AMERICAN CIVIL-MILITARY REL ATIONS (original) (raw)
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Saving Samuel Huntington and the Need for Pragmatic Civil–Military Relations
How the U.S. military establishment interacts with other parts of the American government and the people impacts American national power. Because civil–military relationships are influenced by the context of the environment and the ''kind of war'' being waged, there are a variety of ways that military and civilian leaders can work together to improve the nation's security. This article proposes an alternative civil–military relations model called pragmatic civilian control. It integrates Samuel Huntington's objective civilian control theory with traditional American political philosophy and concepts established by Morris Janowitz, while accounting for current geopolitical conditions.
The Military and Domestic Politics: A Concordance Theory of Civil-Military Relations
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Rebecca Schiff's academic work is known for her well organized and skillfully analyzed in the field of military studies and civil-military relations. She is well known political scientist and received her doctorate from University of Chicago. She works as a council member for the inter-university seminar on Armed Forces and Society. She also teaches at the US Naval War College and currently a research fellow at the Swedish National Defense College, Stockholm. Since the start of her doctorate, she took keen interest in analyzing civil-military relationship among countries in North America, Latin America, Middle East and South Asia. This book mainly revolves around Concordance theory which posits has enriched the research in the field of civil-military relationship, as previously, civil-military research was confined to theory of separation that was predominantly a Western approach of understanding civil and military affairs of the state.
The irrelevance of International Relations theory to the conduct of foreign policy has received renewed attention since 9/11. Though lamented by a few, this state of affairs has been on the whole lauded by a profession by now unreflexively committed to evaluating the degree of "originality" of any academic research on one criteria only: its degree of policy irrelevance. Much less has been written on the irrelevance of civil-military relations theory for the conduct of military policy -and for a good reason: outside of military circles, few people are even aware of the existence of this obscure sub-field which has been an intellectual backwater for the past generation. If you like the proverbial insularity of IR theory, you have to love the intellectual inbreeding permeating a field cultivated by two dozen practitioners mono-maniacally obsessed with the "civilian control of the military," and who keep plowing their ever-shrinking plot seemingly unaware of the law of diminishing returns.
Discovering the Fault Lines in American Civil–Military Relations
This essay is in response to Thomas Crosbie and Meredith Kleykamp's article that investigates relationships between what they consider to be three fault lines in the American military profession: ethical lapses, expertise, and identity. As they explore the literature to contemplate how professionalism might help to prevent ethical lapses, they also seek to reveal relationships between lapses, military expertise, and identity. To enhance the relevance of their research, it is recommended that they examine ethical lapses more broadly. Their core subject is American civil–military relations, which is a complex, contentious, and often ambiguous topic. They can mitigate the ambiguity by developing a clear problem statement and a set of research assumptions. In addition, because not all lapses are treated the same, they can be categorized to identify more serious lapses, which will allow for a focused examination of institutional responses to the lapses. Also, integrating other academic approaches such as political science and history into their research will improve the theoretical and explanatory power of their investigation. Adopting these and other aspects of inquiry will support the testing of their six hypotheses and improve our understanding of the military profession.
Pursuing Civilian Control Over the Military
This essay is responding to Dr. Ionut Popescu's review of the article " Saving Samuel Huntington and the Need for Pragmatic Civil-Military Relations. " He challenges the pragmatist outlook by questioning its usefulness to " manage relations between the military and its civilian superiors in a democracy such as the United States. " Based on the concerns of Morris Janowitz regarding military relations, three assertions are made in defense of the pragmatic approach. First, the choice between " professional versus civilian supremacy " for making crucial decisions during wartime is misleading because it is based on obsolete thinking from the twentieth-century Cold War. Second, types of wars waged are determined by complex and provisional decision-making processes amid political struggle. Third, Huntington's civil–military theory wrongly maligns the word " politics " by distorting its meaning and purpose. Politics is a natural process and an essential feature of democracy.
Dereliction of Duty Redux?: Post-Iraq American Civil-Military Relations Spring 2008 | 217
The protracted war in Iraq has exacerbated existing tensions and dysfunctional elements inherent in American civil-military relations. Many in the national security community were worried that civil-military relations were far from satisfactory well before the war. 1 For too long this dimension of ''the American way of war'' had been allowed to drift without resolution. The Iraq conflict could result in a further deterioration in this crucial component of strategic effectiveness due to mutual ''scapegoating, blame-avoiding and willful institutional refusal to recognize and act on the sources of defeat.'' 2 This essay explores the current precarious nature of civil-military relations in this country. It also explores the emergence of a ''stab in the back'' thesis among the military community, and various issues raised by the ongoing Long War. Based on this evaluation, the article concludes with some proposals to remedy or lessen the strains that exist today. These remedies seek to better define the compact and code of conduct that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy and the dedicated servants we ask to carry out those policies.
Annual Review of Political Science, 1999
▪ Who will guard the guardians? Political scientists since Plato have sought to answer this, the central question of the civil-military relations subfield. Although civil-military relations is a very broad subject, encompassing the entire range of relationships between the military and civilian society at every level, the field largely focuses on the control or direction of the military by the highest civilian authorities in nation-states. This essay surveys political science's contribution to our understanding of civil-military relations, providing a rough taxonomy for cataloguing the field and discussing the recent renaissance in the literature as well as fruitful avenues for future research. The essay focuses on theoretical developments, slighting (for reasons of space) the many case studies and empirical treatments that have also made important contributions to our knowledge.