CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS

AND THE NOT-QUITE WARS OF THE PRESENT AND FUTURE

Vincent Davis

Editor

October 30, 1996
ii

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These papers originally were presented to the Patterson

School Symposium on Military Operations Other Than War, sponsored

by the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute and

The Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce,

University of Kentucky. The views expressed in this report are

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iii

PREFACE

In September 1995, the University of Kentucky's Patterson

School of Diplomacy and International Commerce and the U.S. Army

War College's Strategic Studies Institute hosted a symposium

surveying the area between the high end of humanitarian

intervention and the low end of low-intensity conflict in the

not-quite wars that U.S. forces have been engaging in since the

end of the Cold War. The following papers on various aspects of

civil-military relations resulted from this symposium.

Military intervention is nothing new in American history. In

their role as commander-in-chief, presidents resorted to this

stratagem with some regularity prior to World War II and have

done so since 1945 with increasing frequency. But the symposium

examined the argument that the pattern of interventions since the

end of the Cold War, although sharing some characteristics with

traditional patterns, represents a new trend.

Participants at the symposium included several distinguished

generals and admirals, ambassadors, knowledgeable Pentagon

civilian policymakers, scholars from throughout academia, and a

number of think-tank strategists. Their papers ranged from case

studies of recent interventions in Somalia and Haiti to

discussions of issues involving civil-military relations.

The Army War College and the Strategic Studies Institute were

pleased to support the Patterson School's symposium. The

following papers are presented to stimulate thought and

discussion on the topic of civil-military relations.
iv

FOREWORD

Classic civil-military relations literature, especially at

the strategic level, focuses on the relationships between the

highest political authorities on the one hand, and the most

senior military leaders on the other. But in a broader sense, the

topic includes the nature of relationships between society and

the military institutions the society supports with the

expectation that the military will defend the society's shores

and interests from foreign aggressors. The dynamics of civilmilitary relations also can include the nature of relationships

between soldiers and sailors on weekend passes in the local town,

whether at home or abroad. In addition, it includes the

relationship between the base or post commander and the local

mayor of the town or city outside the gate.

With the end of the Cold War, changes in national and

international affairs raised civil-military relations questions

in new contexts. The front edge of the "baby-boomer" generation

who began filling key political offices in the early 1990s often

had little or no meaningful prior contact with the military. Some

senior military leaders, for their part, remained imbued with

resentments based on their perceptions of grossly unfair civilian

leadership and "meddling" during the Vietnam War. The stage was

set for new concerns about civil-military relations just as a

rapid succession of operations got underway in Somalia, Haiti,

Bosnia, and elsewhere.

Three papers presented at the Patterson School-Strategic

Studies Institute Symposium focused on civil-military relations

at various levels. West Point professor Don M. Snider maintains

that continued pressures on the armed forces--especially the

Army--to put aside war-fighting missions in favor of other

missions will further strain civil-military relations. In the

second essay, retired Admiral Stanley R. Arthur examines the

broader aspects of civil-military relations where he sees a

growing estrangement between all levels of the armed forces on

the one hand, and the larger civilian society on the other.

Finally, George Washington University professor Deborah D. Avant

argues that the post-Vietnam war reluctance of senior military

officers to take their forces into low-level threat interventions

does not constitute defiance of established civilian political

authority. In fact, she holds that this is precisely the way the

American system of constitutionally-divided government is

supposed to work, and that the real problem is the inability of

top civilian politicians to form and achieve a consensus in their

vision.

Together these papers address a spectrum of issues attendant

to the current debate over civil-military relations. I commend

them to your consideration. On behalf of The Patterson School and
v

the University of Kentucky, I wish to thank the Army War College

and the Strategic Studies Institute for their support, without

which the symposium could not have been held.

VINCENT DAVIS

Patterson Chair Professor

The Patterson School of Diplomacy

 and International Commerce
1

U.S. CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS

AND OPERATIONS OTHER THAN WAR

Don Snider

To provide context, I begin with three hypotheses about the

current state of civil-military relations in the United States.

Within that hypothesized context, I will then discuss what I

believe to be the principal implications for future civilmilitary relations stemming from continued U.S. involvement at

the low end of the conflict spectrum in "operations other than

war" (OOTW).

Three Hypotheses.1

The recent debate over a potential "crisis" in U.S. civilmilitary relations, in part a result of Professor Richard Kohn's

article in the Spring 1994 issue of The National Interest, has

been quite productive.2 It compelled research and professional

introspection into issues that have not been examined in

sufficient depth for some time. From those processes, and the

real tensions in civil-military relations that have been

identified, I offer the following three hypotheses about the

underlying systemic causes.3

First, taking the nub of the current tensions to be in the

decisionmaking context with focus on who decides and what they

get to decide, it is hypothesized that at this interface

individual military decisionmakers are better prepared to deal

with current and future decisionmaking than are their civilian

counterparts. They are better prepared in that they are better

educated and trained and have had more relevant experience. To

use a sports idiom, the military clearly has "the better team and

a deeper bench." Examples range from General Colin Powell

reportedly "taking advantage" of President Clinton on the

homosexual issue to interagency councils in Washington where flag

officers and colonels generally arrive better prepared to

outperform their civilian counterparts. Even in the interface

between the Depart-ment of Defense (DOD) and Congress, the

military staffs at the Pentagon usually outperform the

congressional staffs and those of their analytical support

agencies. Finally, in the field, the military is taking the lead

in the joint mission and political-military analyses that now

precede most all operations other than war.

Although the plausible explanations for this phenomena have

not been empirically demonstrated, they include short-lived

administrations, presidential personnel policies for making

political appointments that emphasize criteria other than

executive competence, growing piles of "ethics" regulations that
2

make it increasingly difficult to entice top-quality individuals

away from the private sector and into politically-appointed

positions, and the thinning quality of career civilians in the

federal bureaucracy, in addition to the decreasing familiarity

with the military among the civilian leadership. For instance,

for the first time in history, the majority of the members of the

104th Congress have had no military experience. Furthermore, this

particular administration has appointed far fewer military

veterans than any preceding administration. Finally, large

numbers of civilians with experience in the Cold War military,

intelligence, scientific, and policymaking communities are

retiring or seeking employment outside the government.

On the other side of the relationship, within the postVietnam military, plausible explanations portray the converse.

More officers than ever before are educated in the policy

sciences at the best universities. They enter more often and

remain longer in policy-type assignments, both in Washington and

in various joint commands around the globe. Goldwater-Nichols

legislation has produced joint specialists with remarkable

professional competence to populate staffs within and without

Washington; albeit at the expense of the traditionally powerful

service staffs.4 Finally, major post-Cold War military operations

like DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM have reflected areas of

traditional expertise for uniformed officers, such as midintensity conventional operations emphasizing informational and

technological dominance. Few civilian leaders or their staffs

have had experience or training in those areas.

Second, neither the civilian leadership, regardless of

party, nor the military services have a common vision of the

future. They have no clear concept of what the military should be

able to do, and therefore no common vision of how the services

should be organized, trained, and equipped for the 21st century.5

In other words, there is not a generally accepted mid-or longrange plan within which, at multiple levels of decisionmaking,

civilian and military decision-makers can comfortably agree on

who decides and for what. For support of this hypothesis, I need

cite no more than the two tortuous processes, as yet

inconclusive, attempting since 1992 to resolve the essential

issues of strategy and defense policy: those that produced

Presidential Decision Document (PDD) 25 on U.S. military

interventions, and the ever-changing Pentagon approach to theater

missile defenses, the greatest vulnerability of current, powerprojection military strategy.

Third, both parties to the relationship, as well as the

general public, are changing their ideas of what "correct" or

"good" civil-military relations should be in the threat-free

environment of today. Simply stated, normative conceptions are

changing. In the past it was better understood, and better
3

accepted, that the supremacy of civilian values lay at the core

of American civil-military relations. 6 But "values" have waned as

a focal point, to be replaced by "control" and by various

measures of efficiency and effectiveness in the relationship,

often defined in terms of a particular political agenda. A policy

that produces more gender integration in the military is said to

be good or, at the least, a result of "good" civil-military

decisionmaking.7 Indications of change on both sides of the

relationship abound. On the one side, the public had no problem

accepting the number of retired senior military officers who

endorsed the Clinton presidential bid in 1992 and the rewarding

of one with an appointment as ambassador to the Court of St.

James. Congressional changes to allow for more political

participation by federal employees, including the uniformed

military, went virtually unnoticed. On the other hand, there was

little in the way of comment when the military took the issue of

gays in the military into the public arena. In sum, it is not

clear that either the public, the practitioners, or the academics

know what "good" civil-military relationships are, or should be,

in this new environment.

Implications for Future U.S. Civil-Military Relations of

Continued Involvement in Operations Other than War.

The first implication of continued involvement in OOTW is

short term in nature and focuses on the character and role of

military advice-giving. It results from the highly resourceconstrained environment in which these operations will occur.

Simply stated, the military leadership will continue to be forced

to choose internally between financing OOTW or supporting the

traditional "warfighting" roles and their urgently needed

modernization. This has been, and remains, a particularly acute

problem for the Army, the one service most involved in OOTW, and

also the one most without a modernization budget. For the

following reasons, the services can be expected, when faced with

this choice, to continue their external behavior to resist

embracing OOTW missions.

First, such missions do not reflect the essence of the

military's raison de etre, "to fight and win the nation's wars."

Thus the U.S. military should not get involved in quasi-military

operations (the Vietnam syndrome). The military's purpose is to

"kill people and break things," and other instruments of national

power should take on collateral missions such as nation-building

and humanitarian relief.

Second, from the services' perspective, the current resource

environment has created a zero-sum game when purchasing future

military capabilities (OOTW vs. traditional missions) in which

the signals from Congress are clear; buy the big items needed for
4

traditional missions. Further, that game goes well beyond dollar

allocations to include recruitment and retention of personnel, as

well as organizational energy and focus at a time of critical

need for focusing on the future into the 2lst century.

Third, under the best of circumstances, OOTW missions are

most often "high-risk, no-win" operations, whose complexity in

planning and execution is beyond the understanding of most

civilian decisionmakers. In this regard, the mission to Bosnia

appears to have been unique in the post-Cold War period in that

the military was given practically everything it wanted during

the political negotiations in Dayton to include a clearly

defined, limited mission and open rules of engagement.

Finally, prior to the Dayton negotiations, the military

leaders have not trusted their civilian leaders to devise sound

political guidance for any initial use of force (thus the 2-year

tussle over PDD 25). With Somalia as an example, they do not see

their civilian leaders as able to control "mission creep," and

they point to the domestication of intervention decisions made on

Haiti as placing the military in the service of various domestic

constituencies at the expense of others. Taken together, these

constitute a disunifying national role that the services always

seek to avoid.

Given these existing institutional biases, the hypothesized

tensions in civil-military relations over U.S. participation in

humanitarian operations will most likely continue. Each mission,

as in the case of Bosnia, will require separate political debate,

with the military on the sideline awaiting the outcome. The

public's unwillingness thus far to support a great involvement in

OOTW, and the inability of political leaders to change that fact,

will continue to provide support for the services' resistance,

and they will act accordingly. That said, however, the military

is increasingly aware of the need to be, both in fact and in

perception, a good investment of federal resources rather than an

expensive institution of little use in the current security

environment. This countervailing need, if reinforced by further

successful interventions like the very limited operation in

Rwanda, could soon erode the current biases of the military and

thus lessen civil-military tensions. Bosnia will be the real test

of this nascent trend.

These tensions over OOTW do not, however, exist at all

levels of the civilian-military interface, particularly at those

levels where resource decisions are implemented rather than made.

Neither do they exist to the same degree within all military

institutions, particularly those entities involved in determining

how to do OOTW better than in the past, e.g., the service and

joint doctrinal and training commu-nities. I cite three examples:

the rich issue of doctrine on OOTW during the past 2 years from
5

both service and joint doctrinal agencies; the remarkable synergy

occurring among civilian and military trainers at the Joint

Readiness Training Center (JRTC); and, at a much lower level, the

fact that last summer 14 cadets from the U.S. Military Academy,

with the assistance of civilian leaders in the Departments of

State and Defense, spent part of their summer working overseas

with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for the purpose of

"producing graduates knowledgeable in the NGO-military

relationship in peace operations."

The second implication of continued OOTW is long-term and

focuses on the issue of building service capabilities for the

future, a responsibility of both civilian and military leaders.

Basically the issue is dual: whether to build forces for use as

"warfighters" or as "peacekeepers," and whether, in the future,

technology and organizational adaptation will determine that such

a dichotomy is, in fact, false. The services now believe,

correctly in my view, that the dichotomy is valid except in the

case of a few specialized capabilities, like those of Special

Operations Forces. By their own direction to prepare forces at

the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk, Louisiana, prior

to rotation into Haiti, it is apparent that they believe even

those capabilities now designed for combat at the low end of the

spectrum need extensive and expensive retraining, both prior to

and following use in OOTW. But in the main, the services would

not invest in F-22 air superiority fighters, Comanche stealth

helicopters, Aegis destroyers, and Theater High Altitude Air

Defense (THAAD) systems if they truly believe OOTW will be their

focus in the future. Service leaders believe as much in long-term

institutional relevance and survival as do other stewards of

large organizations supported by the federal treasury.

In terms of the civil-military interface, I see the context

of this longer-term implication as follows. The services know

that their programs are over-structured and badly under-funded.

But service leaders cannot find political leaders in either

party, or in the Congress and Executive branches, with whom to

form a vision of the future so that a political deal can be cut

that will last long enough to bring about the changes in force

structure and capabilities fostered by that vision. Implicit in

this much needed deal would be the acquiescence by military

leaders in further cuts in and reshaping of force structure in

return for the assurance from political leaders that resources

saved would be used over the years for research, development, and

investments in future capabilities for the 2lst century. Absent

this, the service leaders are hedging their bets, tinkering at

the margins, but offering no big changes until the political

situation clarifies.

For their part, civilian leaders are also accepting future

risks by not compelling any dramatic changes in current
6

capabilities. The Bottom Up Review (BUR) force designed in late

1993 cannot now do what it was designed to do, that is, to fight

in two nearly simultaneous major regional contingencies. It is

not likely that anything will change until after the 1996 general

elections, except that U.S. military capabilities will continue

into obsolescence while consuming virtually all the available

resources and, in the process, potentially denying the nation

that level of technological sophistication needed to meet future

challenges and threats.8

In this context, continued involvement in OOTW will fuel

the current tensions over whether to build "belligerent" or

"peacekeeping" capacities for the future. And well it should,

because this issue must be faced squarely and resolved as part of

a common vision for the future of DOD. The best way out of this

dilemma is by innovative thinking about future military

capabilities for OOTW.

The civilian leadership in the Department of Defense, for

instance, should accept the currently perceived dichotomy

incapabilities and designate a small, joint task force (JTF)

dedicated solely to Chapter VI peacekeeping. Such a force would

number 10-15 thousand. Logistical support would be "privatized"

to multinational companies specializing in global security and

logistical operations. The advantages of such a JTF appear large,

especially from the perspectives of both sides of the civilmilitary relationship.

From the perspective of civilian leaders, this would resolve

the political debate over how much support the American people

are willing to provide for such efforts, whether unilateral or

multilateral and, if the latter, whether they would be directed

or authorized by the United Nations. If political agreement could

be reached between the Executive and Congress, fully supported,

that establishes the reasonable limits of U.S. involvement in

peacekeeping at any one time, and that all other U.S. military

capabilities are exclusively for warfighting roles (including

presence, deterrence and defense), then extremely important and

clear signals would be sent to several constituencies now in dire

need of them.

Congress and the Executive would have a much clearer basis

on which to debate and undertake intervention decisions, and

would be assisted in coming to closure by the choice between two

distinct type of forces with very different capabilities. Foreign

governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions would know that

America is willing to do her part in peacekeeping--shedding blood

if necessary--but that fact would be conditioned by the

expectation that there are clearly defined limits as indicated by

the relatively small (smaller than a single division) size of the

dedicated JTF. If America's peacekeeping JTF is fully committed,
7

as most of the time it would be, then it would be clear to all

that the United States would undertake no other peacekeeping

missions until relieved of the current one by other nations. This

would change the terms of the public debate, both at home and

abroad, as to the U.S. role in supporting such multilateral

endeavors.

Given this kind of structure, it would soon become

universally clear that the United States has two types of forces;

one for peace and one for more conventional forms of conflict and

war. National intentions on the use of force would be clearly

signaled by the forces selected for any intervention. Trendy, but

utterly confusing euphemisms like the brilliant oxymoron, "peace

enforcement," could be eliminated both from civil-military

discourse as well as from the national and international debates.

Furthermore, the natural synergy between the two distinct levels

of military capability would lend credibility to both when

advantages taken of U.S. "peacekeepers" compel the deployment and

appropriate use of "warfighting" forces. Over time international

expectations and behaviors would be conditioned, provided U.S.

responses and actions remain congruent and predictable. An

additional advantage accruing from this kind of JTF would be the

amelioration of the phenomena of "mission creep." The JTF's

narrow capabilities would clearly define the range and duration

of possible missions. Both civilian and military leaders would

know the limits of the possible in advance of any commitment. If

warfighting reinforcements needed to be called in later, such a

discontinuous and discrete escalation should cause a healthy

reexamination of just what the mission ought to be.

From the military leader's perspective, the current

stalemate over what capabilities the services should build in the

future would be broken. It would be accepted that some forces

could be extensively and permanently reorganized, reequipped, and

trained specifically and only for peacekeeping tasks. Further,

the long-term scope of this "intrusion" in the normal activity of

the military departments--force building--could be clearly

understood and logically planned for by all involved, as could

planning for the remainder of the warfighting forces. Such

planning, once the permanence and scope of the endeavor is

understood, might even include separate personnel policies for

this JTF. Enlisted personnel would have to be specifically

screened, tested, and recruited for the purpose of being neutral

"peacekeepers." This may, in fact, create a new pool of personnel

for military service. Defense industries, to the extent they

still exist, and enterprises with dual-use technologies could

forecast markets in each capability area allowing at least some

industrial base capabilities to focus on the future. The

disadvantages of such an approach are clear, particularly from

the perspective of the services and their perceived need to

defend their Title 10 authorities. But whether the Army
8

specifically or DOD generally wants to believe it or not, we are

in revolutionary times, and viable approaches to the future

demand that we do more than merely leverage technologies into

existing systems and organizations.

The third implication I see is a continuation of a

potentially disturbing trend by the uniformed military to "fill

the void" in many civil-military interfaces surrounding the

decisionmaking to take on, as well as to implement, OOTW. While

such a trend may spring naturally from the services' "can do"

approach to mission accomplishment, the unintended consequences,

which can be described as the increased politicization of the

officer corps, may turn out to be quite deleterious to the

services.

Since doctrine has taken an increasingly important role in

the shaping of military culture, earlier in the U.S. Army, but

more recently in the other services as in the Joint community, it

is a logical area in which to observe these consequences. Recent

joint publications, as well as Army manuals, contain examples of

doctrines that tend to erode traditional roles in civil-military

relations, and which come dangerously close to calling into

question the dominance of the civilian role, particularly in the

sensitive areas of mission analysis and the definition of the end

state in OOTW operations.

To quote from the Joint Task Force Commander's Handbook,

published in February 1995, paragraphs 5 and 7 read:

5. Mission analysis . . . Throughout the mission

analysis, if a mandate or parts of a mandate are

unclear, you should take the necessary steps via higher

authority to have it explained or redefined . . . A

means available to influence a rewrite of the mandate

is to develop your own mission statement and coordinate

it with higher authorities. This may also provide you

with the opportunity to clarify force structure

requirements, end state(s) and "commander's intent"

with the supported combatant commander.

7. End State . . . End state refinement is a continuous

process . . . an important step in the mission analysis

process is to be sure that there is a clearly defined

end state(s) . . . Although an end state may be

difficult to define in peace operations, you should

strive to refine the mission to ensure one exists . . .

being prepared early to develop your own mission

statement and coordinate it with higher authority may

allow you the opportunity to clearly identify an end

state(s) . . . This process also may serve as impetus

for all militaries, UN, and other organizations
9

involved in the operations to agree on what needs to be

accomplished or what is acceptable to reach an end

state.9

A combination of initiative and circumstance may, in some

circumstances, place the military leader in a position to

determine end states; something normally and rightfully the

purview of political leadership. Similar examples can be found in

service doctrinal literature; for example, almost identical

language is found in Army FM l00-23, Peace Operations.

Conclusion.

 The relations between military and civilian leaders are

undergoing a significant transition in this early post-Cold War

period, arguably moving those relations out of their tenuous but

long-standing equilibrium. It is not yet known how long the

transition will take and whether the new relationship will

include a new equilibrium similar to the old one. No one knows

even what factors are providing the major influences on the

transition. There has been much speculation that the factors most

responsible include: the loss of the unifying, commonly perceived

external security threat; the character of the new baby-boomer

civilian leadership; a more assertive post-Vietnam War officer

corps expecting--even demanding--more and better guidance from

its civilian leaders; and finally, the changing nature of

conflict that has added new and unfamiliar demands for the use of

military forces. This essay addresses the latter factor, the

impact of increasing involvement in OOTW as one form of "new"

military operation.

If the hypotheses offered here are valid, and if the

implications outlined are real, then it is fair to conclude that

American military leaders, during this transition in civilmilitary relations, are walking a very fine line indeed. They are

torn between representing the interests, as they perceive them,

of the institutions they lead and the self-abnegating role that

the citizenry and the Constitution ultimately requires of them as

military servants. I end this essay with two examples to clarify

this conclusion.

First, in the recent past military leaders have arguably

exacerbated civil-military tensions by their opposition to

involvement in OOTW where military capabilities were to be used

for limited objectives in support of humanitarian goals (Somalia,

Haiti, policy in PDD 25, etc.). Such opposition by military

leaders, coupled with their relative expertise (hypothesis one),

has led to increased involvement by the military at the political

level in determining the appropriate missions for the military,

and under what conditions they are to be supported. This was
10

clearly evident during the Dayton negotiations for U.S. military

involvement with NATO in Bosnia. Now, however, having assumed an

increasing role in areas that some would consider correctly the

purview of civilian leaders, the military could have set

themselves up for failure in Bosnia had the operation gone sour,

which it has not at this writing in mid-1996.

Over the longer term, military leaders will likely continue

to resist accepting the permanence of OOTW missions. They will

not soon change their minds on organizing their forces or

capabilities to address these missions, preferring instead to

consider these requirements as "lesser included capabilities" to

those needed for traditional warfighting missions. And while the

existing strategic uncertainty may warrant this position, it is

also the case that innovative solutions (as outlined in this

essay) are available at very low cost (15 thousand manpower

spaces that will likely be lost anyway without a political

constituency to save them) that could both ameliorate civilmilitary tensions as well as retain most of the current

flexibility to deal with strategic ambiguity.

In both of these examples, I believe it fair to characterize

the attitude and actions of the military "knowing best what is

good for the military." Assuming the characterization to be

valid, the question remains as to whether the military actually

does know "what is best," or whether some ideas promoted by

civilian leaders, such as continued or increased involvement in

OOTW, need to be embraced as in the best interests of the

services. This is the thin line military leaders are currently

walking because it is not an open question that the American

public will eventually hold the military profession accountable

for the results of its employments. Thus, from the perspective of

future civil-military relations, I believe impacts on intangible

factors, such as the public's perception of the profession's

ethos, also loom large. These issues additionally deserve our

attention. Ultimately, however, the central concern is that

continued involvement in OOTW, and the accompanying discord

generated, are jeopardizing the military profession's traditional

ethical edge.

ENDNOTES

1. The three hypotheses presented here were vetted with a

distinguished group of scholars and practitioners at the

University of Kentucky's Patterson School of Diplomacy and

International Commerce, September 22-24, 1995. Little

disagreement emerged, and, in fact, several participants greatly

experienced in humanitarian operations, such as Ambassador Robert

Oakley, strongly agreed with them. Nonetheless, they remain

simply hypotheses until empirically supported, which highlights

the principal purpose of this think piece--to separate what we
11

know from what we do not know about the implica-tions of

humanitarian operations, and to stimulate research in those areas

about which we are as yet uninformed.

2. Richard Kohn, "Out of Control: The Crisis in Civilmilitary Relations," The National Interest, No. 35, Spring 1994,

pp. 3-17.

3. For an overview of these tensions, see Miranda CarletonCarew and Don M. Snider, eds., US Civil-Military Relations:

Crisis or Transition?, Washington: Center for Strategic and

International Studies, 1995.

4. Garland H. Williams, "Defense Reform and Organizational

Change: Have the Services Embraced the New Joint Paradigm?",

unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1994, pp. 274-

287.

5. See Don M. Snider, et.al., "The Coming Defense Train

Wreck and What to Do About It," The Washington Quarterly, Vol.

19, No. 1, pp. 89-124.

6. Allan Millet, "The American Political System and Civilian

Control of the Military: A Historical Perspective," Mershon

Center Position Paper in the Policy Sciences, No. 4, Columbus,

OH: Ohio State University, April 1977.

7. The classic on the subject of civil-military relations is

Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the State: The Theory and

Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Cambridge: Belknap Press,

1957. See also Michael Desch, "US Civil-Military Relations in a

Changing Interna-tional Order," in Carlton-Carew and Snider,

eds., US Civil-Military Relations, pp. 166-170.

8. For a more complete explanation of this scenario, see

Defense in the Late 1990s: Avoiding the Train Wreck, a report

prepared by the Political Military Studies Program, Washington:

Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1995.

9. Joint Task Force Commander's Handbook for Peace

Operations, Ft. Monroe, VA: Joint Warfighting Center, February

28, 1995, pp.5-11.
12

THE AMERICAN MILITARY:

SOME THOUGHTS ON WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE ARE

Admiral Stanley R. Arthur

In the United States, some people talk about the subject of

civilian control of the military as if the issue is whether or

not the military likes or respects civilian control. This is the

wrong issue and focus of the discussion. No military institution

in the world supports the principle of civilian control more

strongly than the American military. Nonetheless, a number of

dynamics are cause for concern. These worries are not so much

directed at the quality or quantity of senior military advice.

Senior military officers are well within the bounds of civilian

control, so far. What is of concern is the degree to which the

armed forces are growing more and more separate from American

society. This separation is even more worrisome because it is

built around a feeling of elitism among the military. This is a

problem which is reflected in the recruitment and accession

policies of our young enlisted and officer candidates. If we do

not change them, there is reason to expect this problem to

migrate into the senior enlisted leadership and the senior levels

of the officer corps. This would be a dangerous thing. We do not

want the people who serve in the U.S. military to think of

themselves as too distinct from--or much better than--the society

they represent.

The difficulties I see in the military grew out of solutions

to the problems we had at the end of the Vietnam War when low

morale was the norm among all the armed forces. The controversies

of the war were only part of the problem. They were exacerbated

by the fact that those who could afford to found ways to avoid

the draft. In fact, one of those who did escape the draft, James

Fallows, has referred to Vietnam as "the class war."1 The

exemptions, however, did not stop with class. The draft was also

skewed along racial lines. From among the many myths emerging

from the Vietnam War is the notion that blacks were drafted in

greater numbers than their corresponding proportion to the

population, and that black Americans bore a disproportionate

number of the casualties.2

 While the statistics do not support

those widely-held beliefs, what is important is that the

perceived unfairness of the draft, along with the unpopularity of

the war, led to a number of problems in the field, to include

drug abuse, alcoholism, and a general sense of malaise. In any

event, by 1975 the core values in the American military were at

an all time low. At the same time, there was tremendous political

pressure to end the draft. The combination of the legacy of

Vietnam problems and the downsizing after the war led many to

worry that the United States would not be able to meet serious

security threats.
13

The creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) was one

solution to these difficulties. The idea behind the AVF was to

let the market solve the problem. If, under the draft, the United

States had poor military recruits, the idea was to take in those

who really wanted to serve and to offer them pay and benefits

that would reward their service. The AVF was not without its

critics. Many worried that the military would not be able to

attract enough high-quality recruits. Some also worried that the

armed forces might be an even worse representation of society

without the draft. In the end, the AVF was a good solution to

past problems, but it has created a set of challenges of its own.

There was tremendous debate over the benefits and costs of

the AVF. At the beginning, it was tough to attract bettereducated recruits, especially in the wake of Vietnam. But over

time, the quality of recruits rose. The United States now fields

a force of higher quality than it has at any time in its history.

The military sets its sights on high school graduates and

dedicates the funds necessary for pay, health benefits, college

tuition supplements, comfortable living accommodations, and a

plethora of facilities to make service in the military an

attractive option for many young people.

The AVF and the mechanisms we have used to make it work,

however, have increased the cost for maintaining the armed

forces. People are an expensive part of all modern armed forces,

but the inducements to serve in the U.S. military have increased

the cost to the point that pay is, all by itself, the largest

single item in the defense budget. But pay is only the beginning

of personnel costs. Add to basic compensation the cost of

providing housing, health benefits, schools, day care facilities,

and a host of other benefits evident on military installations at

home and abroad, and we are in danger of pricing ourselves out of

the market. In the days of the draft, open-bay barracks were

thrown up to house soldiers in large groups. Today, many service

members have their own rooms and a host of amenities such as

televisions and VCRs.

Another hidden cost is that of recruiting. Part of the

concern over the AVF was whether it would truly reflect American

society. We have done a great deal to make sure that the military

does represent American society in some ways. We can chart and

control where and whom we recruit by age, aptitude, gender, and

race. But every time we want to change the mix, every time we

want to increase the admission standards, every time we decide on

a new parameter, it costs us more. There must be new recruiting

advertisements, and we need to monitor the success of recruiting

in each of our services. But advertising is extremely expensive,

especially during programming focused on young people, i.e.,

collegiate and professional sports shows and prime time

television serials and movies.
14

The armed forces are where they are because of the AVF. If

they want to retain high quality recruits, they have to treat

them well with pay and benefits for service. If the goal is to

make the military representative of the diversity in American

society, then the price must be paid for advertising, recruiting,

and monitoring the quality and progress of the recruits as they

become soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. Unfortunately,

this has become very expensive, and no end is in sight. There is

an ever-increasing desire to do more for those who serve--"to put

people first." Senior officer after senior officer begin their

speeches and addresses by assuring their various audiences that

they are, indeed, "people persons." But there is tradeoff between

providing a high quality style of life and comfortable living

conditions for troops, and developing and procuring modern

military equipment. We are in danger of caring more for the

quality of living conditions than we are the quality of the

rifles, and, in that, we may be losing sight of what is most

important for any military service.

So, were our concerns about the ability to field a top

quality AVF real? No. We have been very successful in recruiting

top quality people. We had little trouble accessing an

appropriate mix of race and gender within the services. Within a

few years of the introduction of the AVF, we had both a diverse

and a talented force. But then we became worried about upsetting

this trend.

First, we wanted to keep the quality of our people high. The

expense of inducing high quality recruits, however, meant that we

had to make do with fewer personnel. That forced us to select

only the best of a pool of good recruits, thus increasing the

quality of our recruits even more, especially among women. This

helped the services deal with the demographic trends between baby

boomers and their children. As the number of available people in

the population decreased, so did the number of people we

recruited. Now, however, the demographic trend is going in the

other direction, and the number of people available from the

general population is increasing. A larger pool of potential

recruits available to enter a downsizing military means quality

and selectivity will be high.

Second, the military has the tools to meet racial and gender

diversity goals. In many ways the armed forces have been more

successful than most other institutions in dealing with this

issue. The military is the one place where minorities in

leadership positions are not an anomaly. It is too early to

declare success in all issues involving women in the armed

forces, but great progress has been made by any objective

evaluation.
15

But representing society does not mean having the same

balance between race, ethnicity, and gender. There has been a

cost to the success of the AVF. It no longer recruits as many

"normal" folks, nor does it touch a large cross section of

people's lives. Consequently, the military is no longer an

institution with which most--even many--people can identify. And

because of this, I am worried that our armed forces will not

produce as many Al Gores, Bob Doles, Harry Trumans, or Dwight

Eisenhowers.3 To be sure, today's all volunteer force is a good

one. But to keep this quality up, each service is putting more

and more resources into providing better benefits. We also do a

great deal to make our people feel special through advertising

and training. But there is a price. When we go for only the

highest quality recruits, people who could benefit from military

service sometimes are left out. Ultimately we risk making our

armed forces less representative of American society.

Today, the armed forces are no longer representative of the

people they serve. More and more, enlisted as well as officers

are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the

society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force serving

a democracy.

Although isolated incidents, the medic who refused to serve

under United Nations command and the two Marines who declined to

provide DNA samples indicate the kinds of attitudes that are more

and more prevalent. Increasingly, members are trying to dictate

the terms of their service. They feel entitled to know what they

will be doing before they sign up. Service members demand to know

the what and why of the requirements put upon them by those in

command. It is almost as if the services are becoming unionized.

While paying more for the AVF and getting the quality people we

want, the services are paying a price in that the total

"commitment to serve" has devolved into service within specified

parameters. The debate over the proper use of force is a debate

that belongs in Congress and not in the barracks, enlisted and

officer clubs, nor even around the table in the briefing rooms at

higher headquarters. When one signs up for service in the armed

forces, he or she must be prepared to do whatever the government

decides is appropriate. Unfortunately, today too many people

throughout the armed forces believe they have both the right to

remain in the force and the right to specify where and how they

will serve.

There is reason to believe that this trend will continue.

This has not only to do with the quality of people we are taking

into the military, but also has to do with what we do with them

once they are a part of the force. The whole focus on quality of

life issues is important not just because it is expensive, but

because it is aimed at individuals, and because it is

increasingly dealt out in ways that reinforce the separation of
16

the military from society.

The external perception that the Clinton administration is

loaded with draft dodgers and people who are, at best, unfamiliar

with military service or, at worst, hostile towards it, has led

the administration to bend over backward to demonstrate its

support for the armed forces. To some extent, this effort is

misguided. Support for the troops has centered on initiatives

that increase the quality of life for military members--better

quarters, more pay, and additional services like day care centers

and more and better recreational facilities. But there is a trade

off. With increasingly limited resources, every dollar spent on

quality of life is not being spent on purchasing better weapons

and equipment. Dead in battle because one's weapon is obsolete

results in a very low quality of life.

Even more important, the tendency has been to direct quality

of life improvements toward bases and posts. This is

understandable since any politician who gets new houses built on

a military installation can claim he has provided a service to

his district. Along with better housing comes better schools and,

now, better child care facilities.

One of the unfortunate results of this trend is that

military people spend more and more time with other military

people. Consequently, they have less interaction with society.

Their children go to special schools which, in many cases, may be

better than those in the immediate area. Even if this is so, it

is not a healthy thing for the military to be distinct from its

society. It would be better to increase the stipends for these

service members so they can live in the outside community.

Otherwise, the risk is that our armed forces will become

increasingly isolated from the nation they serve. That separation

the military feels from society holds the potential for fostering

a sense of superiority.

So, beginning with the general effects of the AVF recruiting

something other than a cross-section of society, and adding in

the effects of housing and educating military families

separately, a problematic level of separation and distinction

arises. Military families mix well with each other, but not as

well with the general population. While it might be convenient to

have housing, child day care, education, and health care

facilities all in one place, especially when both adult members

of a family are in the military, there is the danger of creating

a totally separate society. Our inclination to hold our people to

higher ethical standards creates the dilemma of having them

believe that they do, in fact, embody a superior ethical and

moral code which makes them better than those outside the gate.

As we shrink the size of the armed forces while maintaining
17

the high quality of our forces, and at the same time encourage

them to turn inward, how can we ensure that they will not see

themselves as superior to the American people they serve? We need

to think hard about this because the more those in the ranks

think of themselves as elite, the less likely they are to be

concerned with the attitudes, needs, and demands of the nation.

There is a real problem when the armed forces do not respect the

values of the society at large. The recent troubles with hate

groups and skinheads could be, in part, attributable to this

dynamic. Superficial remedies, like banning Nazi flags or

watching for certain kinds of tatoos, address symptoms more than

causes.

The problem occurs more at the lower levels of the service

hierarchy than with the leadership. But if allowed to develop, it

will inevitably migrate upward. People are aware of the culture

of promotions and education in the military and what will and

will not be tolerated. If these attitudes develop among the

privates and lieutenants, they will inevitably develop among

sergeants and majors, and then among sergeants major and

colonels. When they reach the flag officer levels, there is

potentially a threat to civilian control.

So, how do we address and hopefully solve this problem? We

cannot and do not want to lower the quality of recruits because

this will lead to a lower quality military. While resurrecting

the draft is unrealistic, the fact is that when we had the draft,

it routinely brought in people who initially had little interest

in the military but who learned from their experiences.4

The first solution involves civilian attitudes toward the

military. Both the legislative and executive branches need to be

careful about their well-intentioned, though perhaps misguided,

tendencies to focus on the quality of life of the forces versus

everything else. Instead, they should focus on military

capabilities, their abilities to support national objectives, and

the military's commitment to serving the nation. In this sense,

supporting the military services by making sure they have the

best possible equipment and weapons would be more effective than

making sure they have luxurious quarters.

Decisions as to the quality of life in and on military

installations need to be made with a sensitivity toward the longrange attitudes of the force. The convenience of having homes,

schools, and child day care centers on post and on base have to

be balanced with the costs of reducing the interaction with

society. Instead of building newer and better facilities on base,

Congress and the civilian leadership of the armed forces should

work on providing adequate stipends for military families to live

outside the base, send their children to public schools, and

patronize community day care centers. Politicians ought not to
18

shy away from this issue. They might still benefit from infusing

the local economy because these service members will be buying

homes, paying property taxes to support education, using civilian

rather than government facilities, even theaters, bowling alleys,

and clubs.

Finally, the armed forces could benefit from a two-tiered

entry program at the enlisted level. The first tier would operate

the way it does now. But the second tier would provide a chance

for those who might not make the initial cut to improve

themselves. Perhaps they could enter into a special 2-year trial

enlistment in which they might be paid less and have fewer

guaranteed benefits, but successful completion would allow these

people to enter the first tier. In a sense, the services already

do this with the prep schools for the various academies.

Instituting a similar program for the enlisted ranks might

provide some solutions by increasing the chance that the services

will attain a cross-section of society and return people to

society who have benefitted from their military experiences.

Regardless, we need to focus sustained attention on this

issue. In policy terms, one challenge is to remedy the increasing

separation of the military from the society it serves. Within

each of our individual services, the challenge is to work on

attitudes to reinforce an understanding of who we are and what we

are. From private or airman to general, from apprentice seaman to

admiral, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have pride in

themselves and their services. But they must also be proud of

their service to the country and proud of the country that they

serve.

ENDNOTES

1. James Fallows, "What Did You Do In the Class War,

Daddy?," Washington Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 8, August 1975, pp. 5-

19.

2. According to Thomas C. Thayer, War Without Fronts: The

American Experience in Vietnam, Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

1985, p. 114, whites accounted for 87 percent of the American

combat deaths and blacks accounted for 12 percent. By comparison,

the national population of males of military age in 1973 was 13.5

percent black. The percentage of blacks in the U.S. armed forces

at the end of 1972 were 13.5 percent enlisted and 2.3 percent

officer.

3. Let me provide an example. A high school friend of mine

was a frequent visitor to misdemeanor court. After another late

night appearance, the judge (my father, a 23-year career Navy man

who enlisted at the age of 17) gave my buddy a choice: join the

Navy or go to jail. He opted for the Navy and served honorably
19

for 20 years, retiring as a warrant officer. When he returned to

our hometown, he bought a farm and forged a second career as a

productive and respected member of the community. In today's

environment, this man probably would not have been recruited into

the Navy because of his court record.

4. Each of the military services has, since the Vietnam War,

achieved a level of excellence unparalleled in the history of the

armed forces of the United States. Some have suggested that it

might be beneficial to direct some of their accomplishments to

the society at large. See Robert Hahn, "Soldier-Citizens: New

Roles for Military Officers in American Society," paper presented

at the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society,

Baltimore, MD, October 1995.
20

MILITARY RELUCTANCE TO INTERVENE IN LOW-LEVEL CONFLICTS:

A "CRISIS"?

Deborah D. Avant

When people write of the "crisis" in American civil-military

relations, they are referring to many different issues. One of

the most important is that advice by the military leadership

increasingly hinders civilian decisions to use force,

particularly in low-level conflicts. I think this argument is

misguided. While agreeing with the crisis literature that the

miliary's advice tends to be reticent, I think this is a problem

that reflects a lack of consensus among civilians rather than

military intransigence. Fur-thermore, I propose that the

reluctance can be ameliorated only in the event of civilian

agreement about the importance of low-level conflicts to national

security goals. Finally, absent that agreement, there may be some

policy benefits to military hesitation. Extending American

military force when the consensus for action is not high has

presented the United States with security disasters in the past.

While we do not want the military to determine security goals, if

military hesitancy makes civilian leaders think twice about

difficult commitments for which there is not domestic support

before the United States is involved, it may be a good thing.

In the ideal situation, the military acts as an agent of the

civilian leadership, and ultimately the electorate. In agency

relationships, there is always the potential that the agent's

interests may be different than his superiors. For example, in

the simplest terms, we can imagine a president, because he has to

balance many objectives, preferring to get the most bang for the

buck from the military; an individual military leader, however,

may prefer instead to get the most bucks for the organization.

Also, because the agent knows more about how he behaves when his

superiors are not looking and often knows more about the issue he

works on, he can often use his position to further his own

interests. Thus superiors must think hard about how to select

appropriate agents and monitor them to insure that they act as

intended.

The choices made by various superiors concerning how to

setup and monitor military organizations affect what kind of

agency problems are most likely to occur. Because civilian

leaders are also agents of their voters, political institutions

are an important factor in deciding how civilians will decide to

structure and monitor their militaries.1

 When civilian

institutions unify power over the control of the military in one

branch of government, civilians can exercise after the fact, or

ex post, checks to punish military indiscretions relatively free

from electoral costs.2 This often biases organizations to

anticipate civilian goals. When civilian institutions divide
21

power over the control of the military between a president and a

legislature--as in the United States--oversight becomes more

complicated.3 There are two reasons why this is true.

First, the different electoral structures for the president

and the Congress encourage disagreement between the institutions

over policy goals.4 When Congress wants the military to do one

thing and the president another, the military is likely to align

with the civilian preferences closest to its own. For example,

after the Civil War, military leaders sided with Congress because

both wanted a more activist reconstruction policy in the South.5

Second, and more often, disagreement between civilians can

take the form of distrust between the different branches of

government over the mechanisms by which to control the military.

So, even though the president and Congress may agree on what they

are telling the military to do, they may disagree about how to

best monitor and oversee the organizations. Mechanisms that work

well for the president may frustrate Congress. For example,

despite the general agreement with goals of John F. Kennedy's

"flexible response" doctrine, many members of Congress

disapproved of Robert McNamara's methods of oversight.6 This

disagreement allowed the Army greater discretion in interpreting

Kennedy's call for more preparation in counterinsurgency.

Aside from these broad outlines, theories about delegation

tell us to expect several patterns to emerge when multiple

civilians compete for control over the military. First, the

compromise that results often makes policy less efficient. So,

while civilians may get what they want in general, they may have

to pay too much, have to withstand delays, etc., and policy is

likely to contain more slack.

Second, when civilians disagree, the military has an

incentive to act strategically and play civilians off one another

in order to gain support for its own preferences.8 All things

being equal, military opinions are more influential when

civilians disagree on policy.

Finally, even regardless of the military's preferences,

policy will tend to be conservative when civilians disagree. When

civilians give military leaders competing signals about what is

acceptable and require specific procedures to ensure that their

preferences are reflected in policy, military leaders have

reasons to take small, but well-fortified steps.9

 For example, in

the post-Cold War period, American military organizations have

been asked to formulate plans for action in high risk areas,

plans for action that do not risk casualties, and plans that can

be undertaken in an era of reduced budgets. In specific

instances, there may be no plans that satisfy all these criteria.

But violating any one of them will bring the wrath of some
22

portion of Congress or the administration to the organization. In

these cases, we should expect military organizations to draw

conservative plans that specify their awareness of the various

civilian concerns in order to avoid blame after the fact.

In instances of divided civilian control, it is likely that

policy outcomes will reflect civilian preferences most closely

when civilians agree on policy goals. When they disagree on

objectives, military advice will be couched in such a way as to

reinforce the preferences of the civilians closest to the

military position. In this case, military advice will have

relatively more influence on outcomes. The tendency for civilian

leaders to rely on more confining procedures when they disagree

should lead the military to be more cautious about spelling out

the costs and benefits of policy options and having clear

criteria for success.10

Though space prevents an examination here, the cases to

which the crisis literature has pointed support this logic. In

Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, we tended to see military advice

becoming public only when Congress took a publicly different

stance from the president (the advice sometimes represented

presidential opinion and sometimes congressional). Congressional

articulation of conditions for intervention also prompted the

military to push for clear and achievable goals that took heed of

congressional conditions. Most importantly, in none of these

crises did military advice drive policy. Initial civilian

decisions against using force in Bosnia had more to do with

alliance concerns and domestic political concerns than military

reluctance. In the end, civilians decided to use force in Bosnia

and Haiti despite military reservations and concerns.11

The Costs and Benefits of Military Hesitancy.

The crisis literature claims that military reluctance has

constituted undue military influence on civilian decisions about

the use of force. I have argued that when civilian control is

divided and civilians disagree, we should expect the military to

have more influence (particularly if its advice is conservative),

and we should expect policy outcomes to be less efficient for any

particular civilian preference; thus the "crisis" claims are

overstated. It is nonetheless clear that military advice in

recent crises has generally reflected a reluctance to intervene

in low-level conflicts, and this reluctance has often frustrated

at least a portion of the civilian leadership. Is this military

reluctance a good thing?

Congressional scholars make competing arguments about the

benefits and costs of presidential (divided) vs. parliamentary

(united) governments. Presidential systems are held to create
23

unwieldy arrangements that do not allow countries to respond

effectively to the international system. Parliamentary systems

allow governments to respond quickly and efficiently. At the same

time, however, proponents of divided systems argue that they

guard against civilian indiscretion. Parliamentary systems

purchase efficiency at a cost--they increase the risk of civilian

errors.12

The crisis literature asserts that civilians have a right to

be wrong.13 With this claim, they may be reasoning in a similar

way to proponents of parliamentary systems. The framers of the

American Constitution, though, had significantly different

worries. Their concern in structuring American institutions was

to guard against civilian indiscretion--to make it harder for

mistaken policy to go forward.

Just because the American system is working the way the

framers intended does not make it right or best. The framers'

concerns, however, have shaped American institutions and should

be the starting point for realistic expectations about what we

can expect from civilian and military leaders in the United

States. Divided systems instill a set of behaviors and enforce

them with electoral risks. Indeed, the impact of the recent

conservative military advice is enhanced by its reflection of

public and congressional concerns about limited wars.14

Encouraging leaders to ignore electoral risks may lead the

country into policies that are unlikely to be sustained.

Certainly, one of the most important lessons of the Vietnam War

is that there are high costs to embarking on a policy that cannot

be continued in the long term. In other words, it may be a good

thing that the military is giving prudent advice before there is

broad agreement between the president and Congress (or even

between different Congress members or the public at large) about

what are U.S. national security goals. Until there is a general

consensus that the United States should be intervening in Bosnia,

or Haiti, or Cuba, or any one of a number of similar

contingencies that may arise, American interests (and the

interests of our allies) may be served well by military wariness.

Inaction may be frustrating, but action which only makes matters

worse by its failure or lack of completion can lead to wasted

resources, squandered lives, and institutional crises.

Barring constitutional reforms, there will always be more

slack in the American polity than in a more unified system. If we

want less slack, we need to focus our attention on the root

cause--lack of consensus among civilian leaders. Trying to remedy

an intermediary result--conservative advice from military

leaders--is unlikely to work and could lead to even worse policy

outcomes.
24

Conclusion.

Are the reluctant warriors out of control? Not quite.15 Their

conservatism makes sense as a response to the lack of consensus

among the civilian leadership in the United States about the

importance of low-level threats. The lack of consensus has been

affected by both the uncertainty of the international environment

and political institutions in the United States which encourage

disagreement. When civilians disagree, the United States'

institutional structure was designed to slow change. The system

is working as intended, and the way we should expect it to, short

of constitutional reform. Regardless, to the extent that there is

a problem with the nation's willingness to use force, it is not a

problem that will be solved by discouraging conservative military

advice. The solution to the problem is to generate civilian

consensus. Until the consensus about the conditions under which

responding to low-level threats is important to American

security, the military will not abandon its cautionary role.

ENDNOTES

1. Deborah D. GAvant, Political Institutions and Military

Change: Lessons From Peripheral Wars, Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1994; Terry Moe and Michael Caldwell, "The Institutional

Foundations of Democratic Government: A Comparison of

Presidential and Parliamentary Systems," Journal of Institutional

and Theoretical Economics, 150, No. 1, 1994, pp. 171-195; Terry

Moe, "The Politics of Structural Choice," in Oliver Williamson,

ed., Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and

Beyond, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

2. This is because military leaders cannot appeal to another

institutional branch, and there are thus fewer mechanisms by

which civilian choices are likely to be questioned, and fewer

electoral incentives to question leaders' incentives.

3. This logic can be extended to expect differences within

the legislative branch (between the Senate and the House), and,

at times, the judicial branch may be involved as well. The War

Powers Act has prompted much legal attention of late.

Representative Lowery sued President Reagan in 1983, Ron Dellums

sued President Bush in 1990. See David Locke Hall, The Reagan

Years: A Constitutional Perspective on War Powers and the

Presidency, Boulder: Westview Press, 1991; Harold Koh,

"Presidential War and Congressional Consent: The Law Professor's

Memorandum in Dellums v. Bush," Stanford Journal Law, Vol. 27,

Spring 1991, pp. 247-264.

4. See Moe, "The Politics of Structural Choice."

Congressional interest in defense policy depends on the
25

importance of defense policy for congressional electoral

prospects. See also, Avant, Political Institutions and Military

Change, Chap. 2.

5. See Harold Hyman, "Johnson, Stanton, and Grant, American

Historical Review, Vol. 65, 1960; Benjamin Thomas and Harold

Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War,

New York: Knopf, 1962, pp. 85-100; Russell F. Weigley, A History

of the United States Army, Bloomington: University of Indiana

Press, Chap. 12.

6. Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War

Crises, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 edition, p. 44.

7. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change.

8. Terry Moe, "An Assessment of the Positive Theory of

Congressional Dominance," Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12,

No. 4, November 1987, pp. 475-520.

9. See Mathew McCubbins and Benjamin Page, "A Theory of

Congressional Delegation," in Mathew McCubbins and Terry

Sullivan, eds., Congress: Structure and Policy, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987; and McNollgast, "Administrative

Procedures as Instruments of Political Control," Journal of Law,

Economics, and Organizations, Vol. 6, 1987.

10. By conservatism, I mean prudence and not ideological

tendencies. Charles Cochran and Eloise Malone, "A Comparison of

Naval Academy Plebes and College Freshmen Over 20 Years: 1974-

1994," paper presented at the Biennial International Conference

of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society,

October 20-22, 1995.

11. There were those in the military that supported the use

of military force in Bosnia, most prominently, USAF Chief of

Staff General Merrill A. McPeak.

12. See Maurice Durverger, "Which is the Best Electoral

System?" in Arend Lijphart and Bernard Grofman, eds., Choosing an

Electoral System, New York: Praeger, 1984; Arend Lijphart and

Bernard Grofman, Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, New York: Agathon, 1986; Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of

Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Matthew Shugart and John

Carey demonstrate that there are many intermediary systems and

that number of parties, length of terms, electoral systems, and

many other variables mediate these issues of basic constitutional

design. This is argued in Matthew Shugart and John Carey,

Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral

Dynamics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
26

13. Peter Feaver, "Civilian Control of the Military:

American Civil-Military Relations in Theory and Practice," paper

presented at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political

Science Association, April 18-20, 1996, Chicago, IL.

14. Russell Weigley has long argued that it is difficult for

the American military to pursue limited wars. This phenomenon has

less to do with whether civilian leaders are in control and more

to do with the electoral context within which leaders operate.

15. Even Richard Kohn agrees that "out of control" did not

accurately characterize his argument. See "An Exchange on CivilMilitary Relations," The National Interest, Summer, 1994, pp. 21-

31.
27

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ADMIRAL STANLEY R. ARTHUR (USN, RETIRED) was Vice Chief of Naval

Operations when he retired in 1995. He is now the Vice President

for Navy Systems at Lockheed-Martin and Chairman of the Board of

the Association of Naval Aviation. Admiral Arthur commanded

Attack Squadron 164 and flew more than 500 combat missions during

the Vietnam War. He was captain of the aircraft carrier USS Coral

Sea, commanded Carrier Group Seven, and then the Seventh Fleet.

During Operation DESERT STORM, Admiral Arthur served as

Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, the largest U.S.

naval armada assembled since World War II.

DEBORAH D. AVANT is Assistant Professor of Political Science in

the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington

University. She is the author of Political Institutions and

Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars, published by

Cornell University Press in 1994. Her forthcoming article, "Are

the Reluctant Warriors Out of Control?", will be published in

Security Studies. Professor Avant earned her B.A., M.A., and

Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at San Diego.

VINCENT DAVIS is the Patterson Chair Professor at the University

of Kentucky's Patterson School of Diplomacy and International

Commerce. He is the author, coauthor, and/or editor of a dozen

books and hundreds of shorter works. Dr. Davis has held teaching

and/or research positions at Princeton, Dartmouth, the Graduate

School of International Studies, the Naval War College, and the

Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is a member of

the Council on Foreign Relations and also the International

Institute for Strategic Studies. He is a retired Naval Reserve

captain with a total of 34 years of commissioned service which

included assignments as an intelligence officer and naval

aviator. He earned his B.A. at Vanderbilt University and his

M.A., M.P.A., and Ph.D. at Princeton University.

@NOINDENTBODY = DON M. SNIDER is the Olin Distinguished

Visiting Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S.

Military Academy at West Point, where he is on leave from his

regular position as Director of Political-Military Studies at the

Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC.

Dr. Snider served three tours in Vietnam as a combat infantryman

and later served as Director for Defense Policy on the National

Security Council Staff in the White House during the Reagan and

Bush administrations. He retired from the Army with the rank of

colonel. Dr. Snider holds M.A. degrees in both economics and

public policy from the University of Wisconsin. He earned his

Ph.D. in international politics from the University of Maryland.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Richard A. Chilcoat

Commandant

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STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

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Colonel Richard H. Witherspoon

Director of Research

Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr.

Author

Dr. Don M. Snider

Director of Publications and Production

Ms. Marianne P. Cowling

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Mrs. Devona A. Peck

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

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Cover Artist

Mr. James E. Kistler