, civilian authorities grant a professional offi cer corps autonomy in the realm of military affairs...

...Huntington’s historical generalizations concerning the alleged isolation of the military during the late 19th century are also at odds with the evidence...

...A professional military obeys civilian authority...

...For instance, one of Huntington’s testable hypotheses was that a liberal society (such as ours) would not produce suffi cient military might to survive the Cold War...

...But although these years may have been the dark ages of the military, there was a positive outcome...

...But there are a number of fl aws in Huntington’s theory...

...Gates went on to note that there were also a large number of offi cers on detached duty, which often included assignments that brought them into close contact with civilians, and that there was a great deal of social contact between offi cers and civilians...

...And while most people think of The Clash of Civilizations when they hear his name today, his most infl uential book—for better or worse—remains one that he wrote exactly a half-century ago: The Soldier and the State...

...Contrary to the real conduct of war, offi cers often infer that military autonomy means they should be advocates of particular policies rather than simply serving in their traditional advisory role—indeed, that they have the right to insist that their advice be heeded by civilian authorities...

...that the key to civilian control is military professionalism...

...To begin with, Huntington grounded his theory in a “deductive logic derived from democratic theory while his critics did not,” writes Feaver...

...During this period, Huntington claimed, the military was isolated—not only physically, but also socially, politically, and intellectually—from the mainstream of American life...

...Such an attitude among uniformed offi cers is hardly a recipe for healthy, balanced civil-military relations...

...Interference or meddling in military affairs undermines military professionalism and so undermines objective control...

...The requisite for military security is a shift in basic American values from liberalism to conservatism...

...Huntington contends that the physical isolation of the armed services during this period was mirrored by its intellectual isolation: “The military were also divorced from the prevailing tides of intellectual opinion...

...Paul, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, and San Francisco: “In a nation that numbered only 100 cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants in the 1880 census, many of the western cities in which offi cers found themselves were of signifi cant size...

...He quotes one offi cer to the effect that, in America, the United States Army had become “an alien army” existing in “practically complete separation from the lives of the people from which it [was] drawn...

...Wars are not fought for their own purposes but to achieve policy goals set by the political leadership of the state...

...Finally, the line of demarcation mandated by Huntington’s theory is not as clear as some would have it...

...In Huntington’s prescriptive or normative theory, the key to objective control is “the recognition of autonomous military professionalism,” respect for the independent military sphere of action...

...The tension between the demands of military security and the values of American liberalism can, in the long run, be relieved only by the weakening of the security threat or the weakening of liberalism...

...a predictive element that enables its adherents successfully to argue that, under suchandsuch conditions, a certain outcome can be expected to occur...

...That was very much on the minds of the Founding generation, which had to strike a balance between vigilance and responsibility...

...In other words, isolation acted as a crucible for the creation of a professional military...

...Here, Huntington advances an institutional theory of civil-military relations, one that “focuses on the interaction of political actors played out in the specifi c institutional setting of government...

...The Soldier and the State has had a great and lasting effect within our uniformed military...

...Using reports of the Army’s adjutant general during 1867-97, Gates discovered that anywhere from “17 to 44 percent of all offi cers present for duty in established army command . . . were serving in the Department of the East or its equivalent, living in the most settled region of the United States, often on the Atlantic seaboard...

...Objective control guarantees the protection of civilian society from external enemies and from the military themselves...

...The “isolation and rejection” of the military “made those years the most fertile, creative, and formative in the history of the American armed forces...

...The key to objective control of the military is professionalism...

...While objective control weakens the military politically, rendering it politically sterile or neutral, it actually strengthens the military’s ability to defend society...

...The predictive element of Huntington’s theory held that, without a change in the societal imperative, the United States would never be able to build the necessary military forces necessary to confront the Soviet Union...

...Moreover, Huntington’s theory is the source of what Eliot Cohen has called the “normal” theory of civil-military relations, which holds that, during wartime, civilians determine the goals of the war, then stand aside to let the military run the actual war...

...Why...

...Huntington’s main descriptive or empirical claim in The Soldier and the State was that American civil-military relations have been shaped by three variables: the external threat, which he called the functional imperative, and two components of what he called the societal imperative, “the social forces, ideologies and institutions dominant within the society...

...It is still on our minds...

...According to Huntington’s reading of American history, the origin of American military professionalism is to be found during the period following the Civil War...

...But Huntington perseveres “while the challengers drift into obscurity...

...The reason that civilian leaders cannot leave the military to its own devices during war is that war is an iterative process involving the interplay of active wills...

...As Peter Feaver has argued in his formidable challenge to Huntington, Armed Servants, Huntington’s theory has survived numerous challenges over the decades...

...For example, in a 1980 article for the journal of the Army War College, John Gates pointed out that Huntington had vastly overstated the physical isolation of the Army offi cer corps during the decades following the Civil War...

...Huntington also argued that both components of the social imperative— the constitutional structure and the American ideology of antimilitary liberalism—had remained constant throughout U.S...

...A good theory possesses three elements: a descriptive or empirical element that accounts for and explains relevant phenomena...

...In other words, if the military is granted autonomy in its sphere, the result is a professional military that is politically neutral and voluntarily subordinate to civilian control...

...On the contrary, argues Gates: They “had more in common with the ruling elite than with any other societal group in the nation...

...This is because “the withdrawal of the military from civilian society produced the high standards of professional excellence essential to national success in the struggles of the twentieth century...

...a military that does not obey is not professional...

...What appears to be the case at the outset of a war may change as the war continues, modifying the relationship between political goals and military means...

...The fi rst component of the social imperative is the constitutional structure of the United States, the legal-institutional framework that guides political affairs generally and civil-military affairs specifi cally...

...The second is ideology, the prevailing worldview of a state...

...It addresses the central problem of civil-military relations: the relation of the military as an institution to civilian society...

...In particular, Huntington argued that he was prescribing a means for enabling the liberal United States to effectively meet the Soviet threat without forfeiting civilian control...

...At the opposite pole from objective control lay Huntington’s worst case situation—“ subjective control”—which constituted a systematic violation of the autonomy necessary for a professional military and produced transmutation...

...The same problems affect Huntington’s prescriptive theory...

...Indeed, the military has come to endorse many of Huntington’s general conclusions and has made it central to its civil-military relations education...

...Huntington’s theoretical framework consists of a few tightly reasoned, deductive propositions...

...As Eliot Cohen has shown in Supreme Command, democratic war leaders such as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln impinged upon the military’s turf as a matter of course, infl uencing not only operations but also tactics...