Democracy, Security, and the problems with labelling the military as a profession (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Military Professionalism for the Changing Armed Forces, 2020
Since Huntington (1957), the understanding of the officer corps and the relationship between the armed forces and society has drawn upon the wider theoretical literature of professions. Over time, however, both theoretical advances (e.g., development of more conflictual theoretical models) and societal changes (e.g., declining autonomy of professions from the state and markets, competition over jurisdictional domains with other types of vocations) have impacted the explanatory power and suitability of employing the theoretical concept of professions to the study of contemporary militaries. Recently, Eyal and Pok (2015) have provided a review of the literature on professions and its pitfalls as well as an alternative conceptual framework. Although they have demonstrated its utility in the study of the security domain, their research discussed neither the military nor the officer corps. This paper draws on Eyal and Pok's review of the evolution of the concept of professions and adapts their alternative framework to the military profession. Keywords Sociology • Military professionalism • Professionalism • Military profession • Professions The current chapter is based on study conducted in the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI), and was financed by Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca [2014 BP_B 00147 (AGAUR)]. An earlier version of the core of this chapter was published as the theoretical part of Libel (2019).
ANALYSING NORMATIVE AND TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF MILITARY PROFESSIONALISM
: In democratic regimes, military subordination to civilian rule is a vital requirement. The civil-military relations (CMR) field of political science has been created to achieve and maintain that purpose. Yet the question of what military professionalism is still does not have a universally accepted answer. After Samuel Huntington published his highly inspirational landmark work The Soldier and the State (Huntington, 1957), CMR scholars started heated debates to create a certain and comprehensive theory of professionalism that would be eligible for all case studies, but none of these attempts has been completely successful. In his influential theory, Huntington (1957) defined military professionalism as a moral code which would prevent officers from pursuing political interests and oblige them to obey civilian rule (p. 158). That approach has been a criterion and a so-called goal for the Western militaries to reach since the Cold War. Having said that, in several cases, professionalism could not deter militaries from praetorian acts (Huntington, 1957, pp. 60–61). Hence, this paper will make a general analysis of military professionalism in the CMR literature. While doing this analysis, the paper will look for the answers to certain questions. What is the relationship between military culture and military professionalism? What are the normative and technical dimensions of military professionalism?
Fault Lines of the American Military Profession
Over the past decade, the American armed services have witnessed a near-constant stream of so-called ethical lapses. Spanning rank, specialty, and service, these " lapses " have given rise to a flood of criticism by journalists and piercing calls for reform from politicians. In response, American military leaders have pointed to the paired concepts of profession and professionalism as the solution. In this article, we use classical conceptualizations of the military profession to resituate the problem of ethical lapses as instead one of the three fault lines of the contemporary American military profession, unfolding alongside crises in military expertise and identity. The three fault lines reveal at once the large scale of the challenges facing the American armed services and our very limited social scientific understanding of those problems. We end by emphasizing the need for future research to establish an updated empirical baseline for theories of the military profession in America. Over the past decade, the American armed services have witnessed a near-constant stream of so-called ethical lapses from the abuse of detainees by enlistees to cheating on nuclear power training exams by junior officers to drunken and disorderly behavior by general and flag staff officers. Spanning rank, specialty, and service, these
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.
Democracy, the Armed Forces and Military Deployment: The ‚Second Social Contract' is on the Line
This report deals with the tensions that the 'second social contract'-the relations between society, government, and the armed forces-has increasingly been confronted with in the context of military deployment. Contents 1. Introduction: democracy, the armed forces and military deployment: a problematic relationship 2. Democracy and its armed forces: the 'second social contract' 3. Democratic checks on the military and deployment decisions 3.1 Democratic checks on the military 3.2 Democratic checks on deployment decisions 4. The new challenges and changes facing democratic soldier profiles 4.1 The transformation of the international system and new tasks for the armed forces 4.2 The transformation of the armed forces 4.3 Consequences of the transformation on military-democracy relations 5. Policy answers to heightened deployment risks 5.1 Attempts at military risk minimization 5.2 Repression and avoidance rhetoric 5.3 Democratic society and armed forces: a growing gap? 6. Conclusions and recommendations Bibliography 2 This report draws upon the results of three large research projects conducted by PRIF within its program "Antinomies of Democratic Peace". "Kriege von Demokratien nach 1990" (Wars by Democracies after 1990, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) investigated the decision-making processes in seven Western democracies in favour or against participation in military operations. "Democracies and the 'Revolution of Military Affairs'" studied the integration of new technologies within the armed forces of six democracies and one non-democracy. "The Image of the Democratic Soldier" (sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation) examined the shift in the conception of the soldier in twelve democracies, including six younger democratic systems in Eastern Europe. We also draw upon the results of the large-n study "Parliamentary Control of Military Missions in Western Democracies", a DSF-sponsored project. These projects, aimed at fundamental research, each attempted to comprehend the occurrences in our own country, utilizing empirical comparison with other countries.
THE MILITARY MUST FIND ITS VOICE
To say that the strategic landscape remains unsettled would be an understatement.1 In the brief period since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has fought one major war (Iraq), performed numerous "non-traditional" humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, struggled to adjust to a variety of social demands such as the full integration of women and gays in the ranks, and at the same time attempted to prepare for the twenty-first century. What is more, the armed services have been asked to do all this within the worst budgetary environment in fifty years. As a result, the U.S. military faces a dilemma: how to respond to the uncertainties of the new domestic and strategic landscapes, maintain a healthy relationship with American civil society, and yet retain its core raison d'être, which is to deter or win war against the nation's enemies. The American military faced similar dilemmas after the Civil War and World War I, for a brief time after World War II, and following the Vietnam War. 1 At least one lesson clearly emerged from those experiences: the military profession dare not withdraw into an ethical cocoon and take on a defensive posture. Instead, it must make a prudent and positive response to the travails imposed on it and not shrink from articulating its views in the public square. In short, senior military officers must reshape the very notion of military professionalism by candidly admitting the impact of politics on the military's ability to do its job and daring to practice constructive political engagement. This would appear to violate the sacred code of silence by which the U.S. military is strictly apolitical, offers technical advice only, and goes out of its way to honour the principle of civilian control. But only through constructive political engagement can military professionals legitimate their role in policy debates, mark a clear boundary between defence policy and merely partisan politics, and provide the American public with a clearer understanding of military life and culture. Nor are constructive political engagement and loyalty to the country, civilian leadership, and the Constitution in any way incongruous. Indeed, such constructive political engagement, far from threatening to make the military an independent actor, presupposes that the military is dependent upon a variety of political actors and the public at large. It is because the U.S. military is under such tight civilian control that it needs to make its voice heard in civilian councils. Any number of issues might fall within the scope of constructive political engagement, but the two most critical are the so-called democratization of the military (the convergence or divergence between the military and society) and the problematical utility of military force in the foreign policy contingencies of the century to come. These issues are interconnected and have a profound impact on the military's operational effectiveness. To be sure, it has been an article of faith among military professionals and civilians alike that a wall exists in America between the military and politics. But that faith is not only historically invalid, it denies current reality. The American domestic landscape and the international strategic landscape are, and have always been, politically and militarily inextricable, while the use of military force has always been shaped by political considerations. If the skill, wisdom, and experience residing in our officers corps are to be tapped by our national leadership, the military profession itself must be philosophically broadened and encouraged to involve itself judiciously in the policy arena. 2 This would include the development of a more comprehensive view of politics, greater sensitivity to the realities underpinning the American political system, and more assertive presentation of the military viewpoint within the parameters of American democracy. Nothing makes the point more eloquently than the Vietnam War, the mismanagement of which forced military professionals, especially in the army, to go through an agonizing reappraisal of the meaning of the military profession. 3 In the broader policy arena, the failure of senior military leaders to speak out with a realistic military perspective on that war provides an enduring lesson for military professionals. 4 Recently, the role of the chiefs of staff in the decision to go to war in Vietnam and in its conduct has been studied by H. R. McMaster and found 1 See, for example, C. Robert Kemble, The Image of the Army Officer in America: Background for Current Views (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973);
Beyond the Problematic of Legitimacy: Military Influences on Civilian Society
Boundary 2-an International Journal of Literature and Culture, 2005
The various relations between the military and technology are best discussed at a level intermediate between the micro-level of the individual and the macrolevel of society as a whole. The mesolevel, as this intermediate dimension may be called, contains a variety of entities, from rural communities to institutional organizations, and from neighborhoods to cities, in which technologies range from the personal wrist-watch to the urban transit system. But of all these intermediate entities, organizations are of particular importance. This is true not only because when one speaks of "the military" one is actually referring to a complex population of organizations, specialized to fight on land, air, or sea, but more importantly because the influence that these organizations may have on civilian technology is often effected through changes in civilian organizations leading to particular uses of technology. In this essay I will concentrate on these organizational influences, and not as much on the technologies themselves. We must therefore start with the theory of organizations.