Civil-Military Relations From Vietnam To Operation Iraqi Freedom
Civil-Military Relations From Vietnam To Operation Iraqi Freedom

Author: Major Brandon L. DeWind

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2015-11-06

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 1786250071

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The end of the Cold War did not bring about the grand peace that was hoped for during four decades. Instead, the world has become more dangerous, with multiple complex problems. Military institutions worldwide must learn to adapt to the ever-changing face of the threat to fight the Global War on Terror. Services can no longer look within their own ranks to accomplish the mission; all operations must be joint in order to succeed in the contemporary operating environment. This monograph traces the thread between civil-military relations during two times of war for the U.S. The military must know what the civilian leadership requires and must, in return, articulate a clear path to achieve it, if feasible. The U.S. military never lost a battle in Vietnam and yet that conflict is looked upon as an American defeat. The war in Iraq began to look like a repeat performance. The military was clearly winning engagements on the battlefield but the talk at home, in the media, was of a “quagmire” and “stagnation” (two terms used to describe Vietnam) and ultimately, of defeat. Although this monograph uses two snapshots in time of civil-military relations, the significance of its findings apply, in general, to all students interested in civil-military relations, as well as decision making. Whether looking at times of war or peace, civil-military relations play a significant role in all matters pertaining to the running of our military; the decisions made by our civilian leadership can influence even the smallest facets of military life.

Managing Transitions
Managing Transitions

Author: U. S. Military

Publisher:

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 9781520599083

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This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. This study provides a comparative analysis of the US Army's post-Vietnam transformation with an examination of the Army's recent transformation during the initial phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The research will identify those senior leaders whose constructive and positive civil-military relations enabled their service in managing transformation, which created agile and adaptive teams that were capable of adjusting to change. Additionally, effective transformation was built with sound doctrinal underpinning that informed the organizational structure and training initiatives that endured through the next war. The results of this monograph will show that the senior leaders who managed the post-Vietnam transformation were more effective in managing the reform efforts than the leaders who managed the defense transformation efforts in the early part of the Twenty-first Century. The post-Vietnam reform was developed with a solid doctrinal underpinning that informed the organizational structure and training initiatives that endured through the duration of the transformation and were implemented during the next war. The initiatives were built in a mutually supporting manner, which reduced multiple adjustments and kept the cost down as the Army completed the transformation. In contrast, the defense transformation of 2003 contained dysfunctional civil-military relations that consisted of micromanagement and an over-reliance to transform at all cost. In that environment, the Army failed to refine the capabilities-based network-centric doctrine to reflect the changing nature of war in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. The flawed doctrine contributed to the continued investment and mismanagement of reforms like Future Combat System (FCS), Modularity and Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN). The impact of the mismanagement of the recent transformation led to the Army paying a 400 percent increase in readiness and a loss of $480 billion dollars from FCS cancellations, and oscillations of force structure within the modular design.

Military Advice and Civil-Military Relations
Military Advice and Civil-Military Relations

Author: Douglas W. Bennett

Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub

Published: 2012-09-16

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 9781479329472

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As the United States leads the world into the 21st Century, military leaders must gain and maintain the trust of the President and the Secretary of Defense by understanding and influencing the manifold variables that affect the civil-military relationship in order for their advice to be considered towards the goal of maximizing the security of the nation. This monograph examined three of the variables that impact the civil-military relationship with regard to understanding how military advice is received by civilian leadership – combat military experience of civilian leaders, political expertise of military leaders, and service parochialism –and examined them in the context of the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The lack military experience of civilian leaders did not detract from the military security of the nation with respect to operational combat, and by extension, from the health of civil-military relations. The conclusion about political expertise in military leaders is not as definitive and is dependent on the characterization of the conflict involved. Service parochialism is a factor of the civilian leaders' receptiveness to military advice. The military leaders need to be aware of this factor in order for their advice to be heard and considered in the formulation of national policy for military operations. In the aggregate, politicians will only hear and listen to military leaders if several things manifest themselves simultaneously. First, regardless of the civilian leadership's experience in the military, the political administration must respect military culture as suggested by Herspring. Second, military leaders must have political experience to understand the ancillary functions of irregular warfare as recommended by Janowitz. Finally, there must exist a service culture that is divided enough to offer different opinions and alternatives, but not so divisive that it appears ineffectual and incoherent as indicated by Feaver.

War and Media Operations
War and Media Operations

Author: Thomas Rid

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-02-15

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1134116861

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This is the first academic analysis of the role of embedded media in the 2003 Iraq War, providing a concise history of US military public affairs management since Vietnam.In late summer 2002, the Pentagon considered giving the press an inside view of the upcoming invasion of Iraq. The decision was surprising, and the innovative "embedded media prog

Success and Failure in Limited War
Success and Failure in Limited War

Author: Spencer D. Bakich

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 022610785X

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Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

The Pentagon and the Presidency
The Pentagon and the Presidency

Author: Dale R. Herspring

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2005-03-04

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0700614915

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While presidents have always kept a watchful eye on the military, our generals have been equally vigilant in assessing the commander-in-chief. Their views, however, have been relatively neglected in the literature on civil-military relations. By taking us inside the military's mind in this matter, Dale Herspring's new book provides a path-breaking, utterly candid, and much-needed reassessment of a key relationship in American government and foreign policymaking. As Herspring reminds us, that relationship has often been a very tense, even extremely antagonistic one, partly because the military has become a highly organized and very effective bureaucratic interest group. Reevaluating twelve presidents-from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush-Herspring shows how the intensity of that conflict depends largely on the military's perception of the president's leadership style. Quite simply, presidents who show genuine respect for military culture are much more likely to develop effective relations with the military than those who don't. Each chapter focuses on one president and his key administrators--such as Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and Donald Rumsfeld-and contains case studies showing how the military reacted to the president's leadership. In the final chapter, Herspring ranks the presidents according to their degree of conflict with the military: Lyndon Johnson received exceedingly low marks for being overbearing and dismissive of the armed forces, further aggravating his Vietnam problem. George H. W. Bush inspired respect for not micromanaging military affairs. And Bill Clinton was savaged both privately and publicly by military leaders for having been a "draft dodger," cutting Pentagon spending, and giving the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" tag an unnecessarily high profile. From World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Herspring clearly shows how the nature of civilian control has changed during the past half century. He also reveals how the military has become a powerful bureaucratic interest group very much like others in Washington-increasingly politicized, media-savvy, and as much accountable to Congress as to the commander-in-chief. Ultimately, The Pentagon and the Presidency illuminates how our leaders devise strategies for dealing with threats to our national security-and how the success of that process depends so much upon who's in charge and how that person's perceived by our military commanders.