Civil-Military Relations and Shared Responsibility
Civil-Military Relations and Shared Responsibility

Author: Dale R. Herspring

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1421409291

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A provocative approach to evaluating civil-military relations. Dale R. Herspring considers the factors that allow some civilian and military organizations to operate more productively in a political context than others, bringing into comparative study for the first time the military organizations of the U.S., Russia, Germany, and Canada. Refuting the work of scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington and Michael C. Desch, Civil-Military Relations and Shared Responsibility approaches civil-military relations from a new angle, military culture, arguing that the optimal form of civil-military relations is one of shared responsibility between the two groups. Herspring outlines eight factors that contribute to conditions that promote and support shared responsibility among civilian officials and the military, including such prerequisites as civilian leaders not interfering in the military's promotion process and civilian respect for military symbols and traditions. He uses these indicators in his comparative treatment of the U.S., Russian, German, and Canadian militaries. Civilian authorities are always in charge and the decision on how to treat the military is a civilian decision. However, Herspring argues, failure by civilians to respect military culture will antagonize senior military officials, who will feel less free to express their views, thus depriving senior civilian officials, most of whom have no military experience, of the expert advice of those most capable of assessing the far-reaching forms of violence. This issue of civilian respect for military culture and operations plays out in Herspring's country case studies. Scholars of civil-military relations will find much to debate in Herspring's framework, while students of civil-military and defense policy will appreciate Herspring's brief historical tour of each countries' post–World War II political and policy landscapes.

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.

US Civil-Military Relations After 9/11
US Civil-Military Relations After 9/11

Author: Mackubin Thomas Owens

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2011-01-27

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 144118306X

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A thorough survey of the key issues that surround the relations between the military and its civilian control in the US today.

Armed Servants
Armed Servants

Author: Peter Feaver

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9780674036772

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How do civilians control the military? In the wake of September 11, the renewed presence of national security in everyday life has made this question all the more pressing. In this book, Peter Feaver proposes an ambitious new theory that treats civil-military relations as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive monitoring the actions of military agents, the armed servants of the nation-state. Military obedience is not automatic but depends on strategic calculations of whether civilians will catch and punish misbehavior. This model challenges Samuel Huntington's professionalism-based model of civil-military relations, and provides an innovative way of making sense of the U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War experience--especially the distinctively stormy civil-military relations of the Clinton era. In the decade after the Cold War ended, civilians and the military had a variety of run-ins over whether and how to use military force. These episodes, as interpreted by agency theory, contradict the conventional wisdom that civil-military relations matter only if there is risk of a coup. On the contrary, military professionalism does not by itself ensure unchallenged civilian authority. As Feaver argues, agency theory offers the best foundation for thinking about relations between military and civilian leaders, now and in the future.

Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations
Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations

Author: Lionel Beehner

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-11-16

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0197535496

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This book explores contemporary civil-military relations in the United States. Much of the canonical literature on civil-military relations was either written during or references the Cold War, while other major research focuses on the post-Cold War era, or the first decade of the twenty-first century. A great deal has changed since then. This book considers the implications for civil-military relations of many of these changes. Specifically, it focuses on factors such as breakdowns in democratic and civil-military norms and conventions; intensifying partisanship and deepening political divisions in American society; as well as new technology and the evolving character of armed conflict. Chapters are organized around the principal actors in civil-military relations, and the book includes sections on the military, civilian leadership, and the public. It explores the roles and obligations of each. The book also examines how changes in contemporary armed conflict influence civil-military relations. Chapters in this section examine the cyber domain, grey zone operations, asymmetric warfare and emerging technology. The book thus brings the study of civil-military relations into the contemporary era, in which new geopolitical realities and the changing character of armed conflict combine with domestic political tensions to test, if not potentially redefine, those relations.

The Routledge Handbook of Civil-military Relations
The Routledge Handbook of Civil-military Relations

Author: Thomas C. Bruneau

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0415782732

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The Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations not only fills this important lacuna, but offers an up-to-date comparative analysis which identifies three essential components in civil-military relations: (1) democratic civilian control; (2) operational effectiveness; and (3) the efficiency of the security institutions. This Handbook will be essential reading for students and practitioners in the fields of civil-military relations.