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iii

Strategic Studies Institute

and

U.S. Army War College Press

THE LIMITS OF MILITARY OFFICERS’ DUTY 

TO OBEY CIVILIAN ORDERS:

A NEO-CLASSICAL PERSPECTIVE

Robert E. Atkinson, Jr.

July 2015

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and 

do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the 

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Government. Authors of Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) and 

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offer new and sometimes controversial perspectives in the interest of furthering debate on key issues. This report is cleared for 

public release; distribution is unlimited.

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Sections 101 and 105. It is in the public domain and may not be 

copyrighted.
iv

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*****

The author very much appreciates the comments and encouragement received from faculty members at the Army, Navy, 

and Air Force Academies and the Army and Navy War Colleges 

who are, quite literally, too numerous to name in the usual space. 

Many of them referred me to Dr. Don Snider, indisputably the 

dean of military professionalism studies. I can fairly say that, 

without his help, you would not be reading this. Nor would any 

of you be reading nearly so neatly annotated a version without 

the exceptional research assistance of Alexandra Akre, Florida 

State University (FSU) Law 2016, and Christopher Roberts, FSU 

Law 2015.

ISBN 1-58487-696-4

vii

FOREWORD

This monograph offers a neo-classically republican 

perspective on a perennial problem of civilian/military 

relations: limitations on military officers’ obligation to 

obey civilian authorities. All commentators agree that 

military officers are generally obliged—morally, professionally, and legally—to obey civilian orders, even 

as they agree that this rule of obedience has exceptions. Commentators tend to differ, however, on the 

basis and breadth of these exceptions. Following Samuel Huntington’s classic analysis in The Soldier and the 

State, Mr. Robert Atkinson shows that disagreement 

about the breadth of the exceptions tends to assume 

that their bases—moral, professional, and legal—are 

incommensurable. This monograph suggests, to the 

contrary, that all defensible exceptions to the rule of 

military obedience, like that rule itself, derive from a 

single neo-classical, Huntingtonian standard binding 

on civilian authorities and military officers alike: the 

common good. 

This perspective promises significantly to reduce 

the range of disagreement over the limits of military 

obedience both in theory and in practice.

 

 DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

 Director

 Strategic Studies Institute and

 U.S. Army War College Press
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROBERT E. ATKINSON, JR., is the Greenspoon 

Marder Professor of Law, Florida State University. 

Previously, he clerked for Judge Donald Stuart Russell 

of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth 

Circuit. He practiced law with Sutherland, Asbill & 

Brennan in Washington, DC, before joining the faculty at the Florida State University College of Law, 

where he writes and lectures on philanthropy, property, and professionalism. Mr. Atkinson holds degrees 

in history and philosophy from Washington and Lee 

University, and a law degree from Yale University.

viii
ix

SUMMARY

Several post-September 11, 2001, events—the invasion of Afghanistan and the second invasion of Iraq, 

the use of “enhanced interrogation,” the detentions 

at Guantanamo, the “air-only” attacks on the Islamic 

State in Iraq and Syria—have raised a perennially perplexing issue of civilian/military relations: principled 

limitations on military officers’ duty to obey civilian 

orders. Not surprisingly, contemporary answers have 

split along a familiar fault line. Those on one side 

emphasize, more or less rigorously, officers’ general 

professional duty to obey; those on the other emphasize, more or less expansively, familiar exceptions for 

irrational, illegal, or immoral orders. 

Paradoxically, both sides find support in the classic statement of modern military professionalism, 

Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. More 

paradoxically, flaws in Huntington’s original analysis 

compound the problem, even as the correction of those 

flaws offers a common ground. This reexamination 

of Huntington’s original position can thus narrow, if 

not wholly bridge, the gap between opponents in the 

current debate over military obedience. 

Part I situates the general obligation of officers 

to obey the orders of civilian authorities in Huntington’s basic theory of civilian/military relations. Part 

II examines two logical limitations that Huntington’s 

theory implies for the duty of military officers to obey 

civilian orders: when civilian authorities usurp military officers’ tactical expertise and when civilian authorities lapse in the exercise of their own expertise as 

“statesmen.” Part III maps this latter exception onto 

the two general exceptions to military obedience, illegal orders and immoral orders, and then ties all 
three exceptions back into the common ground of 

military professionalism, the common defense, which 

rests on the deeper foundation of both American constitutional law and neo-classical political theory: the 

common good.

x
1

 THE LIMITS OF MILITARY OFFICERS’ 

 DUTY TO OBEY CIVILIAN ORDERS:

 A NEO-CLASSICAL PERSPECTIVE1

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to 

be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most 

wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the 

common good of society; and in the next place, to take 

the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold the public trust.

The Federalist 57 (James Madison)

We the People of the United States, in Order to form 

a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, 

promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings 

of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain 

and establish this Constitution for the United States of 

America.

Preamble, Constitution of the

United States

The professional ideology of service goes beyond 

serving others’ choices. Rather, it claims devotion to 

a transcendent value which infuses its specialization 

with a larger and putatively higher goal which may 

reach beyond that of those they are supposed to serve. 

Eliot Freidson, Professionalism, 

The Third Logic: On the Practice of 

Knowledge2

INTRODUCTION

Several post-September 11, 2001 (9/11) events—

the invasion of Afghanistan and the second invasion of Iraq, the use of “enhanced interrogation,” the 
2

detentions at Guantanamo, the “air-only” attacks on 

the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—have raised 

a perennially perplexing issue of civilian/military 

relations: principled limitations on military officers’ 

duty to obey civilian orders. Not surprisingly, contemporary answers have split along a familiar fault 

line.3 Those on one side emphasize, more or less rigorously, officers’ general professional duty to obey; 

those on the other side emphasize, more or less expansively, familiar exceptions for irrational, illegal, or 

immoral orders. 

Paradoxically, both sides find support in the classic statement of modern military professionalism, 

Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. More 

paradoxically, flaws in Huntington’s original analysis compound the problem, even as the correction 

of those flaws offers a common ground. This monograph’s reexamination of Huntington’s original position can thus narrow, if not wholly bridge, the gap between opponents in the current debate over military 

obedience. 

Part I situates the general obligation of officers 

to obey the orders of civilian authorities in Huntington’s basic theory of civilian/military relations. Part 

II examines two logical limitations that Huntington’s 

theory implies for the duty of military officers to obey 

civilian orders: when civilian authorities usurp military officers’ tactical expertise and when civilian authorities lapse in the exercise of their own expertise as 

“statesmen.” Part III maps this latter exception onto 

the two general exceptions to military obedience, illegal orders and immoral orders, and then ties all 

three exceptions back into the common ground of 

military professionalism, the common defense, which 

rests on the deeper foundation of both American con-
3

stitutional law and neo-classical political theory: the 

common good.

PART I. HUNTINGTON’S FUNCTIONAL 

DERIVATION OF MILITARY DUTY AND 

CIVILIAN AUTHORITY 

In his 1957 classic, The Soldier and the State, Huntington proposed to solve the classical dilemma of 

civilian/military relations: having a military strong 

enough to protect the political community without 

making that military a threat to the political community. Huntington’s solution was what he called “objective civilian control,” in which “[a] highly professionalized officer corps stands ready to carry out the 

wishes of any civilian group which secures legitimate 

authority within the state.”4 That would give the perfect balance of maximum military preparedness and 

minimum risk of military insubordination.5 Military 

professionalism, in that arrangement, entails two basic 

components, one intellectual and the other moral:6 the 

competence needed to defend the homeland, the military’s functional imperative,7

 and the virtue necessary 

to prevent abuse of that competence at the expense of 

civilian values, the military’s societal imperative.8

In Huntington’s first-best, ideal solution to the 

problem of military/civilian relations, a professionalized military high command is perfectly matched 

to a professionalized upper echelon of civil servants, 

whom he calls “statesmen.” The relative scopes of 

their respective expertises are the basis for their entire 

relationship, with each deferring to the other in their 

particular fields:
4

The military profession is expert and limited. Its members have special competence within their field and 

lack that competence outside their field. The relationship of the profession to the state is based upon this 

natural division of labor. The essence of this relationship concerns the relative scope of competence of the 

military expert and political expert or statesman.9

As Huntington elaborates on this relationship, two 

critical elements become clear. First, each has its proper sphere; second, each must be a proper expert within 

its sphere. The military officer, as a professional, is 

an expert about one means of achieving state ends, 

the management of violence; “it is this area within 

which the statesman must accept the judgment of the 

military professional.”10

Statesmen, by contrast, use military means toward 

state ends. This is their domain, and in this domain 

lies their own corresponding competence:

Politics deals with the goals of state policy. Competence in this field consists in having a broad awareness 

of the elements and interests entering into a decision 

and in possessing the legitimate authority to make 

such a decision. Politics is beyond the scope of military 

competence. . . .11

Statesmen, in Huntington’s model, are experts 

with special competence in the ends of state action; 

military officers are experts with special competence 

is one particular means of achieving state ends, organized violence. Logically, then, military officers must 

be subordinate to statesmen, as means are subordinate 

to ends. 
5

The criteria of military efficiency are limited, concrete, 

and relatively objective; the criteria of political wisdom are indefinite, ambiguous, and highly subjective. 

Politics is an art, military science is a profession. No 

commonly accepted political values exist by which 

the military officer can prove to the reasonable man 

that his political judgment is preferable to that of the 

statesman. The superior political wisdom of the statesman must be accepted as a fact.12

Huntington’s ideal of military/civilian relations 

distills down to two interlocking syllogisms, both 

sharing the same major premise: 

• Major Premise: The less competent should 

defer to the more competent.

— Minor Premise 1: Compared with civilian 

leaders, military officers are more competent about the military means of state action.

— Minor Premise 2: Compared with military 

officers, civilian leaders are more competent 

about the civilian ends of state action.

• Conclusion 1: Therefore, civilian leaders should 

defer to military officers about the military 

means of state action.

• Conclusion 2: Therefore, military officers 

should defer to civilian leaders about the 

civilian ends of state action.

Huntington’s logic is sound enough; if his premises are true, his conclusions are valid. And, if his conclusions are valid, then the problem of military disobedience disappears. If military officers and civilian 

officials are both operating properly in their respective spheres of occupational competence, no conflict 

between them arises. 
6

This, alas, is obviously too good to be true; more 

precisely, it is too good to be always true. The real 

contribution of Huntington’s analysis lies in its corollaries: what military officers and civilian officials 

are to do when ideal conditions are not met. We turn 

to those corollaries in Part II. As we shall see, Huntington’s model, properly adjusted, offers principled 

limits on the obedience of military officers in two 

decidedly second-best scenarios. 

PART II: THE LIMITATIONS ON MILITARY 

OBEDIENCE IMPLICIT IN HUNTINGTON’S 

MODEL 

As Huntington’s model identifies separate spheres 

of military and political expertise, so it divides the 

problem of military obedience into two basic situations: when civilian authorities invade the military’s 

proper sphere of expertise and when civilian authorities fail in their own proper sphere. In each case, Huntington’s model implies principled limits on military 

obedience. But, in both cases, the full strength of Huntington’s model only becomes clear when important 

flaws of that model are sorted out. Part II takes up that 

task. In both cases, a better working out of Huntington’s analysis offers a much better understanding of 

the limits of military obedience. We begin with the 

first situation, where the full implications of Huntington’s analysis only need to be worked out, and 

then consider the second, where his analysis needs 

significant revision. 
7

When Civilian Authorities Invade Military Officers’ 

Proper Sphere.

Recall that, under Huntington’s Conclusion 1, civilian leaders are to defer to military officers in the latter’s area of professional expertise, the use of military 

force. Now consider the possibility that civilian authorities do not defer under those circumstances, but 

instead usurp tactical control themselves. Huntington 

nicely isolates the issue: 

What does the military officer do when he is ordered 

by a statesman to take a measure which is militarily 

absurd when judged by professional standards and 

which is strictly within the military realm without any 

political implications?13

His answer is unambiguous: “The statesman has 

no business deciding, as Adolf Hitler did in the later 

phases of World War II, whether battalions in combat should advance or retreat.”14 And he is careful to 

make his answer a corollary to his earlier analysis:

The presumption of superior professional competence 

. . . does not exist when the statesman enters military 

affairs. Here the existence of professional standards 

justifies military disobedience.15

But what, one might object, of the military officer’s 

constitutional duty, in our very different American 

regime, to obey civilian authorities? Does not Huntington’s model, even as it offers a limit to the officer’s 

professional duty to obey, create a conflict with the 

officer’s constitutional duty to obey? Here Huntington’s model implies an answer that he seems not to 

have seen. His justification of disobedience in the case 
8

of militarily absurd civilian orders is not only professional, but also constitutional. As the Constitution’s 

preamble reminds us, a fundamental purpose of our 

constitutional regime is “to provide for the common 

defense.” That purpose, in turn, implies Huntington’s functional imperative of military professionals: 

Provide the intellectual and moral pre-conditions for 

competent defense. Assisting in the implementation 

of fundamentally flawed tactics could, at least under 

some conditions, breach the officer’s constitutional as 

well as professional duty.16

Consider, against this background, the situation in 

which General Eric Shinseki found himself as Army 

Chief of Staff in the Second Gulf War. Secretary of 

Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of 

Defense Paul Wolfowitz famously challenged Shinseki’s professional estimate about the size of the force 

needed to occupy Iraq.17 Had Shinseki come to believe 

that he faced civilian orders to implement irresponsible tactics, occupying a hostile country with an inadequate force, he may well have considered himself constitutionally and professionally obliged to resist, even 

resign.18 In much the same way, military commanders 

might resist, on both professional and constitutional 

principles, politically motivated pressure from civilian authorities to put “boots on the ground” without 

tactically adequate support or reasonable prospect of 

military success in achieving even limited objectives.19

Nor is this potential reconciliation of professional 

and constitutional duty the end of the insight that 

Huntington’s model offers. Just as the professional 

duty reinforces the constitutional duty, so the constitutional duty reinforces an even deeper moral duty. 

The constitution’s invocation of common defense assumes a widely shared belief that self-defense is a 

basic right, personal and collective, moral as well as 
9

legal. The functional limit of an officer’s professional 

duty to obey tactically disastrous civilian orders thus 

rests on a constitutional duty to defend the constitutional regime, which in turn rests on society’s moral 

right of collective self-defense.

Huntington’s analysis also entails, if only implicitly, another significant element: The limitation of the 

officer’s duty to obey civilian orders within the area of 

military expertise is limited by the foundation upon 

which the rule and the exception both rest. To say, as 

Huntington does, that an officer is not professionally 

required to obey militarily absurd orders is, as he recognizes, to pose an extreme case. It may justify, as in 

the case of Hitler’s generals, a response as extreme as 

“sabotaging, where possible, impossible policies.”20

But, from that limiting case, we can interpolate both 

lesser civilian incursions into the military’s sphere 

and less radical responsive measures. Shinseki’s fundamental disagreement over theater-wide tactics did 

not lead him to resignation, much less sabotage; a minor disagreement over tactics might lead an officer not 

to resign his or her commission, but to remonstrate 

with the relevant civilian authorities.21

 The point here is not to say that the proper course 

of an officer’s conduct in the face of a civilian usurpation of military tactical expertise is always easy to 

assess. More often than not, it will entail a complex 

assessment of overlapping duties and second-order 

effects.22 The point, rather, is that considerations often 

seen to be in conflict—professional competence and 

constitutional duty—can sometimes be reduced, in 

practice as well as in principle, to a common denominator: the common defense and the common good.

Huntington’s theory of professionalism thus 

gives a well-grounded exception to the general rule 
10

of military obedience to civilian orders in the case of 

tactically flawed orders, an exception the limits of 

which are traceable to the policy underlying the rule. 

Against that background, we can now turn to Huntington’s second conclusion: In matters of state ends, 

as opposed to military means, officers should defer to 

statesmen’s greater expertise. 

When Civilian Authorities Fail in Their 

Own Proper Sphere.

As we have seen, Huntington’s first conclusion—

that civilian authorities are to defer to the greater expertise of military officers in the latter’s sphere, the 

management of violence—has its complement in the 

civilian sphere: Officers are to defer to the superior 

political expertise of statesman. So, we must now see, 

just as the first conclusion implies limits on military 

obedience, so does the second. 

We need to notice, however, that the two sets of 

limits implied by Huntington’s two conclusions are 

not perfectly symmetrical. In the case of military expertise, the limitations on the officers’ duty to obey 

flow from the civilians’ excursion into the military’s 

proper sphere. In the case of civilian expertise, the 

limitation on the officers’ duty to obey flows from 

the civilians’ failure in their own proper sphere. The 

problem in the first situation is that civilian authorities 

are not following the logical conclusion of Huntington’s analysis; they are not acting on the mandate to 

defer to military officers’ greater expertise in military 

matters. The problem in the second situation is that 

civilian authorities are not meeting the logical conditions of Huntington’s analysis; they are not providing 

expertise in statecraft.
11

 The trouble with syllogisms, of course, is that their 

conclusions are valid only if all of their premises are 

true. The problem with the second conclusion of Huntington’s double syllogism is that Minor Premise 2 is 

demonstrably false much, if not most, of the time.23

Contrary to Minor Premise 2, military officers are 

sometimes better at assessing state ends than are civilian leaders, both because civilian leaders are sometimes poorly versed in matters of statecraft and, conversely, because military officers must be well versed 

in precisely those matters.24

Thus Huntington’s second minor premise, the assumption that civilians are always more competent 

than military authorities in matters of politics, contains two dubious subpremises, one a universal positive, and the other a universal negative. First, civilian 

authorities are always politically competent; second, 

military officers are never politically competent. Each 

of these subpremises, as we will see in this section, 

admits obvious exceptions. 

What is more, the premise of statesmen’s superior competence in the political sphere may be false 

at either of two different levels of analysis, because 

the science of statecraft has two essential components: 

achieving state ends and evaluating state ends. With 

respect to both of these components of statecraft, civilian leaders are sometimes less competent than their 

military counterparts. Part II questions Huntington’s 

presupposed superiority of civilian leaders to military 

leaders in the political sphere, first in achieving state 

ends, and then in evaluating state ends. Both assessments rely primarily on Huntington’s own examples 

to show that his assumptions about the relative competence of military officers and civilian leaders are 

often demonstrably, even disastrously, false. 
12

Competence in Achieving State Ends.

Most of the case Huntington makes for the subordination of military to civilian leaders in the political 

sphere rests on arguments about statesmen’s greater 

competence in achieving, rather than evaluating, state 

ends. We begin, accordingly, with the former. 

The False Subpremise of Universal Civilian 

Competence. 

As we have seen, Huntington’s conception of competent statesmanship has two components: “a broad 

awareness of the elements and interests entering into a 

decision” and “the legitimate authority to make such a 

decision.”25 The first thing to notice is that, as a matter 

of both fact and logic as well as law, a civilian leader 

may have legitimate authority without the requisite 

knowledge. 

Hitler, again, nicely illustrates the point. Some legally legitimate rulers are, by no reasonable measure, 

“statesmen”; they are demonstrably maniacs. Nor is 

Hitler a single anomaly here. The last century, Huntington’s century, also gave us Joseph Stalin, Benito 

Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin. All 

had, at least at some point, legitimate authority under 

international law to make decisions about state ends. 

But notice, critically, that none had the other mark 

of Huntington’s statesman: “a broad awareness of 

the elements and interests entering into a decision.” 

Leaving aside, for now, their skill in evaluating state 

ends, they were not particularly adept at achieving 

those ends.
13

To show that some political leaders are not proper 

statesmen is only to show that Huntington’s premise 

about superior civilian expertise is not universally 

true—that it admits notable but perhaps narrowly 

limited exceptions. But Huntington does little, if anything, to prove that civilian politicians are proper 

professional statesmen more often than not. The closest thing he offers to proof of the proposition’s truth 

comes down, in essence, to an argument that it needs 

to be true not only as a grounds for his theory’s subordination of military to civilian authorities, but also as 

a guarantee of proper civilian government. 

In the place of evidence that civilian politicians are 

the properly professional statesmen that his theory 

needs them to be, Huntington only offers evidence of 

when and why that need arose. Here is that evidence, 

which Huntington quotes from Field Marshal Earl 

Wavell’s The Good Soldier:

Interchangeability between the statesman and the 

soldier passed for ever, I fear, in the last [nineteenth] 

century. The Germans professionalized the trade of 

war; and modern inventions, by increasing its technicalities, have specialized it. It is much the same with 

politics, professionalized by democracy. No longer 

can one man hope to exercise both callings, though 

both are branches of the same craft, the governance of 

men and the ordering of human affairs.26

Several factual assertions are confusingly conjoined here; once we tease them out, we find no reason to believe that civilian leaders are invariably, or 

even usually, the model statesmen that Huntington’s 

model needs them to be.

The first assertion is that, under 19th century conditions, military leadership had to be professionalized 
14

if it were going to succeed, to meet what Huntington 

identifies as its “functional imperative.” We can easily 

grant that Huntington has elsewhere proved that first 

assertion. The problem lies in the second assertion, that 

civilian leadership underwent a similar transformation: “It is much the same with politics, professionalized by democracy.”27 Even if the independent clause 

is true, and politics came to require a professionalism 

paralleling military professionalism, the modifying 

phrase is very dubious evidence. Huntington needs 

that phrase to establish two propositions: that democracy somehow made professional statesmanship necessary and that politicians are true professionals.

The first proposition—that democracy made professional politics necessary—is at best unlikely. More 

likely, what made professional politics necessary were 

the same social factors that made military professionalism necessary: the increasing complexity of the task 

at hand, owning to a host of scientific and social factors, of which democracy was only one, and perhaps 

not the most critical one. As Huntington’s own citation of Otto von Bismarck implies, political authorities 

needed to be statesman even in nations that were far 

from being democratic.

The second proposition—that democracy somehow ensures that modern political leaders must be 

competent statesmen—is both the more important 

and the more dubious, as surprising as it is unexplained. At least since the century of Plato’s Republic 

and Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, the notion of 

a class of recognizably professionalized statesmen 

has been seen as, if not antithetical to democracy, 

then at least in tremendous tension with democracy. 

Huntington’s own examples of this new and necessary division of labor only compound the problem. 
15

“Napoleon embodied the old unity of military science and politics. He was replaced by Bismarck and 

Moltke[,] who symbolized the new dichotomy.”28 

Let us assume, with Huntington, that Bismarck was 

nothing if not a genius at realpolitik and that his military doppelganger, Helmuth von Moltke, was a worthy Clauwitzian master of war as “politics by other 

means.” But Bismarck’s statesmanship, whatever its 

merits, is hard to see as either produced or guaranteed by democracy. Bismarck would not likely have 

thought to submit his chancellorship to a plebiscite, 

and not only because he might well have lost. 

The problem with Huntington’s analysis of political professionalism, or statesmanship, comes to this: 

Technology- and demography-driven changes in the 

19th century may well have made professionalism 

functionally necessary in both military command and 

civilian administration; this trend toward professionalization, in turn, may well have made it unlikely that 

any one person could be a master of both military science and civilian administration. But the emerging 

need for professionalism in both fields, military and 

civilian, does not prove that need has been met in either field. Nor did the concurrent trend toward political democracy mean that civilian leaders at the highest levels would tend to be, in any sense, professionals 

or experts at anything other than getting elected. 

This suggests a possibility that, curiously enough, 

Huntington failed to mention, if not consider. Although military officers may need both elements of 

professional knowledge, Freidson’s marriage of the 

technical and the liberal,29 civilian statesmen may 

need only one, the liberal, or, if anything more, only 

a sort of on-the-job ability to choose professional subordinates.30 A corollary would be that although states-
16

men may well lack the qualifications to be officers, 

officers might well possess the qualifications to be 

statesmen. It cannot have escaped Huntington’s notice, and he cannot have expected it to escape his readers’, that, even as he was publishing his book, Dwight 

Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander, 

had just begun his second term as President of the 

United States. 

That would still mean, of course, that civilian authorities might lack the educational requirements of 

statesmanship. Nor, as Huntington’s own examples 

remind us, is that the worst of it. Civilian leaders may 

not merely lack any policy expertise of their own; they 

may eschew reliance on such expertise altogether, 

sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, but nonetheless unmistakably. Here again, Hitler is the perfect 

paradigm:

Hitler was a mystic, who tended to discount, even 

when he did not disregard, all the rules of strategy.

Hitler taught and believed that reason and knowledge 

are nothing, and that the unbending will to victory 

and the relentless pursuit of the goal are everything. 

Mystical speculation replaced considerations of time 

and space, and the careful calculation of the strength 

of one’s own forces in relation to the enemy’s. All freedom of action was eliminated. Even the highest commanders were subjected to unbearable tutelage.31

Although Hitler is, as usual, the limiting case, his 

case is hardly unique. Fascism generally “stress[es] 

intuition” and “ha[s] little use or no need for ordered knowledge and practical, empirical realism,” 

“celebrat[ing] the triumph of the Will over external 

obstacles.”32 Fascism, a sadly hardy perennial among 
17

political ideologies, illustrates a more general problem: Civilian authorities who rely not on greater 

policy expertise but on deeply and manifestly, even 

admittedly, irrational modes of decisionmaking. 

Of course, even if civilian leaders eschew relying 

on expert policy analysis, they may nonetheless be 

willing to distort policy analysis in order to bring others, in the military and elsewhere, around to a position 

they have reached by their own irrational methods. 

This seems to have been significant in Hitler’s overcoming his generals’ objections to his plan to invade 

Russia:

Hitler was able to overcome their doubts about his 

Russian adventure with the aid of political “information” designed to convince them of its necessity, and 

that Russia’s internal weakness would affect her military strength.33

That was most likely not destined to be the last time 

that civilian authorities, bent on a military adventure 

for reasons unrelated to any rational analysis of the 

national interest, overstated both the threat posed by 

an enemy and the weakness of that enemy’s internal 

support.34 As we shall see in the next section, a military officer corps well versed in geopolitical matters 

may provide the best bulwark against such deceptions 

and attendant disasters.35

The False Subpremise of Universal Military 

Incompetence.

As we have just seen, civilian politicians often 

lack or ignore the knowledge base necessary for the 

function Huntington’s model assigns them as “statesmen”; now we need to see that, in Huntington’s own 
18

account, military officers functionally need, and often 

actually have, just this knowledge. This is a second 

challenge to the minor premise of Huntington’s argument for universal deference of military officers to civilian policy determinations, the notion that military 

officers necessarily lack political expertise. 

To appreciate this second challenge, we need to 

note that Huntington’s version of military professionalism entails two essential parts: tactics, the variable 

components of managing violence, and strategy, the 

constant components.36 Military officers must master 

both tactics and strategy if they are competently to use 

military force to achieve state ends.37 Those ends are, 

as we have seen, the arena of statesmen’s special competence, politics or policy in Huntington’s model.38 In 

trying to distinguish the sphere of the officer from that 

of the statesman, Huntington has to make a significant concession: “Obviously a considerable area exists 

where strategy and policy overlap.”39

To fulfill their functional imperative, officers must 

know not only strategy and tactics, how to use military 

means in service of state ends, but also how the use of 

military means will affect state ends and be limited by 

them. As Huntington insists, “the military man must 

recognize that a wide number of conceivably purely 

military decisions, such as the selection of a theatre 

of war, also involve politics, and he must be guided 

accordingly.”40 Think, again, of Hitler’s blunders: Bad 

as Bolshevism on the Reich’s eastern border may be, 

it would be worse to force Stalin into an alliance with 

the western capitalist democracies and open a very 

long second front.41 More generally: 

The top military leaders of the state inevitably operate in this intermingled world of strategy and policy. 
19

They must always be alert to the political implications 

of their military attitudes. . . .42

As Huntington nicely illustrates, military officers 

can, and often do, have access to political expertise of 

their own:

When required in his executive capacity to make decisions involving both military and political elements, 

the military man ideally should formulate his military 

solution first and then alter it as needs be on the advice 

of his political advisors.

43

In those final phrases, not emphasized in the original, 

Huntington seriously undermines his own “division 

of labor” argument for military deference to civilian 

political expertise. Even if no one person can master 

both military “science” and political “art,” a military 

officer can refer to political experts within the military. Even assuming, with Huntington, that military 

officers cannot be experts on policy, they can, by his 

own admission, have political advisors of their own, 

presumably on their staff. Acting on the analysis of 

these advisors, military officers could plausibly question the policy decisions of civilian leaders and their 

civilian advisors. 

In fact, Huntington assigns the military two essential functions that entail just such political assessments. 

The first of these is what he calls the representative 

function. In performing this function, the military officer “must keep the authorities of the state informed 

as to what he considers necessary for the minimum 

security of the state in the light of the capabilities of 

other [military] powers.”44 This function entails: 
20

the right and the duty to present his views to the public bodies, whether executive or legislative, which are 

charged with the apportionment of resources between 

the military and other claims.45

The second of these functions is what Huntington 

calls “the advisory function.” In performing this function, the military officer is “to analyze and to report on 

the implications of alternative courses of state action 

from a military point of view.”46

In any of their three capacities—the executory, 

the representative, or the advisory—military officers 

could find their political analysis at odds with those of 

a civilian leader.47 In at least some cases, the military 

officers might reasonably conclude that their own political assessments, or those of their political advisors, 

are superior to those of their civilian counterparts. 

Think only of Wolfowitz’s congressional testimony, 

in the face of Shinseki’s troop estimates, that “there 

was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was 

in Bosnia or Kosovo” and that “Iraqi civilians would 

welcome an American-led liberation force.”48

Even more basically, military officers could recognize situations in which civilian leaders are not acting 

on political expertise at all, even as Hitler’s generals 

recognized with his decision to invade Russia. Even 

if it were true, as Huntington insists, that military officers must “be willing to accept the final decision of 

the statesman,”49 it doesn't mean they have to follow 

the final judgments of political authorities who are 

not statesmen; even in the case of those who were, he 

would need to give an independent reason for obeying them when their political decisions conflicted with 

those of equally reliable political experts, in or out of 

the military.
21

Huntington’s argument for the general deference 

of military to civilian authority on policy decisions assumes a universally superior competence of civilian 

authorities to military officers that is, on Huntington’s 

own evidence, demonstrably false in many significant 

historical cases. What is worse, Huntington gives no 

evidence to support his basic premise that civilian authorities are generally more expert in political matters 

than their military counterparts and more reliable in 

the achievement of state ends, and thus to be deferred 

to on that basis. Next, we need to examine an even 

worse problem with his argument for general military 

deference to civilian authority: the hidden assumption 

that civilian authorities are not only better at achieving state ends, but also at choosing or evaluating 

state ends. 

Competence in Choosing State Ends.

Expertise in using military force and other means to 

accomplish state ends is only one aspect of the statesman’s supposedly superior knowledge. The other aspect is evaluating state ends. We have just seen that 

Huntington’s argument for military obedience to civilian authority rests on a claim that civilian authority is 

always better versed on the relation of military means 

and state ends, a claim that is demonstrably false in 

many cases, and doubtful in principle across an even 

wider range. With respect to evaluating ends, as with 

respect to matching means to ends, we have no reason 

to believe that civilians will always be right and officers always wrong. Any claim to civilian superiority 

in the evaluation of ends shares all the problems with 

claims about the matching of military means to civilian ends and compounds them with a deeper problem 

long familiar to normative philosophers. 
22

The special problem of evaluating ends is neatly 

captured in Emmanual Kant’s distinction between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives.50

With respect to hypothetical imperatives, the end 

entails the necessary means to that end. One may or 

may not want the end, but, if one does want it, one 

also wants, ex hypothesi, the necessary means. To use 

Stalin’s chilling example, if you want an omelet, you 

must break some eggs. If your chosen end is an omelet, you will necessarily be breaking some eggs; if 

you are a vegan, you will be getting your breakfast 

protein from another source.

Stalin, of course, was not really talking about eggs. 

Making omelets was his metaphor for his murderous 

domestic policies. We remember it because it anticipates, even as it scorns, an obvious objection: Human 

beings are not eggs. Even if we cannot quite work out 

either the logic or the full implications of Kant’s argument that human beings are ends in themselves, we 

can feel the attraction of its negative corollary: Human 

beings are never to be used only as means to the ends 

of others. To derive from our own rationality an absolute, or categorical, imperative to treat rational nature, 

in ourselves and others, always as an end in itself may 

be a bit ambitious; that, indeed, is very much the point 

we need to see. 

No one doubts that we live in a world of hypothetical imperatives, from the preparation of breakfast 

to the conduct of diplomacy. It makes perfect sense 

to say, as Huntington does, that the accomplishing of 

state ends entails special imperatives beyond the ken 

of all but the expert: defending the homeland, managing the economy (or leaving it alone), running a legal 

system. But, as we have seen, it cannot plausibly be 

said, as Huntington does, that civilian authorities are 

always better at ends-means rationality than anyone 
23

else; sometimes civilian authorities make mistakes 

that military officers are quite qualified to spot.

What we need to see here is that it is even less 

plausible to say that civilian leaders are always better 

than anyone else in choosing what ends to pursue in 

the first place. Military leaders, as experts in the management of violence, can sometimes see that civilian 

political choices will result not in the ends desired, 

but in the very opposite, the destruction of the regime.

Military leaders, as people of ordinary moral sensibility, can see that some ends are deeply disturbing, 

even outright unacceptable, for them as individuals 

and for any society of which they could agree to be a 

functioning part.51

Here again, Nazism proves an important reductio of 

Huntington’s analysis. Hitler, he has to admit, proved 

a very poor statesman in the actual accomplishment 

of state ends; among other things, his political rashness led him to invade Russia prematurely and thus to 

open a second front that may well have been his undoing. But consider, now, the alternative. Suppose Hitler had been a savvier grand strategist, had honored 

his nonaggression pact with Stalin until he defeated 

the Western allies (or developed the V2 or the atomic 

bomb or the jet fighter), and had only then turned east 

to conquer the Soviet Union, thus securing domination of Europe (and, had he shown similar savvy in 

dealing with Japan and the United States, perhaps 

the world). Could we, consistent with Huntington’s 

analysis, call him a great statesman? If we are to deny 

Hitler that accolade, we must be ready to distinguish 

between achieving state ends and evaluating those 

ends, choosing state ends that are worthy. 

Here we see a glaring omission in Huntington’s 

analysis of statesmen, particularly in comparison with 
24

his military officers. Military officers must have not 

only special, professional knowledge, but also a special, professional virtue that ensures they do not abuse 

that knowledge. Huntington insists that civilian leaders have a corresponding kind of professional knowledge; sometimes, as we have seen, they do not have 

that knowledge. Here we see something different. Civilian leaders, like military officers, need a special virtue as well, a virtue that ensures that they do not use 

their special expertise in the achieving of state ends to 

achieve ends that are bad, in either of two easily identified ways: bad because they threaten to destroy the 

civilian population in order to advance regime goals, 

as in the case of Hitler’s “Nero orders,” or bad in the 

sense that they threaten to destroy the system of international relations, as in the case of Nazi ambitions 

of continental, even world, dominance. In tacit recognition of the need for some such limits, Huntington 

offers two exceptions to his rule that military officers 

always obey the orders of legitimate civilian authorities, exceptions still echoed in today’s debates. 
25

PART III: TWO EXCEPTIONS TO MILITARY 

OBEDIENCE THAT PROVE A MORE BASIC 

RULE FOR BOTH MILITARY OFFICERS AND 

CIVILIAN AUTHORITIES 

Huntington recognizes two exceptions to the military officers’ obligation to obey civilian authorities 

in political matters, the proper sphere of civilians: 

when those authorities act illegally or immorally.52

Both these exceptions undermine his general rule of 

obedience, even as his effort to narrow these exceptions underscores his exaggeration of that rule.53 The 

problem in the case of both illegality and immorality 

is the same problem we have already identified: Military officers may be better judges in these matters than 

their civilian counterparts, because both matters entail 

determining the public good. Thus, in effect, what begin as exceptions to the rule of universal military obedience take us back to exactly the same point where 

our analysis of that rule took us: Military officers, to 

perform their professional duty to defend the homeland, must know and act upon both the constitutional 

and the moral bases of that duty, the common good. 

The Legality Exception: Officers’ Duty to 

Disobey Illegal Civilian Orders.

Huntington admits the first of his exceptions in 

the case of conflict between military obedience and 

legality. In matters of law, as in matters of both warcraft and statecraft, the question of deference turns on 

occupational competence. Thus: 

If the statesman claims to be acting legally, but the action seems illegal to the officer, then the issue is one of 
26

the relative competence of the officer and the statesman to judge what is legal and illegal.54

Since law, strictly speaking, lies outside the expertise of both military officers and civilian statesmen, the 

ideal recourse, in modern states with an independent 

judiciary, is to the courts.55 In the absence of that option, “the military officer can only study the law applicable to the situation and arrive at his own decision,” 

recognizing a duty “to give a considerable presumption of validity to the opinion of the statesman.”56 To 

distinguish his refusal to recognize a parallel possibility with respect to military review of civilian policy 

decisions, Huntington asserts that “the standards of 

law are generally more precise than those of politics 

but less than those of military science.”57

Whether or not he is right about the relative precision of the standards of law, politics, and military 

science, he is certainly wrong to suggest that “the 

military officer can only study the law applicable to 

the situation and arrive at his own decision.” In fact, 

in law, as in statecraft, military officers, every bit as 

much as civilian authorities, are able and likely to rely 

on the assessments of their own legal experts. That 

was precisely what happened in the now infamous 

case of enhanced interrogation. Military officers and 

civilian authorities both turned to their legal advisors; 

military and civilian lawyers disagreed on whether 

“enhanced interrogation” amounted to statutorily forbidden torture. On more precise legal points, as on 

broader policy points, the military lawyers may well 

have had the better view.58
27

Huntington’s focus on these more precise questions of law ignores another parallel between law and 

politics, which parallels a distinction we drew within 

politics.59 American constitutional law (and, more 

generally, any other form of liberal law) imposes two 

basic constraints on all state action. It must serve legitimate state ends, and the means it employs must be 

rationally related to those legitimate ends. Our actual 

legal system, then, like Huntington’s ideal political 

system, contains minimum standards for assessing 

both the means used to advance state ends and those 

ends themselves. Stated at an admittedly rarefied level of generality, these are the standards: The means of 

state action must bear at least some plausible causal 

relationship to the ends they purport to advance; those 

ends must be grounded in the common good and 

trammel no more than necessary certain traditionally 

recognized conditions of human flourishing.

To illustrate these common floors under both legal and policy analysis, consider again the question 

of enhanced interrogation. Even if the civilian lawyers 

were correct in concluding that enhanced interrogation was not illegal in the narrow sense that it did not 

violate the relevant statutory prohibition on torture, 

that still leaves deeper legal questions open. The practice of enhanced interrogation might well have violated constitutional requirements of substantive due 

process, in either of two ways. First, it might be that 

the use of enhanced interrogation demonstrably does 

not work, that enhanced interrogation as a means of 

extracting useful information is contrary to any conceivable explanation of human psychology.60 Given 

the narrowness of this test and the practical plausibility of enhanced interrogation, the policy may perhaps 

pass this first test, even if that policy is, on balance, 
28

a very poor way of extracting information. It could, 

in that sense, be “bad policy” but still “good law,” a 

functionally inferior but not wholly ineffectual measure that thus satisfies the minimal constitutional 

standard of ends/means rationality. 

But that would still leave the other, ends-oriented 

constitutional test: Even if enhanced interrogation is 

a marginally effective method, is ours a state that can 

use human beings, prima facie “ends in themselves,” as 

means in this way without violating rights we deem 

fundamental? Here, of course, the answer is less clear 

as a matter of law. But it is indeed a matter of law—

not merely politics—and legal questions are no more 

precise at this level than political questions because 

here our politics and law converge. A fundamental 

function of our law, like all liberal law, is to limit our 

politics (at least provisionally, pending constitutional 

amendment). 

This returns us to an earlier point: the relative 

expertise of military officers and civilian authorities. 

On legal matters here, as on political matters earlier 

in our analysis, the opinions of military officers and 

the experts on their staff may be superior to those of 

civilian authorities at every relevant level of analysis. 

As others have shown in painful detail, the Justice Department’s “torture memo” was a model of dubious 

statutory interpretation.61 More basically, however, 

the military’s assessment seems to have been better at 

the two levels of ends/means rationality common to 

both constitutional law and political statecraft. Torture, as the military argued, may be a poor means of 

obtaining operationally useful information; it may 

well fail the basic test of ends/means rationality.62 As 

a matter of evaluation of state action, torture may fail 

as a matter of choice of state ends: We may not want to 
29

be the kind of people that torture other people (at least 

under the conditions no more restricted than those 

presented by this situation), and our constitution may 

well place that deep preference beyond the reach of 

ordinary politics.

The issue of enhanced interrogation also raises a 

point that Huntington’s analysis seriously underemphasizes. The law that limits our politics, and thus our 

military officers’ duty to obey our politicians, is not 

our law alone; the law that governs both our civilian 

authorities and our military officers alike is international as well as domestic. Enhanced interrogation 

looks, at its uglier extremes, a lot like torture; torture 

is forbidden by international treaties as well as by domestic statutes and constitutional norms.63 Torture, 

along with a growing list of other human rights violations, may well rest on an even deeper stratum of 

international law. It may belong, with genocide and 

offensive war, to the class of prohibitions binding on 

all state agents, even those whose nations have not 

endorsed those norms as their own. Think, again, of 

Hitler’s generals.

The case of enhanced interrogation illustrates the 

situations in which military officers might have reason to question the legality of particular civilian orders, under both national and international law. To 

his credit, Huntington also addresses, if only briefly, 

the more basic question about the legality of the civilian authority. Not only are military officers, under 

Huntington’s model, obliged to disobey illegal orders; 

they are, more generally, obliged only to obey the orders of legitimate regimes. The question of a regime’s 

legitimacy is to the question of an order’s legality as 

wholesale is to retail. Particular orders of a legitimate 

regime may be illegal, and in that sense not binding 
30

upon officers; no orders of an illegitimate regime may, 

of their own force, be binding on officers, because 

the regime is not a source of proper law. Without unpacking this latter jurisprudential paradox, we can 

note that illegality at the wholesale level, the problem of illegitimate regimes, poses deeper problems 

for Huntington’s analysis than he admits, or perhaps 

appreciates.

Huntington confuses the question of legitimacy 

even as he raises it:

If there are two governments in the state, each claiming to be duly constituted and to be deserving of military obedience, the military officer cannot escape the 

political choice between the two.64

This is not quite correct, even in Huntington’s terms. 

Some putative governments utterly lack legal authority, under either domestic or international law; 

sometimes, as Huntington suggests elsewhere, legal 

questions are, indeed, more precise than political 

questions. But, here again, at the “wholesale” level as 

at the “retail,” questions of legality blur at the margin 

into broader political questions. 

Here at the wholesale level, we need to note, the 

line blurs in a more basic way. As a matter of international law, the legitimacy of a political regime turns, 

in large part, on its effective control of the territory it 

claims to govern.65 Here, the military must not merely 

assess law at its intersection with policy; the military’s policy-based actions may well determine the 

legality of the regime it is to serve. Revolutions often 

turn on whether the military turns its weapons on the 

people in the street or the rulers in the capitol. Marshal Philippe Petain made his peace with Hitler and 
31

moved his capital to Vichy; General Charles de Gaulle 

insisted that his “Free French,” though in exile, were 

the legitimate rulers of France. The political choice 

that military officers face in this situation, we need to 

notice, is theirs as a practical matter, but that is not to 

say, as Huntington implies, that it is not capable of 

principled review.

Indeed, Huntington’s model implies precisely the 

reverse. Military officers’ decisions about the legitimacy of the regime (like their decisions about the legality 

of particular orders of an unquestionably legitimate 

regime) rest on reviewable principles. Their decisions 

also rest on the same principles as the military’s professional role and the state’s proper role—protecting 

the basic security of its own people (and, conversely, 

not threatening the basic security of other peoples by 

actions like offensive war or genocide). 

Thus, in effect, Huntington’s analysis places military officers under three imperatives, not just two. In 

addition to their professional imperative to deliver effective defense and their legal imperative to preserve 

the Constitution, they also have a humanitarian imperative, which underlies both: In the means you use 

to defend the state, and in the ends of the state that 

you advance, do not violate international restrictions 

on the use of violence. As the example of the Nazi officers makes clear, the penalty for violations can be the 

severest possible: capital punishment. As the example 

of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan also make clear, 

the penalty for the regime can effectively be the same: 

loss of legal legitimacy under international law and 

“regime change.”66

The most basic point to note here is that both international and domestic law, at this deepest level, incorporate humanitarian moral principles. Thus the limit-
32

ing case of Huntington’s first exception to his general 

rule of military subservience, illegal orders, brings us 

to his second exception, immoral orders, which proves 

both broader and deeper.

The Morality Exception: Officers’ Duty to Disobey 

Immoral Civilian Orders.

Huntington’s second exception to his general rule 

of military deference to civilian policy decisions is 

“the conflict between military obedience and basic 

morality.”67 “What,” he asks, “does the military officer 

do if he is ordered by the statesman to commit genocide, to exterminate the people of an occupied territory?”68 One who has not already analyzed Huntington’s peculiar understanding of “statesman” might be 

surprised by a question presupposing that statesmen 

do order genocide. Even after that analysis, Huntington’s answer is still at least a little surprising. He never 

explicitly rules even genocide out entirely; he merely gives officers the option to disobey an order that 

violates the officer’s personal morality.

The argument that leads Huntington to this narrow morality exception to his general rule of military 

obedience is a page of rousing rhetoric. Only after we 

defuse its rhetorical power can we appreciate its logical limits. In what follows, I omit nothing of Huntington’s discussion and quote nothing out of his order; I 

merely interrupt it with my own commentary. This is 

not, of course, entirely fair to Huntington; all I do here 

is to transpose his admittedly stirring rhetoric into a 

pitch that is off-puttingly shrill. But Huntington could 

hardly cry foul; I am, after all, only returning his sophistical fire with my own, borrowing a page from Aristotle’s Rhetoric on the oldest trick of sophistry: Meet 
33

the serious with the comic, and the comic with the 

serious.69 And, after exposing the rhetoric, I return to 

rational analysis, which Huntington can hardly claim 

to have attempted in his own treatment of the topic. 

Huntington chooses the field of his mock battle and 

arrays his forces brilliantly. By charging military officers with a civilian order to commit genocide, he places them on what seems to be very high moral ground, 

both relative to civilians and absolutely, ground they 

not only can hold, but must:

So far as the ability to judge and apply ethical standards are concerned, the statesman and the soldier are 

equal. Both are free individuals morally responsible 

for their actions. The soldier cannot surrender to the 

civilian his right to make ultimate moral judgments. 

He cannot deny himself as a moral individual.70

Both the very humanity of others and the officer’s own 

moral integrity—or, perhaps more precisely, manhood—are under attack; the officer, accordingly, cannot surrender.

Suddenly Huntington’s bugle ceases its blare. “Yet 

the problem is not so simple as this . . . For politics as 

well as basic morality may be involved here.” Not, of 

course, the coarse and corrupt politics of politicians, 

but the high, and highly principled, politics of statesmen, wise and honorable fellow experts with sacrifices 

of their own to make:

The statesman may well feel compelled to violate commonly accepted morality in order to further the political interests of the state. That this is frequently the 

case, there is no denying.71
34

Just as the professional soldier is about to join 

battle on the twin peaks of moral liberty and liberal 

humanity, Huntington subtly shifts both the lay of the 

land and the alignment of forces. Before, military officers stood, second to none, not only for their own 

personal honor, but also for the intended victims of 

genocide. Now that apocalyptic beast is nowhere in 

sight; its innocent victims, the weak and the helpless, 

are no longer in imminent peril. 

In the place of evil incarnate and innocence violated appear two abstractions. One, “the political interests of the state,” is not only less loathsome than 

genocide but also also the very highest value of the 

military profession. And the other abstraction, commonly accepted morality, is a lot less lovable than 

the now-vanished victims of genocide. Indeed, the 

modifiers of morality remove from its appeal at least 

as much as they add. “Common” means “low” and 

“frequent” can also mean “universal.” “Accepted” is 

far removed from “proved.” 

What is more, Huntington reminds his officers 

that, in this newly defined battle, they face not an enemy but an ally, the statesman, a fellow servant of the 

public good. Huntington asks the loyal soldier to see 

the new situation from that ally’s perspective:

If the statesman rejects the private claims of conscience 

in favor of the raison d’etat, is he also justified in implicating the military man too, in subordinating, in effect, 

the military man’s conscience as well as his own?72

From that perspective, the front of battle is no longer what first it seemed. Orders to commit genocide 

fade into the background as Huntington’s argument 

advances along a very different line. What the sol-
35

dier faces is not the enemy of humanitarian morality, 

but the ally who shares his own morality, and an ally 

who is ready to sacrifice even his own morality for the 

greater good, the public good to which the officer is 

pledged. This is not a contest of wills, the soldier’s own 

against some other’s; what this situation demands is 

not surrender to an enemy, but self-sacrifice to a common cause. The real enemy, it now appears, is a fifth 

columnist in the officer’s camp, the source of division 

is the soldier’s loyalty, which is an insinuating call 

away from public duty to private opinion, if not quite 

self-indulgence. “Basic morality,” which had already 

slipped to “commonly accepted morality,” now blurs 

into “the private claims of conscience.” 

For the officer this comes down to a choice between 

his own conscience on the one hand, and the good of 

the state, plus the professional virtue of obedience, on 

the other. As a soldier, he owes obedience; as a man, 

he owes disobedience.

The course for the good soldier is, accordingly, clear.

Huntington’s bugle sounds again, and one wonders 

that the outcome can ever have been in doubt:

Except in the most extreme instances it is reasonable 

to expect that he will adhere to the professional ethic 

and obey. Only rarely will the military man be justified in following the dictates of private conscience 

against the dual demands of military obedience and 

state welfare.73

This is rhetoric to rival Churchill and all the more 

reason to notice that Huntington’s conclusion runs, ultimately, rather in the opposite direction. As Churchill 

has all English-folk fighting Nazis in the fields and the 
36

streets, and if necessary in the hills, where they will 

never surrender, so Huntington gives his officers the 

moral high ground, allows no superior in its defense, 

and permits no surrender. But Huntington narrows 

his high moral ground to the vanishing point, undermines it completely, and leaves his officers standing 

there not only divested of their military status, but 

also in full defiance of professionally unquestionable 

orders. At the end of Huntington’s analysis, the officer 

is no longer fighting the good fight, past the last ditch, 

at the last redoubt, to the very end. He is more like 

Don Quixote, tilting at illusory windmills, and even 

more like an ancient stylitic saint, perched on a pole of 

his own erection, naked and alone in a very peculiar, 

if not pointless, position.

This is, again, not entirely fair to Huntington; I 

have done nothing but grind his high drama down to 

low farce. But to score debating points is neither Huntington’s ultimate goal, nor mine. He needs to show 

not only that his morality exception is narrow, but also 

that it proves his general rule of military obedience to 

civilian orders; to do that, he needs to keep that exception as narrow as possible and to ground it in the reason for the general rule itself, the relative occupational 

competence of military officers and civilian statesmen. 

I need to show that the morality exception is not only 

wider than Huntington allows, but also deeply subversive of his general argument for the rule. 

To give Huntington his due, we must now do what 

he, for whatever reason, declines: Isolate and analyze 

the reasoning that underpins his rhetoric. Once we 

examine the steps in this analysis closely, bearing in 

mind Huntington’s own genocide example, we can see 

major problems at several critical points: underweighing moral matters as compared to political matters, all 
37

the while insisting that the two are commensurable 

and that civilian authorities are better at striking the 

proper balance. Identifying these problems suggests a 

very different weighing of the relevant factors, moral 

and political, and a very different conclusion about 

whose scales are more reliable, military or civilian.

Huntington’s rhetoric implicitly assigns civilian 

authorities and military officers a set of parallel tasks. 

The civilians’ tasks logically come first; it is civilians 

who, in Huntington’s model, are the ultimate ground 

of all military orders, even as they are the source of 

his particular example, the order to commit genocide.

• Step One: Separating moral from political considerations. The civilian authorities must separate moral considerations from political considerations, matters of private conscience from 

matters of public welfare, as a logical first step 

in assessing one against the other. 

• Step Two: Determining raison d’etat. Here the 

civilian authorities, in their official capacity, 

weigh up all the nonmoral costs and benefits 

of the state action under review. If these net 

out negative, they reject the proposal, and the 

analysis ends; if raison d’etat net out positive, 

they go on to Step Three.

• Step Three: Measuring morality. Here the civilian authority weighs all the moral costs and 

benefits of the proposed action. This step, as 

compared to Step Two, has several notable peculiarities. The moral factors and their weighing are, ex hypothesi, outside the scope of the 

statesman’s professional competence; what is 

more, they seem to be ultimately subjective. 

No one else can “check the math” here, because 

everyone makes these calculations differently. 
38

For that reason, the civilian official performs 

this step in his or her personal, not official, capacity. If these moral considerations net out to 

be positive (or zero), they simply add more (or 

nothing) to the balance in favor of the action; 

then the civilian official’s analytic work is done, 

and he or she goes to Step Five. If, on the other 

hand, these moral considerations net out in the 

negative, he or she goes on to Step Four. 

• Step Four. Balancing moral costs against state 

benefits. Here the civilian authority must weigh 

the proposed action’s net moral costs against its 

net nonmoral state benefits. This step, like its 

predecessor, has several notable peculiarities. 

First, the moral costs and nonmoral costs seem 

to be, by definition, incommensurable: moral 

costs are personal, subjective, and thus unreviewable. Nonmoral benefits are public; they 

are interests of the whole state and not of a mere 

individual. They are calculated according to expert criteria that, if somewhat subjective, more 

art than science, are nonetheless susceptible to 

review by other trained professionals (at least 

in principle). If the balance here tips in favor of 

benefit to the state, the civilian authority orders 

the action; if it tips the other way, the civilian 

authority must make a personal, private, and 

subjective decision about whether to put state 

interests ahead of personal morality. A very 

heavy thumb is obviously on the state’s side 

of the scales, and, given the heavy discount to 

be applied to the other side, the balance is not 

likely to be tipped that way.

• Step Five. Issuing the order to the military.
39

Military officers who receive an order implicitly 

subject it to a parallel, but significantly distinct, analytic process. Their analysis seems to go like this: 

• Step One: Identifying a conflict between moral 

duty and professional duty. Military officers 

engage in moral analysis of an order only if 

they find a prima facie moral objection to the 

order.

• Step Two: Determining raison d’etat. Military 

officers do not independently weigh the costs 

and benefits of orders they receive from civilian authorities; instead, they take the civilians’ 

assessments as valid, which is to say, as net 

positives. 

• Step Three: Moral analysis. Here military officers, like civilian authorities, weigh up all the 

moral costs and benefits of the proposed action. For military officers, as for their civilian 

counterparts, this step is personal, not professional, both because moral factors and their 

weighing are, ex hypothesi, outside the scope 

of their professional competence and because 

these matters are ultimately subjective. If these 

factors net out positive (or zero), they simply 

add more (or nothing) to the balance in favor of 

the action; the military officers’ analytic work is 

done, and they implement the order. If, on the 

other hand, the moral considerations net out 

negative, they go on to Step Four.

• Step Four: Balancing moral costs against state 

benefits. Here military officers, like their civilian counterparts, must weigh the action’s net 

moral costs against its net nonmoral benefits. 

And, here military officers, like their civilian 

counterparts, must compare incommensurables: On the one hand, moral costs that are 
40

personal and subjective, both in value and in 

measurement, and rationally unreviewable; on 

the other, nonmoral state benefits that are public and objective, both in value and in measurement. But here military officers are at a distinct 

disadvantage. Unlike civilian authorities, they 

have no particular expertise in assessing nonmoral benefits. Civilian authorities, as professionals, know the proper weight of only one 

side of the balance, state benefits; military officers, as professionals, do not know the proper 

weight of either side.

 Here, accordingly, military officers’ best 

course is to defer to civilian experts; anything 

else entails not only a generally dubious failure 

to subordinate incompetence to competence, 

but also the particular risk of making a wrong 

judgment in the case at hand. What is more, 

even a “right” judgment here is doubly dubious: It involves a breach of professional duty, 

which entails elevating the personal over the 

public. This, we would do well to recall, was 

precisely Huntington’s assessment of the generals who politically opposed Hitler. As a result, a proper military professional will defer 

except in very rare cases, which will always be 

something of a professional embarrassment. 

• Step Five: Implementing the order. 

We need to look at two aspects of this analytic process particularly closely. One is the relative expertise 

of military officers and civilians in weighing moral 

and political considerations; the other is the relative 

weight of those considerations. First, consider the 

question of relative expertise. Notice that Hunting-
41

ton’s analysis of military officers’ obedience to immoral orders applies only to orders they receive from 

civilians. But, of course, military officers at every level 

issue many orders. As Huntington concedes, in issuing those orders, military officials must make appropriate weightings of all relevant factors, political and 

moral as well as military. In other words, in the case of 

all orders except those coming from civilian authorities, military officers must be following the first set of 

analytic steps, those of order issuers, not the second, 

those of order implementers. In issuing orders, every 

military officer must make precisely the same kind 

of assessments that civilian authorities are making in 

deciding whether or not to issue an order. 

In claiming that military officers are thus at a disadvantage, vis-à-vis civilian authorities, in weighing 

moral concerns against state concerns, Huntington is 

assuming either of two untenable positions. He might 

be assuming that military officers, in deciding whether to issue their own orders, should make no assessment of moral considerations. This hardly seems likely. If they are to make those assessments in deciding 

whether to obey orders from others, orders with the 

weight of those others’ independent weighing, then 

surely they should make that assessment in deciding 

what orders to issue. Huntington might, on the other 

hand, be assuming that, although they do make such 

determinations, they gain no insights or expertise in 

this weighing that might tend to put them on a par 

with civilians when they are faced with orders coming 

from civilians. This, too, seems unlikely, and, in any 

case, it is not a prospect that Huntington actually considers. Huntington’s claim for the greater expertise of 

civilians in weighing moral against political concerns 

seems, at best, unproven and, at worst, at odds with a 

more likely account.74
42

If Huntington has not made the case for civilian 

authorities’ greater expertise in moral and political 

matters, he does even worse trying to separate morality from politics and then to subordinate morality to 

politics. These latter problems appear as soon as we 

put Huntington’s own example of genocide through 

his implicit analytic system. Here as elsewhere, the 

exception Huntington chooses to admit badly undermines the case he makes, in more abstract terms, for 

his general rule. Few see resisting genocide as either 

a matter of purely private conscience or an issue only 

for the morally squeamish; most, rather, think it must 

be part of a larger category of shared moral, even 

legal, concern than Huntington’s analysis suggests. 

And genocide is only the limiting case on a spectrum 

of moral wrongs that, even if not ultimately subject to 

mathematical proof, are easily seen to violate widely 

shared humanitarian norms. A little this side of genocide is the notion that “life is cheap in the Orient”; 

short of killing all the people in a country, one can 

make that country an ecological wasteland; maybe a 

bit less bad than that, one can “bomb them back to the 

Stone Age.” 

In opposing these matters, reasonable minds—or, 

more precisely, minds that are both reasonable and 

humane—can and do tend to agree. This is just a special case of the general rule we have already seen: 

Statesmen are not necessarily better judges of state 

ends than military officers are. Accordingly, as Martin 

L. Cook concludes: 

Unwillingness to render obedient service to policies 

an officer considers deeply flawed and utterly at variance with sound professional judgment is not necessarily evidence of a lack of professionalism but may on 

occasion be a high manifestation of it.75
43

Huntington’s effort to reduce the moral weight on 

the military officer’s side of the balance to mere individual opinion thus doubly fails. Sometimes military 

officers will have very good reason to think their civilian superiors are less competent to judge moral matters, and sometimes, as in the case of genocide, moral 

matters may be very weighty indeed. Huntington’s 

effort to increase the weight on the civilian side of his 

analytic scale fails for precisely parallel reasons. Here, 

remember, his move is to stack the civilian side with 

weighty matters of state, their particular area of expertise. But, as we have seen already, civilian authorities 

may have no such expertise and, even if they do, they 

may lack the virtue to use that expertise for the common good. Under either condition, military obedience 

to civilian orders will predictably undermine, rather 

than advance, the common good. And, for the reasons we have noted, properly trained military officers 

are well-positioned to determine whether these two 

conditions exist. 

Reconciling Rule and Exceptions in Their Joint 

Foundation: The Common Good.

The link between Huntington’s illegality and immorality exceptions lies deeper than he means for his 

genocide example to suggest.76 Both exceptions take us 

back to the minor premise of Huntington’s argument 

for the general rule of military obedience to civilian 

authority, the assumed superior occupational expertise of civilian authorities over military officers in matters of state welfare. Like the general rule of military 

obedience in that domain, the two basic exceptions 

to that rule turn on the issue of civilian authority’s 

greater expertise. 
44

In legal matters, as we have seen, statesmen have 

no more expertise than military officers, and thus the 

latter’s general obligation to defer to the former is, on 

matters of law, removed. But, as we have also seen, 

this concession tends to prove more than Huntington 

intends—that law is not just a parallel discipline entailing different expertise; it is also an independent 

constraint on civilian authorities. In moral matters, 

Huntington’s argument about relative expertise does 

not produce (as he hoped) a much narrower exception than law. As we have seen, it produces a much 

broader exception, with the same basis at bottom: the 

common good.77

That, in turn, should remind us of what we saw 

with respect to the other half of Huntington’s double 

syllogism, the duty of civilian authorities to defer to 

military officers in military matters. Just as there, in 

the sphere of military expertise, officers are sometimes 

justified in disobeying civilian authorities who intrude 

into an area outside their own expertise, so here, in 

the sphere of civilian expertise, military officers are 

sometimes justified in disobeying civilian authorities 

who lack their own appropriate expertise. Also, here 

as there, the military officers’ professional duty and 

its legal and moral exceptions can be traced back to, 

and resolved in terms of, the same basis as civilian authorities’ corresponding duty and its limit—serving 

the common good. 

Again, here in the civilian sphere as there in the 

military sphere, the limits of the military officers’ justified disobedience to improper civilian orders are to 

be measured by the same metric. Just as minor civilian 

intrusions in matters of military expertise should be 

met with less severe responses than major intrusions, 

so minor civilian lapses in legal or moral matters 
45

should be met with less severe responses than major 

lapses. We can thus say, with respect not only to issuing their own orders, but also in deciding whether 

and how to obey or disobey civilian orders, military 

officers act under a single rule: Do what advances the 

common good. And that, of course, is the same rule 

under which civilian authorities in a republican form 

of government are bound to act. 

Finally, this does not mean it will always be easy 

for military officers to determine when civilian authorities have failed to follow that rule as it applies 

to them. More likely, that determination will never be 

easy. Rather, this means the factors military officers are 

to consider in both making that determination and in 

deciding how to respond to it—the professional, legal, 

and moral factors—must all ultimately be reducible to 

the common good, the common denominator of both 

civilian and military service in any proper republic.

CONCLUSION: NOT A SIMPLE, MODERN 

ANSWER, BUT A UNIFIED NEO-CLASSICAL 

PERSPECTIVE

Debate over the proper limits of military officers’ 

obedience to civilian authority often assumes that 

three incommensurable sets of values are in play: moral, legal, and professional. As the debate is generally 

framed, officers have both a constitutional and a professional obligation to obey civilian orders; sometimes 

these duties conflict with each other, and sometimes 

either or both also conflict with the officer’s independent moral duties. This monograph has not tried to 

solve all conflicts between military officers and civilian authorities but to offer a neo-classical perspective 

from which to reframe those conflicts. The focus here, 
46

following Huntington’s The Soldier and the State, is the 

common good that both military officers and civilian 

statesmen, as professionals, are supposed to know 

and serve. 

The preamble to our Constitution reminds us that 

ours is a republic—a government devoted to advancing the common good, of which the common defense 

and the general welfare are inseparable parts. The 

Founders were quite aware that the question of civilian and military relations was a subset of a larger question, finding and maintaining public officials, civilian 

and military, both knowledgeable of and devoted to 

the common good. 

As statesmen, the Founders knew and rejoiced 

that they were not the first to try to strike that balance; 

they looked back to the English Commonwealth, even 

as the leaders of that Commonwealth looked back to 

the Roman Republic. As Patrick Henry put it, “Caesar 

had his Brutus; Charles I, his Cromwell; and George 

III . . . may profit from their example.”78 As John Milton, functioning as Cromwell’s foreign secretary, reminded the crowned heads after English judges had 

decapitated their king and abolished the monarchy, 

Rome had been a Republic before it became an empire; as the historian Edward Gibbon reminds us, the 

values of the Roman Republic were sometimes better 

preserved by its military emperors than by its civilian 

senators. 

The best of those senators, like the best of those 

emperors, believed, with our Founders, that the best 

government is not that which governs least, but that 

in which the wise rule for the common good. Perhaps 

Marcus Aurelius—philosopher and ruler, emperor 

and general—put it best of all: 
47

As you are yourself a complement of a social system, 

so let every act of yours be complementary of a social 

living principle. Every act of yours, therefore, which 

is not referred, directly or remotely to the social end 

sunders your life, does not allow it to be a unity, and 

is a partisan act, like a man in a republic who for his 

own part sunders himself from the harmony of his 

fellows.79

May all of us, whether our service be civilian or 

military, profit from what he practiced as well as 

preached.

ENDNOTES 

1. This monograph is part of a larger review of Samuel P. 

Huntington’s study, The Hidden Promise of Huntington’s The Soldier and the State: Military Professionals as Guardians of the Republic,

available from the author of this SSI monograph upon request.

2. Eliot Freidson, Professionalism, The Third Logic: On the 

Practice of Knowledge, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 

2001, p. 146.

3. For a succinct review of these positions on current issues, 

see Don Snider, Strategic Insights: Should General Dempsey Resign? 

Army Professionals and the Moral Space for Military Dissent, Carlisle, 

PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, October 

21, 2014, available from www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/

index.cfm/articles/Should-General-Dempsey-Resign/2014/10/21.

4. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory 

and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1957, p. 84.

5. Ibid., pp. 84-85.

6. Ibid., pp. 8-10, outlines the professional officer’s “expertise” 

and “responsibility.”
48

7. Ibid., p. 2. 

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 70. See also Matthew Moten, “Root, Miles, and Carter: Political-Cultural Expertise and an Earlier Army Transformation,” Lloyd J. Matthews, ed., The Future of the Army Profession, 

2nd Ed., New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, April 2005, 

p. 738, “In an ideal world, military professionals would remain 

unequivocally subordinate to their civilian masters, who would, 

in turn, develop clear, unambiguous, and unchanging policy 

goals prior to a forthright declaration of war”; Marybeth Peterson 

Ulrich, “Infusing Civil-Military Relations Principles in the Officer 

Corps,” Matthews, ed., The Future of the Army Profession, pp. 655, 

659, “The ideal match-up occurs when civilian leaders have high 

competence and responsibility.” (Emphasis in original.)

10. Huntington, note 5, p. 71.

11. Ibid. See also Suzanne C. Nielsen, “Rules of the Game? 

The Weinberger Doctrine and the American Use of Force,” Matthews, ed., The Future of the Army Profession, note 10, pp. 627, 632-

640, showing that both Huntington and Janowitz essentially and 

properly adopt Clausewitz’s view that “domestic political matters and the derivation of policy goals” are outside the province 

of military professionals.

12. Huntington, note 5, p. 76.

13. Ibid., p. 77.

14. Ibid. 

15. Ibid. 

16. It is worth noting that the officers’ oath is not to obey any 

particular civilian officer, but to uphold the Constitution and 

faithfully discharge the duties of the office:

I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the _____ 

(Military Branch) of the United States, as indicated above in the 

grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support 
49

and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance 

to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental 

reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to 

enter; So help me God.

17. Eric Schmitt, “Threats and Responses: Military Spending; 

Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size,” 

The New York Times, February 28, 2003, available from www.

nytimes.com/2003/02/28/us/threats-responses-military-spendingpentagon-contradicts-general-iraq-occupation.html. 

18. See Thom Shanker, “Retiring Army Chief of Staff Warns 

Against Arrogance,” The New York Times, June 12, 2003, available from www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/us/retiring-army-chief-ofstaff-warns-against-arrogance.html.

19. Try not to think of the current situation in Syria and Iraq.

20. Huntington, note 5, p. 122.

21. Except, perhaps, in the most extreme and self-limiting 

case, when resignation rather than implementing tactically unsound orders would result in a greater military catastrophe than 

implementing those orders.

22. Huntington, note 5, p. 76, nicely illustrates this complexity 

with the example of a junior officer’s pressing for the introduction 

a new technique in the face of superiors’ opposition: 

[T]he subordinate must consider whether the introduction of the new technique, assuming he is successful in his 

struggle, will so increase military efficiency as to offset the 

impairment of that efficiency caused by the disruption of 

the chain of command.

23. See Carl Ceulemans and Guy van Damme, “The Soldier 

and the State: An Analysis of Samuel Huntington’s View on Military Obedience Toward Political Authority,” Professional Ethics, 

Vol. 10, pp. 7, 11:
50

[Huntington’s analysis] implies that if it could be proven in 

one way or another that the political analysis of the military officer were much sounder than that of the statesman, 

then the former would not only have the right to disobey, he 

probably would have an obligation to do so.

24. See Martin L. Cook, “Army Professionalism: Service to 

What Ends?” Matthews, ed., The Future of the Army Profession, 

2nd Ed., note 10, pp. 683, 689, explicitly rejecting, on empirical 

grounds, the view that skill and wisdom about how to employ 

military forces reside not among military officers at all, but among 

those who use the military as obedient tools, employed in ways 

and for ends beyond the purview of military officers themselves.

(footnote omitted).

25. Huntington, note 5, p. 71.

26. Ibid., p. 70, citing Field Marshal Earl Wavell, The Good Soldier, London, UK, 1948, pp. 27-28. This approving reference to 

politics as a profession, we must note, is in considerable tension 

with Huntington’s rhetorical flourish elsewhere that “politics is 

an art, military science a profession.” Ibid., p. 76. The latter seems 

to make modern statesmen less the parallel to his modern professionalized military and more like the pre-professional “geniuses” 

that he very carefully eschews. See ibid., p. 28 (faulting 18th century military scholars because they “substituted glorification of 

natural genius for a conception of professional officership.”); Ibid., 

p. 30 “The accepted 18th-century theory of generalship centered 

about the concept of a natural genius,” which implied that “military command was an art like music or sculpture which required 

inherent talent” and thus “could not be transmitted or learned.”

27. Ibid., p. 70, citing Field Marshal Earl Wavell, The Good 

Soldier, London, UK, 1948, pp. 27-28.

28. Ibid. 

29. Freidson, “The ideology of professionalism asserts knowledge that is . . . [a] wedding of liberal education to specialized 

training . . . .”
51

30. If that. See James Burk, “Responsible Obedience by Military Professionals,” Suzanne C. Nielsen and Don M. Snider, eds., 

American Civil-Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New 

Era, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp. 

149, 157 (comparing “military professionals, who are specialists 

in violence,” with “elected officials, who are specialists in persuasion”). In classical political philosophy, of course, the skill of persuasion is a dangerous tool in the hands of those who do not both 

know and serve the public good. See generally Plato, “Gorgias,” 

in The Dialogues of Plato, 14th Ed., Benjamin Jowett, trans., New 

York: Random House, 1937; Aristotle, Rhetoric, W. Rhys Roberts, 

trans., New York: Modern Library, 1954.

31. B. H. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, New York: 

Quill, 1948, p. 44, quoting General Kurt Dittmar, who relied in 

part on conversations with General Franz Halder, head of the 

General Staff from 1938 until 1942. Huntington quotes part of this 

account. See Huntington, note 5, p. 115.

32. Huntington, note 5, p. 92. See also Ernst Nolte, Leila Vennewitz, trans., Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, New York: Mentor, 1966.

33. Hart, note 31, p. 9.

34. See Cook, note 24, p. 689. 

One thinks, for example, of the fairly scathing criticism of 

Iraqi Freedom currently being offered by Gen. Anthony 

Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, as a fruitful 

case for reflection on this point [i.e., the greater freedom of 

retired officers to criticize civilian leadership].

General Barry R. McCaffrey, Foreword to American CivilMilitary Relations, note 30, pp. xiii, xv.

[M]any of our senior flag officers who encountered the arrogance, disingenuous behavior, and misjudgments of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the initial years 

of Operation Iraqi Freedom were ill-prepared to respond 

effectively.
52

35. However, see Risa A. Brooks, “Militaries and Political 

Activity in Democracies,” American Civil-Military Relations, 

note 30, pp. 212, 237. 

In The Soldier and the State, Huntington correctly recognized 

that there are severe downsides to allowing militaries to 

engage in political activity in that it compromises their professionalism and therefore technical competency, but his 

analysis missed critical dimensions of the issue, 

particularly “the potential positive effects of political 

activity.” Ibid., p. 216: 

[I]f military officers and their leaders forgo political activity, 

it may mean that the United States sometimes pursues more 

risky and less well-conceived military actions abroad than 

had those officers engaged in a more forceful and explicit 

effort to shape public debate about the issues. 

Ulrich, note 10, p. 659, argues that, normatively as well as 

descriptively: 

democratic civil-military relations are characterized by 

military professionals who tolerate . . . poor policy-making 

outcomes in order to preserve the more fundamental, longterm interest of upholding the democratic character of the 

state; 

Ibid., p. 662-663, following Peter Feaver in characterizing as shirking “various degrees of military noncompliance with the political leadership’s desired policy preferences” without regard to the 

relative policy merits of the civilian and military positions, citing 

Peter Feaver, “Crisis as Shirking: An Agency Theory Explanation 

of the Souring of American Civilian-Military Relations,” Armed 

Forces and Society, Vol. 24, 1998, p. 407.

36. Huntington, note 5, p. 71.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.
53

39. Ibid., p. 72; see also Richard K. Betts, “Are Civil-Military 

Relations Still a Problem?” American Civil-Military Relations, note 

30, pp. 11, 36, “Huntington himself was not as explicit as he might 

have been about where exactly the lines should be drawn.”

40. Huntington, note 5, p. 73; see also James E. Baker, “LBJ’s 

Ghost: A Contextual Approach to Targeting Decisions and the 

Commander in Chief,” Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol. 

4, 2003, pp. 407, 408, “In many contexts, there are good policy 

reasons to restrict the manner in which a target is attacked that go 

beyond limitations required by the LOAC [Law of Armed Conflict]”; accordingly “a process of target decision entails the exercise of policy discretion as well as legal judgment and military 

command.”

41. Hart, note 31.

42. Huntington, note 5, p. 73; see also Betts, note 39, p. 36, 

reasoning that, although: 

one could make the case that for ideal integration of objectives, strategy, and operations, civilians and military should 

be equally conversant in each other’s terms of reference and 

should participate equally at all stages, . . . few would deny 

that there is some level of high politics at which soldiers 

should be silent, and some level of tactical specificity or micromanagement where civilians should keep hands off. 

Christopher P. Gibson, “Enhancing National Security and Civilian Control of the Military: A Madisonian Approach,” American 

Civil-Military Relations, note 30, pp. 238, 242, “Objective control 

was fundamentally flawed from the outset because it presumed 

that the military and political spheres could be distinguished in a 

comprehensive and meaningful way.” Richard H. Kohn, “Building Trust: Civil-Military Behaviors for Effective National Security,” American Civil-Military Relations, note 30, pp. 264, 265:

Huntington’s ‘objective civilian control’ assumed clear 

boundaries between policy and strategy, on the one hand, 

and tactics, operations, training, and military administration, on the other, that were diminishing in the dawning era 

of nuclear weapons and limited war.
54

McCaffrey, note 34, p. xv, noting that some military leaders have 

unfortunately lacked “an essential sense of history, the law, languages, and other cultures, and how our constitutional form of 

government really works”; Moten, note 10, p. 739, “Moreover, ‘at 

the highest level the art of war turns into policy,’ where officers 

and civilian leaders alike can and do often demonstrate competencies in each other’s jurisdictions”; Suzanne C. Nielsen and Don 

M. Snider, “Conclusions,” American Civil-Military Relations, supra 

note 30, pp. 290, 292, “The most significant shortcoming of Huntington’s construct was its failure to recognize that a separation 

between political and military affairs is not possible—particularly 

at the highest levels of policymaking.” Nadia Schadlow, Charles 

Barry, and Richard Lacquement, “A Return to the Army’s Roots: 

Governance, Stabilization, and Reconstruction,” The Future of 

the Army Profession, note 10, p. 251, “The cultural challenge for 

the Army now is to re-embrace vigorously critical stability operations, particularly those associated with governance, economic 

stabilization, and reconstruction, as integral, inevitable parts of 

war itself.” Leonard Wong and Don M. Snider, “Strategic Leadership of the Army Profession,” The Future of the Army Profession, 

note 10, pp. 601, 603:

As the strategic leaders of a profession look outside their 

profession, they seek at higher levels of analysis to understand comprehensive trends, those macro influences of technology, politics, organization . . . and even enemy adaptations, etc., which could cause jurisdictional changes for the 

Army.

Ibid., p. 617:

They [the Army’s strategic leadership] understand the entire spectrum of operations at the strategic level to include 

theatre strategy; joint, interagency, and multinational operations; and the use of all the elements of national power and 

technology in the execution of national security strategy.

43. Huntington, note 5, p. 73; see also Richard Lacquement, 

“Mapping Army Professional Expertise and Clarifying Jurisdictions of Practice,” The Future of the Army Profession, note 10, pp. 

213, 217, listing “Political-Cultural” as an essential area of military 

professional knowledge, citing Huntington. (Emphasis added.)
55

44. Huntington, note 5, p. 72.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.; see also Nielsen, note 12, p. 638, noting that Huntington’s “representative” role for officers entails relative capabilities of both their own nation and its enemies and concluding that 

“[o]nce factors such as these are taken into account, it is doubtful 

that an assessment of military security needs could be based on 

purely military expertise.”

47. See Mathew Moten, “A Broken Dialogue: Rumsfeld, 

Shinseki, and Civil-Military Tension,” American Civil-Military Relations, note 30, pp. 42, 69, “The essential flaw in Huntington’s 

theoretical wall is that it splits the responsibility for policy from 

the responsibility for strategy”; Williamson Murray, “Professionalism and Professional Military Education in the Twenty-First 

Century,” American Civil-Military Relations, note 30, pp. 134, 135, 

“Officers who know only the tactical and operational framework 

of conventional military forces might offer faulty advice and then 

prove incapable of adapting to the real conditions of the conflict 

they have been asked to fight”; Ibid., p. 146, “[In the post-Cold 

War world,] the use of military power will demand cultural, 

historical, linguistic, and political knowledge as well as tactical 

and operational competence”; Nadia Schadlow and Richard A. 

Lacquement, Jr., “Winning Wars, Not Just Battles: Expanding the 

Military Profession to Incorporate Stability Operations,” American Civil-Military Relations, note 30, pp. 113-114, “Huntington’s 

reliance on an abstract construct that removes political judgment 

from the realm of military professionalism unduly narrows the 

focus of military leaders to operations and tactics”; Don M. Snider, “The U.S. Army as a Profession,” in The Future of the Army Profession, note 10, pp. 1, 53, “To a greater extent than when fighting 

war, the management of defense and peace requires the military 

professional to cooperate and compete with other professions as 

it goes about its work.” 

48. Eric Schmitt, “Threats and Responses: Military Spending; Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s 

Size,” The New York Times, February 28, 2003, available from www.

nytimes.com/2003/02/28/us/threats-responses-military-spendingpentagon-contradicts-general-iraq-occupation.html.
56

49. Huntington, note 5, p. 73.

50. Immanuel Kant, Lewis White Black, trans., Foundations 

of the Metaphysics of Morals, New York: Macmillan Publishing 

Company, 1989, pp. 31-32.

51. See Wong and Snider, note 42, pp. 611-612, “For example, 

strategic leaders need to be politically savvy – knowing when to 

compromise, knowing that many strategic decisions are not black 

and white, and knowing what is best in the long run for the nation 

and the army.” See also Ceulemans and van Damme, note 23, p. 

11, “[I]t seems rather strong [of Huntington] to deny the fact that 

people in a society could share some basic principles of common 

good, and consequently, that political decisions could be judged 

based on these commonly shared values.”

52. See John Mark Mattox, “The Moral Foundations of Army 

Officership,” The Future of the Army Profession, note 10, p. 396: 

Likewise, it has long been understood that, inasmuch as 

Army officers are entrusted by the state with the power to 

preserve or threaten lives, they must be individuals of character who are committed to the properly constrained use of 

that power, both in its legal and moral dimensions. 

We can separate law from morality for analytic purposes without 

conceding that they need be separated permanently, nor whether 

that separation is, in any ultimate sense, possible. Later analysis 

reunites the two, insisting that military officers, like all professionals, must make the moral assessment, whether they make it 

inside the law, or out.

53. See Burk, note 30, p. 159, “In an effort that is difficult to 

reconcile with his earlier assertions about the supreme virtue of 

instant and unthinking obedience, Huntington tries to define the 

limits of obedience.” (citation omitted.)

54. Huntington, note 5, p. 77.

55. Ibid., pp. 77-78.

56. Ibid., p. 78.
57

57. Ibid. 

58. See Peter Margulies, Law’s Detour: Justice Displaced in the 

Bush Administration, New York: New York University Press, 2010, 

p. 60; David Luban, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity, Cambridge, 

UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, “Yoo justified his advice 

with analogies that defied common sense.”

59. See Huntington, Part II.B.2. 

60. This is, we might note, a very old objection indeed. See 

Aristotle, note 30, p. 88:

We must say that evidence under torture is not trustworthy, 

the fact being that many men whether thick-witted, toughskinned, or stout of heart endure their ideal nobly, while 

cowards and timid men are full of boldness till they see 

the ordeal of these others: so that no trust can be placed in 

evidence under torture.

61. Perhaps the most egregious lapse of legal reasoning was 

to overlook a distinction familiar to every layperson: Even a dog 

knows the difference between tripped over and being kicked. The 

torture memo, overlooking this distinction, tries to shed light on 

a statute about the amount of pain government officials may intentionally inflict from a statute that addresses government obligation to redress pain that the government has not caused. Just 

to be clear: I say “overlooked” here in the name of charity, not 

unmindful of the difference between inadvertent and intentional 

wrongs. See Margulies, note 56, p. 60, “Yoo justified his advice 

with analogies that defied common sense.”

62. See James E. Baker, “Process, Practice, and Principle: 

Teaching National Security Law and the Knowledge that Matters 

Most,” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Vol. 27, No. 163, 2014, p. 

171, “They [policy-makers] are impressed with the lawyer who 

relates law to fact connecting the humane treatment of prisoners 

to better intelligence. . . .”; James E. Baker, “What’s International 

Law Got to Do with It? Transnational Law and the Intelligence 

Mission,” Michigan Journal of International Law, Vol. 28, No. 639, 

2007, pp. 655-656, anecdotal evidence from Russian occupation of 

Afghanistan that humane treatment of prisoners enhances intelligence gathering.
58

63. See Luban, note 56, p. 167, “With the worldwide adoption 

of CAT [Convention Against Torture], torture became an international crime.”

64. Huntington, note 5, p. 78.

65. Malcolm N. Shaw, International Law, Vol. 455, 6th Ed., 2008:

The effective control of a new government over the territory 

of the state is thus an important guideline to the problem 

of whether to extend recognition or not, providing such 

control appears well established and likely to continue.

66. This is not the place to answer worries that the Nuremberg verdicts were unfair either as a form of “victors’ justice” or 

as retroactive. Still, a bit about both points. On the first, even if 

we must concede, with the citizens of Melos to the Athenian fleet, 

that the powerful can make the law whatever they will, we can 

nonetheless observe, as the Melians also did, that the powerful 

have a basic choice. They can make the law serve their own narrow interest, or they can make the law serve the interests of all, 

the common good. On the second, it would be a bit hard for the 

Nazis to deny that they were on notice about prevailing humanitarian norms when they had made an ideology of attacking and 

displacing those very norms. 

67. Huntington, note 5, p. 78.

68. Ibid.

69. Aristotle, note 30, p. 216, “Gorgias said that you should 

kill your opponent’s earnestness with jesting and their jesting 

with earnestness; in which he was right.” It is worth remembering that Aristotle could not have forgotten what his own teacher 

had taught him: Gorgias was not a philosopher, but an infamous 

sophist. See Plato, note 30.

70. Huntington, note 5, p. 78.

71. Ibid. 

72. Ibid.
59

73. Ibid.

74. See Burk, note 30, p. 162, “Huntington too quickly dismisses moral reasoning and finds no place for moral responsibility within the military professional’s role.”

75. Cook, note 24, p. 689.

76. See Burk, note 30, p. 161, “A decision to begin genocide is 

impossible to justify under any [acceptable] moral paradigm, and 

so it cannot constitute a lawful order.”

77. See Mattox, note 50, p. 397, 

They [army officers] are moral agents who must recognize 

their responsibility (1) never to issue an immoral order, and 

(2) to refuse an order—even a suggestion—to undertake 

military operations inconsistent with the ideals they are 

sworn to defend.

78. Patrick Henry, Speech on the Stamp Act, Virginia House 

of Burgesses, May 29, 1765.

79. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Vol 60, 9th Ed., A. S. L. 

Farquharson, trans., New York: Everyman’s Library, 1961. 
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General William E. Rapp

Commandant

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