Military Politics: New Perspectives [1 ed.] 9781805390244

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Breach, Neglect, Guidance
Part I. New Theoretical Perspectives
Chapter 1. What Is Military Politics?
Chapter 2. Rethinking Clausewitz’s Chameleon
Part II. New Perspectives on Senior Officership
Chapter 3. Military Contrarianism
Chapter 4. Embedded in Politics
Chapter 5. Civil-Military Challenges and the Militia
Chapter 6. Strategic Civil-Military Relations: Tomorrow’s Generals’ Views on Dissent, Disobedience, and Principled Resignation
Part III. Military Politics and Military Operations
Chapter 7. Military Politics on the Battlefield
Chapter 8. Begging Permission, Asking Forgiveness
Chapter 9. Judges on the Battlefield?
Chapter 10. Small Powers’ Civil-Military Relations
Conclusion. Military Politics as Research Program
Index

Citation preview

Military Politics

Military Politics Series Editor: Thomas Crosbie, Royal Defence College Scholars and practitioners alike are increasingly aware of the need to rethink the role played by militaries in politics. The normative positions we have inherited from the past sixty years of civil-military relations scholarship are neither theoretically compelling nor do they serve the pressing needs of practitioners. Indeed, the most characteristic concern of the field—to keep officers out of politics—is not only unrealistic but undesirable. This book series explores the ways in which militaries shape and are shaped by their political environments, rejecting both the possibility that militaries can be isolated from politics and the belief that politics somehow pollutes the purity of the military profession. Instead, these books, drawing from an emerging interdisciplinary field of research, focus on productive aspects of military political dynamics within and between states. Volume 1 Military Politics: New Perspectives Edited by Thomas Crosbie

Military Politics New Perspectives

+ Edited by THOMAS CROSBIE

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Thomas Crosbie

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crosbie, Thomas (Writer on military affairs), editor. Title: Military politics : new perspectives / Thomas Crosbie, [editor]. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Military politics ; volume 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023004660 (print) | LCCN 2023004661 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390237 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390244 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Armed Forces—Political activity. | Civil-military relations. Classification: LCC U21.5 .M4987 2023 (print) | LCC U21.5 (ebook) | DDC 322/.5—dc23/eng/20230508 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004660 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004661

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-023-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-024-4 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390237

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction. Breach, Neglect, Guidance Thomas Crosbie

1

Part I. New Theoretical Perspectives Chapter 1. What Is Military Politics? Thomas Crosbie Chapter 2. Rethinking Clausewitz’s Chameleon: Is It Time for Western Militaries to Abandon the Idea of War’s Immutable Nature? Anders Theis Bollmann and Søren Sjøgren

19

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Part II. New Perspectives on Senior Officership Chapter 3. Military Contrarianism: The Case of Israel Yagil Levy Chapter 4. Embedded in Politics: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Its Chairman, and the Structure of US Civil-Military Relations Sharon K. Weiner Chapter 5. Civil-Military Challenges and the Militia James D. Campbell Chapter 6. Strategic Civil-Military Relations: Tomorrow’s Generals’ Views on Dissent, Disobedience, and Principled Resignation Steven Lee Katz

73

92 117

132

Part III. Military Politics and Military Operations Chapter 7. Military Politics on the Battlefield: Strategy and Effectiveness at War Carrie A. Lee

165

vi

Contents

Chapter 8. Begging Permission, Asking Forgiveness: Wearing Two Hats in Multilateral Military Operations Stephen M. Saideman

186

Chapter 9. Judges on the Battlefield? Judicial Observer Effects in US and UK National Security Policies Lena Trabucco

201

Chapter 10. Small Powers’ Civil-Military Relations: Two Smoking Guns Carsten Roennfeldt

220

Conclusion. Military Politics as Research Program Thomas Crosbie

246

Index

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Illustrations

Tables 1.1. EVLN categories and military-political activities. © Thomas Crosbie.

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6.1. Survey sample demographics. © Steven Lee Katz.

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Figures 3.1. Scope of contrarianism. © Yagil Levy.

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6.1. Response options and anticipated impact on civil-military relations. © Steven Lee Katz.

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6.2. Civil-military incident timeline. © Steven Lee Katz.

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6.3. Response to jus ad bellum hypotheticals. © Steven Lee Katz.

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6.4. Response to jus in bello hypotheticals. © Steven Lee Katz.

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6.5. Response to jus post bellum hypotheticals. © Steven Lee Katz.

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6.6. Military politics among the dominant CMR frameworks. © Steven Lee Katz.

156

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by the hard work and dedication of many people, foremost among them being the authors of the chapters, as well as the team from Berghahn Books who supported this book and the series to which it belongs. This includes Tom Bonnington and Anthony Mason. Thanks as well to the anonymous reviewers and to Martin Munch Bargmann for his assistance with editing the text. Productive discussions on the topics in this volume were originally discussed at a series of meetings of scholars and high-level practitioners (civilian and military alike) in Copenhagen, Denmark, in November 2021. Special thanks are owed to the participants and attendees of those meetings, in particular our keynote speaker Risa Brooks (whose work inspired so many of the chapters in this volume), and special speaker Rose Gottemoeller. Though delayed repeatedly due to COVID-19, that meeting was an unforgettable event. Funded by the Royal Danish Defence College (RDDC) and the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), with additional support early in the process from Princeton University, its success is largely thanks to the following people: from RDDC, Adm. Henrik Ryberg, Col. Thomas Funch Pederson, Maj. Merete Strømberg, Maj. Michael Jedig Jensen, my CJO colleagues, and especially Felix Falck Jensen; from SDU, Vincent Keating and Amelie Theussen; and from Princeton, Miguel Centeno. Special thanks must be extended to Gen. Philip Breedlove (Ret.) for his support. I also extend special thanks to the senior Danish officers who shared their time and expertise: Gen. Knud Bartels (Ret.), Lt. Gen. Max A.L.T. Nielsen, Maj. Gen. Peter Boysen, and Rear Adm. Torben Mikkelsen. Additionally, a PhD course, titled simply “Military Politics,” taught by me and Vincent Keating (SDU), wrapped around and encompassed the meetings: the students met before in a series of seminars, were mentored by meeting participants, and were actively involved throughout the meetings. I would therefore like to acknowledge the special efforts of those involved with the PhD course—particularly the students (whose brilliant insights advanced the discussion considerably), and the mentors who gave so much time and effort to support the students. This volume builds on the work of many scholars (only a few of whom identify with the label “military politics”). These include scholars of international politics, international organizations, military sociology, military education, and many other subfields. Without such outstanding schol-

Acknowledgments

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ars paving the way as Charles D. Allen, Christopher P. Ankersen, Morten Brænder, Lindsay P. Cohn, Damon V. Coletta, Krystal K. Hachey, Rebecca Jensen, Anthony King, Meredith Kleykamp, Anders Klitmøller, Matthew LeRiche, Tamir Libel, Alan Okros, Ian Rice, Patricia Shields, Simon J. Smith, Andrew Stewart, Ori Swed, Brad West, Craig Whiteside, and many others, there would be no military politics intervention. Of course, my greatest debt is to my family, Jill, Rae, and Calvin, for their support.

introduction

Breach, Neglect, Guidance New Perspectives on Military Politics Thomas Crosbie

+ Introduction We need to rethink the role played by militaries in politics. The normative positions we have inherited from the past sixty years of civil-military relations scholarship are neither theoretically compelling nor do they serve the pressing needs of practitioners. Indeed, the most characteristic concern of the field—to keep officers out of politics—is not only unrealistic but undesirable. The stakes are high. Our viewpoints do not remain cloistered within the walls of academia. Rather, our theories are actively taught to officers through professional military education programs and internalized as part of the professionalization process. Thus, we are complicit in creating and sustaining the military professional’s self-image, for good or ill. We have a responsibility to not promote outdated or misguided conceptions of how officers can, should, and do relate to domestic and foreign political processes. Unfortunately, we often lack better answers. For all our failures, we have barely begun to study many of the most impactful forms of political work undertaken by officers. This book is the first volume in the first series of books dedicated to military politics, a field of research focused on the active role played by militaries in shaping their political environments (the term is defined at length in chapter ). It is a starting point, a launching pad. The authors of this volume do not all agree on the destination, but we do agree on the scale of the problem, and the failure of the field thus far to address the most important dilemmas facing officers. This brief introduction provides three reasons why getting military politics right is among the most urgent tasks facing militaries and democratic governments. The answers are to be found in the events that took place in Washington, DC, on  January ; in Kabul, Afghanistan, on  August ; and in Kyiv, Ukraine, on  February . These three

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events, spanning a little over four hundred days, crystallize the failures of the field to provide civilian and military practitioners with insights and guidance into the most salient problems facing democratic societies. For those in uniform, these events fit into three starkly different categories, representing problems of principal breach, principal neglect, and principal guidance. For our democratic societies more broadly, each type of problem raises unanswered questions about how officers should respond. This uncertainty is, in turn, the very thing that we seek to dispel by introducing our new perspectives on military politics—in this volume, and in the new body of work.

Washington and the Problem of Principal Breach As readers will discover throughout the chapters of this book, military politics shares a great deal with the field of civil-military relations (CMR), although it seeks to break new ground partly in order to avoid the limitations of that field. CMR has been dominated by US-centered analyses and US-based theoretical constructs since its formation in the s. Despite this focus on the American case, the field has nevertheless proven surprisingly ill-equipped to explain appropriate responses to the type of events heralded by the storming of the United States Capitol on  January . It was, of course, widely acknowledged that CMR under President Donald J. Trump’s administration were fundamentally new and different (Brooks ; Cohn ). Trump’s tight symbolic identification with the military, very limited grasp of military affairs, and tendency to “govern by tweet” all made this a dynamic relationship for senior officers to navigate. When Trump began to signal his intent to remain in office after the constitutionally mandated transfer of power on  January, the CMR field could offer no clear guidance for the officers who would ultimately be standing in his way (or standing aside) as he performed this authoritarian coup. Let us consider two sorts of approaches broadly advocated by CMR scholars and commentators. In an open letter to Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two well-known retired officers, John Nagl and Paul Yingling, urged Milley to “give unambiguous orders directing U.S. military forces to support the Constitutional transfer of power” (Nagl and Yingling ) if Trump were to somehow remain in office on  January. From their perspective, the greatest danger was in a showdown between Secret Service agents and federal marshals (literally) fighting a Trumpfunded private security force. If the latter were to defeat the former, then the military could either intervene against Trump’s orders (presumably) or sit passively on the sidelines, which could allow Trump to establish de facto

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control under “a fig leaf of legitimacy.” This scenario was widely mocked by civil-military relations experts. Two, Kori Schake and Jim Golby, wrote their own open letter “to repudiate the deeply irresponsible position” of Nagl and Yingling (). In their view, the military could have no conceivable role to play in preventing a Trumpian coup attempt. This was not because they expected a peaceful transfer. They also foresaw the potential for a violent end to the administration: Nagl and Yingling conjure the nightmare of President Trump calling violent protestors and unaccountable security forces (what they term a private army) into the streets, and we confess we share that worry. . . . Mobilizing the American military solely on the chairman’s un-Constitutional discretion to suppress them is to remove our military from civilian oversight. Which is to destroy the basis on which the American people trust them and to grant the military, and the military alone, the authority to resolve political disputes. (Schake and Golby )

The paradox is clear in the phrase “to grant the military, and the military alone, the authority to resolve political disputes.” If the military alone can resolve political disputes (of a certain sort), but the military can only act when appropriately guided by a civilian principal who is in turn acting in accordance with law and tradition, then political disputes involving a faithless principal are unable to be resolved. This is the principal breach problem, a theoretical limitation of the CMR tradition. Thus, already in August , reality had met and threatened to surpass the theoretical limits of the field. I wrestled with similar concerns as Nagl and Yingling (), and although I found their prediction hard to accept, I proposed six other scenarios in which a Trumpian coup could occur, arguing that “the hardest thing in each of these scenarios will be to pinpoint a moment in time beyond which officers refuse to follow Trump’s orders” (Crosbie ). My point then (and now) is that the bright line separating lawful from unlawful acts would almost certainly be obscured to the point where officers would be confronted with genuinely difficult choices. My concerns were directly countered by James Joyner, a retired US Marine Corps officer and a professor at the Marine Corps University. He found the specter of armed Trump supporters “nonsensical” and argued that if “Trump issues manifestly illegal orders, Milley and company will, as is their duty, refuse to follow them” (Joyner ). For Joyner, the bright line would remain clearly visible to all. The two sides were speaking past each other. For some, the danger was that Trump would recognize American military leaders’ sincere commitment to CMR norms and use this against them by relying on their inaction to achieve the first steps of an illegal seizure of power. For others, the

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greater danger was that military leaders, recognizing a sincere threat in Trump, would abandon their traditional commitments to CMR norms and insert themselves into the democratic process without justification. The second group believed that military leaders would not follow illegal orders, would quickly recognize the proper chain of command, and thus would remain inactive until legitimate civilian control was reestablished. The first group feared that the legality of orders and the proper chain of command would be purposefully obfuscated, and that military inaction could create a power vacuum filled by armed loyalists. These dramatic events were, of course, forecasted for  January. As actually transpired, blood was spilled two weeks earlier than expected, when a group of armed Trump loyalists forced their way into the Capitol. Four people in the crowd died, one shot by a Capitol Police officer, one from a heart attack, one from a stroke, and one, accidentally overdosing on amphetamines, was crushed in the stampede. One officer died from injuries sustained in the attack, and four others killed themselves days after the attack (Cameron ). What role did the military play (or not play) in how this insurrection unfolded? Some have looked for signs of military complicity in the coup attempt itself. Among the more than seven hundred people later charged in relation to the events of that day, eighty were veterans, and one, Marine Corps Major Christopher Warnagiris, was an active-duty officer (Watson and Legare ), a small but a worrying sign of radicalization within the broader military community. For our purposes, however, the greater sin was one of omission, of not acting quickly enough to prevent the violence. The insurrection was fomented during a speech by the president and other speakers at  a.m. near the White House. A large crowd then walked to the Capitol. District of Columbia authorities, including the Capitol Police, called for immediate assistance from the National Guard beginning at : p.m., following the initial breaching of barricades by members of the crowd. It would take three hours for guardsmen to arrive. By December , with the release of the DOD Inspector General’s Report, the perspectives of the senior leadership of the Department of Defense became clear. Then-acting secretary of defense Christopher C. Miller believed that deploying military personnel to the Capitol could create “the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War” (Inspector General, US Department of Defense , ). This was not a Schake and Golby () and Joyner () type of concern that the military, acting of its own authority, would be stepping beyond civilian oversight, and thus should be held back. Recall that the Nagl and Yingling () and Crosbie () position held that the greater danger lay in inaction, fearing that armed Trump loyalists would make strategic gains while the military remained

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paralyzed by inactivity. Miller’s concerns went beyond even these concerns to a fear that the president “would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” (Goodman and Hendrix ). Several reports suggest this was precisely the same fear held by both Miller and CIA director Mike Pompeo (Goodman and Hendrix ). In a detailed review of the Inspector General Report’s findings, the exact reason for the three-hour delay of the deployment of the National Guard was spelled out by law scholars Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix () as follows: “senior military officials constrained the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to avoid injecting federal troops that could have been re-missioned by the President to advance his attempt to hold onto power.”  January  marks a theoretical rupture in American CMR thinking. Surpassing even the worst-case scenarios floated by concerned scholars, the thinking of senior US defense officials was evidently rooted in a belief that the US military was acting under conditions that could be described as “principal breach,” wherein the principal, Trump, was assumed to be planning to issue orders in breach of civil-military norms and against the spirit of the Constitution (whether or not these would also have been illegal). To forestall a scenario in which a faction of the military was presented with “breach” directives (and could have been tempted to follow those orders), the senior leadership of the Department of Defense delayed the deployment of the Guard until after Trump publicly stated he was not in favor of the Capitol’s occupation by his supporters. The field can no longer afford to dismiss as “nonsensical” (Joyner ) or “irresponsible” (Schake and Golby ) the possibility that officers may find themselves navigating such principal breach scenarios, even in the American context. Thus, new military politics perspectives are needed that help illuminate these sorts of challenging dynamics.

Kabul and the Problem of Principal Neglect The high drama of  January, which stressed American civil-military relations (and CMR theory) to the breaking point, finds a counterpoint in the slow advance of the Taliban toward Kabul in the weeks leading up to  August . Following the terrorist attacks of  September , the United States rapidly organized a US-led invasion of Afghanistan that succeeded in taking and holding the capital only two months later, with the First Fall of Kabul occurring on  November . For nineteen years, nine months, and three days, Kabul was held by Americans and their allies or by a friendly regime. American forces were significantly reduced by the time the Taliban launched its final major offensive in May , and fully

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withdrew by the end of August , following the Second Fall of Kabul (Macias ). Total US involvement in the nineteen-year conflict is estimated by the Watson Institute’s Costs of War project at $. trillion, with , American servicemembers killed; , US contractors killed; and a total estimated , people killed (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs ). The Second Fall of Kabul, signaling the failure of the American war effort despite these enormous costs, is a military politics problem of the first order, albeit a problem of a completely different type than the one represented by the insurrection of  January. For some, particularly those in uniform charged with executing its policy, the war is an example of a principal neglect failure: the direction received by the military from its civilian leaders made it impossible for it to satisfactorily realize American political ends through the use of the military instrument (alongside other instruments of national power). From such a perspective, drawing upon standard CMR theories, the military is exempt from criticism. It did as it was directed to do, and the civilian principal, though proven wrong, was “right to be wrong” (in other words, the failure of civilian guidance in no way can be blamed on the military, and is simply a cost of doing business for democracies). Almost identical conclusions were drawn by a large faction of US Army officers following the Vietnam War, and for decades this was interpreted to mean that the Army should never again allow itself to be pulled into an unwinnable war. As a consequence, army leaders fought to justify procurements, personnel policies, and doctrinal revisions predicated on quickly resolving highly kinetic operations against near-peer opponents. Instead, these army leaders bequeathed to their successors a military that had forgotten precisely the sorts of skills that it would be called upon to use in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, $. trillion and , human lives later, we still have no more compelling answer to the question of how military leaders should avoid being pulled into unwinnable wars—an intolerable failure of the imagination of scholars, given the stakes involved. We know that military leaders must navigate scenarios of principal neglect, where guidance from the civilian leadership does not suffice to achieve beneficial ends for the society. We also know that we do not entirely understand how those in uniform should navigate these waters. Here, too, new military politics perspectives are desperately needed.

Kyiv and the New Challenges of Principal Guidance On Wednesday,  February , Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy opened the first of his many wartime speeches by framing the Russian

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invasion in familiar terms: “What do we hear today? It’s not just rocket explosions, battles, the roar of aircraft. It is the sound of a new Iron Curtain lowering and closing Russia away from the civilized world” (Zelenskyy b). The return to a Cold War security posture after a thirty-year hiatus suggests the need to rethink the military politics surrounding principal guidance, especially in the many states that have signaled resolve to increase defense spending and recommit to a hard security orientation. Although the scholarly and practitioner communities were well aware that an invasion was possible, many were nevertheless taken by surprise, including, it seems, Zelenskyy himself, who had announced two days earlier that “a broad escalation on the part of Russia will not happen” (Zelenskyy a). Partly the surprise was due to the nearly universal belief that a Russian invasion, the lowering of the “new” Iron Curtain, was above all expected to be new. Variously described as having adopted a “hybrid,” “new generation,” “non-linear” or “fourth generation” military doctrine, Russia’s leaders were expected to downplay conventional force and leverage instead the cyber domain, alongside sophisticated manipulation of the diplomatic, information, and economic environments (Bērziņš ; see also Stoker and Whiteside  for a critical perspective). Instead, “rocket explosions, battles, the roar of aircraft” dominated the opening weeks of the campaign: in operational terms, the fires and maneuver functions appear to have been the focus of planners, with such critical functions as command and control, force protection, and sustainment all inexplicably failing across the offensive. Indeed, the functions where Russian forces were expected to focus their effort (and to most easily excel), namely intelligence, information, and civil-military cooperation (CIMIC), were least effective (see Crosbie ). The Russian invasion of Ukraine raises two sets of conflicting questions from a military politics perspective. On the one hand, the new Russian approach to war, evidenced by doctrinal revision, organizational change, and prior success in Crimea, among other data points, points to Russia’s effectiveness at targeting our political vulnerabilities, and particularly at creating uncertainty regarding when competition spills over into a state of war. NATO’s officers can counter these sorts of threats by becoming more attuned to political vulnerabilities, and more politically minded generally. Thus, a CMR or military politics response to the implications of the new Russian warfare for democracies would raise such questions as: How can we educate officers to be better at confronting so-called hybrid political threats? How do we avoid securitizing our institutions while improving their resilience? How should we rethink the place of military expertise in purposefully degraded information environments? On the other hand, the invasion of Ukraine has revealed Russia’s limitations. There are therefore dangers of both overcorrecting and undercorrecting in response to Russia’s poor operational performance in Ukraine.

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For example, some might conclude that perhaps there never was a compelling need for officers to focus on political vulnerabilities, although this would be effectively to dismiss the insights gained from how Russia approached operations in Crimea and Syria, and dismiss similar threats posed by other near-peer states. For our purposes, what matters is that no matter how these debates are ultimately resolved, there remains a new uncertainty regarding the political fluency of those in uniform—many of whom have internalized traditional CMR notions of apolitical professionalism and thus feel uniquely ill-equipped to address such concerns. Military leaders today have every reason to expect highly informed principal guidance regarding military response options for war in Europe, but are more than ever confused as to what their role is in helping to formulate that guidance. Military politics perspectives are therefore also critically needed here.

New Perspectives on Military Politics The chapters of this book work toward a common goal of illuminating the most pernicious dilemmas facing practitioners (civilian and military alike) and identifying the most promising new pathways forward. The book is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on developing theoretical challenges to the existing CMR framework. Part II looks specifically at the military politics of senior officers, offering a variety of empirical evidence to demonstrate the very great degree to which senior officers are agentic political actors, with evidence from the recent past, from today, and (through survey data) from the near future. Part III explores the intersection of military politics and military operations, considering the degree to which political concerns filter down onto the battlefield. The volume concludes with a final chapter, in which I recommend three platforms to develop a military politics research program. In the first chapter in Part I, I answer the questions “what are military politics” (in the broadest sense) and “what is military politics” (in the specialized sense intended by this book series). To answer the first question, I provide a basic definition with sufficiently broad contours that all the chapters of this volume fit comfortably within. The answer to the second question is not so straightforward. I first consider the development of the CMR field and identify some paths not taken. I then explain why two major traditions within CMR might reject the very premise of a military politics research paradigm, and make note of major theoretical shortcomings of both. Next, I survey the way that the term “military politics” has been used by other scholars. I establish three basic theoretical commitments shared by the majority

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of these scholars: a commitment to viewing the military as a politically agentic (as the name suggests); to viewing the military as comprising multiple actors; and to viewing the military and civilian spheres as overlapping fields that are co-constructed by civilian and (multiple) military actors. Finally, I provide brief genealogies drawn from a broad literature to indicate two basic aspects of a military politics approach—one of which focuses on vertical alignment efforts, and the other on horizontal alignment efforts. In chapter , Anders Theis Bollmann and Søren Sjøgren offer an important theoretical intervention in military thinking. Contextualizing their argument at the intersection of military politics with new theories of war (particularly, hybrid warfare and cognate notions), they argue that debates over the immutable nature of war not only misunderstand Clausewitz’s original formulation but (more importantly) fail to address our current dilemmas in a productive manner. Instead, they argue for a “war assemblage” approach, which posits that our collective understanding of war is at most a set of stabilized arrangements, not revelations of an enduring nature. From this starting point, basic Clausewitzian themes, particularly regarding “war as politics by other means,” should be recast in more active dialogue with developments in both war and politics, producing (at best) a rough mapping of the contingent arrangements at any given moment. Part II of the volume introduces four new perspectives on senior officership. In chapter , Yagil Levy introduces the concept of “military contrarianism.” Drawing on the case of Israel, Levy’s theory reveals the ways in which military leaders and their civilian masters bargain. Levy demonstrates that the Israeli military’s leaders routinely find ways to resist politicians’ will when they view it as harmful to the military’s enterprise interests. The theory posits that the form and intensity of the military’s opposition reflects the convergence of the level of perceived harm done to the military and the prior power relations, which are themselves determined largely by the civilians’ need for military legitimation. Looking beyond the Israeli case, the theory has important implications for understanding the military politics in any democratic setting in which military support is useful to politicians. In such settings, military contrarianism is likely to be an important factor shaping military behavior. In chapter , Sharon K. Weiner explores the evolving role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of . Her argument, which can be productively contrasted with Levy’s theory of military contrarianism (chapter ), provides a startling new look at the political character of the world’s most influential officers. Weiner argues that since , the political influence of service chiefs has both grown and transformed. Now, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) plays a critical role in aligning service interests with

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political aims, and not exclusively in the interest of the political master. Although intended to be a sort of umpire, instead the CJCS has remained beholden to parochial service interests and primarily works to achieve a balance among the services. In chapter , James D. Campbell shifts from the standard active-duty focus that has dominated the field to consider the surprisingly central role played by the organized militia in American military politics. Campbell’s focus is on the National Guard of the United States, the state-based militia that supplies reserve components to the US Army and Air Force, but which has also long played a key role within the internal politics of the nation and individual states and territories. Campbell argues that the National Guard’s role is becoming increasingly important at the highest political levels due to both its recent deployments in high-profile domestic incidents and its critical role in supporting operations abroad. Because of the exceptionally complex regulatory and legal context within which National Guard leaders (Adjutant Generals) must operate—effectively a double system of state and federal governance—these leaders are likely to be among the most politically savvy and politically effective senior officers. Thus, Campbell argues, Adjutant Generals should be recognized as an important population for future research. Part II ends by looking ahead. In chapter , Steven Lee Katz offers a first look at his important new survey of American war college students, those officers most likely to rise to leadership positions in the near future. Katz’s survey asked students to reflect on lawful but morally questionable scenarios that challenge the military professional ethic, and draws from these data remarkable insights into the views of “tomorrow’s generals” on dissent, disobedience, and principled resignation. Katz looks closely at principal breach scenarios, challenging his respondents to consider their own personal red lines with respect to resisting civilian direction. The findings conform closely with the theoretical insights advanced in Part I and raise unsettling questions when contrasted with Levy’s and Weiner’s observations about how “today’s” military leaders actually do military politics in Israel and the United States. Part III introduces four new perspectives on how military politics affect the conduct of war. Part III begins with Carrie A. Lee’s discussion of military politics on the battlefield (chapter ), which is built around the critical historical case of an American and British invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch (). Lee argues that Huntington took the wrong lessons from World War II, and thus had little justification for his famed theory of an apolitical officer corps. Operation Torch was initially opposed by American senior officers, including Chief of Staff of the Army General George C. Marshall, who viewed the operation as politically compromised. Ultimately, the civilian and military leadership did strike a balance between

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domestic politics, alliance politics, and operational needs, but surprisingly at the expense of electoral gains. Lee grapples with this military politics puzzle in order to understand how effective officers engage in political discussions and negotiation within the boundaries of their professional responsibility and expertise. In chapter , Stephen M. Saideman examines similar dynamics in the present tense, exploring military politics in twenty-first-century multinational operations. Saideman agrees with Lee that officers must inevitably make decisions with an impact on public policy and must therefore be viewed (in part) as political actors. Exploring their political agency in multinational operational settings, he identifies two broad categories of action: “managing the home game,” which roughly corresponds with the “vertical alignment” described in chapter ; and dealing with the multinational chain of command, which roughly corresponds with the “horizontal alignment” described in chapter . He examines ways in which officers interpret directives (broadly or narrowly), build and enhance relationships with the commanders of allied contingents, and plan and scheme scenarios—all of which contributes to a creating military political resilience in the operation. In chapter , Lena Trabucco analyzes judicial observer effects on both military and civilian actors in times of war. Trabucco argues that pending (or probable) court decisions affect national security policy (the judicial observer effect) and do so differently for civilian and military actors. Surprisingly, she finds that American military leaders were more concerned with their vulnerability to international courts and may have behaved with a greater “chill” than did their civilian counterparts. This dynamic is particularly challenging to study in alliance and coalition environments, but also all the more likely in those contexts to affect how senior officers act. Chapter , by Carsten Roennfeldt, brings the analysis from the highest military and civilian levels down to quite junior officers. Rønnfeldt offers two “smoking guns” in proof of the claim that junior officers can have highly autonomous roles to play in the military politics of their state, at least in the case of small powers like Norway. His two cases (the Norwegian contribution to Operations Unified Protector and Silver Arrow) both demonstrate scenarios of quite extreme principal neglect, where political control was exceptionally minimal and junior officers were left to interpret the political aims of their deployment with relative autonomy. Rønnfeldt uses these cases to provide a final challenge to the Huntingtonian framework that haunts so many of these chapters. In the final chapter, I conclude with three recommendations for a military politics research platform. Such research should be post-normative (platform ), no longer aiming to provide an idealized version of the military politics relationship; reflexive (platform ), sensitive both to its impact

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on military politics dynamics and to what is needed for such research to be produced; and military-centered (platform ), situating the military as a unique intervening variable with military actors understood as having agency to shape their political environment, even as they are themselves shaped by their political context.

Conclusion This volume’s title, Military Politics: New Perspectives, invites an engagement with the past and the future. The future orientation of the title is explicit. We are oriented to the endless “new,” the commitment to constantly refreshing our perspectives in order to better capture the dynamic features of social and political life. By contrast, the past orientation is implicit, gesturing to older perspectives on military politics. While the literatures that have used the term “military politics” are addressed in detail in chapter , the title equally gestures toward older perspectives on CMR, a framing that is today better known to readers. Looking backward to these earlier formulations, the aim of these chapters is clear: to move beyond the framing and assumptions that have defined the broader field, whether under the banner of military politics, CMR, or something else. This temporal duality is reflected in the image on the cover of this volume, a photograph of Norman Foster’s famous renovations to the Reichstag, taken on a cloudy day. The image is fitting for a number of reasons. The individuals ascending the spiral staircase do so against a backdrop of gloom and uncertainty, not so unlike today’s troubled security climate. As they ascend, they appear to move further away from their fellow travelers on the other side of the dome. And yet, all paths converge at the top. There, they find themselves positioned to look down upon the work of German lawmakers, simultaneously a symbolic and a literal form of democratic oversight holding governments to account. The rebuilding of German democracy and the rebuilding of the Reichstag were in a sense parallel projects. In architect Norman Foster’s words: Throughout our rebuilding of the Reichstag we respected the imprints of the past—whether civic vandalism or the graffiti of war—and felt that it should be preserved for future generations. Junctions between old and new were articulated, and where the existing fabric had been repaired it was clearly expressed. (Rosenfield )

The present volume aims at something similar. Since World War II, scholars and officers alike have circled around the question of the political agency of militaries, without yet ascending, so to speak, to a point of clarity where the

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true complexity of military politics has been clearly visible. That point is argued throughout the chapters of this book. It is as though for decades we have been looking at eye level upon the work of officers and policymakers, glimpsing their interactions but looking mostly at their backs, their faces turned to one another. Norman Foster sought a different vantage point, a point above the fray in which networks and patterns could be more easily discerned. The present volume and the book series to which it belongs encourages an ascent to such a vantage point. Notably, as we ascend, we may find ourselves distanced temporarily from one another, as the consequence of the variance between our areas of empirical focus or theoretical vocabulary—CMR distanced from military politics, for example. This perception of distance will disappear if we continue to our ultimate destination, that elevated vantage point where a broader understanding of this relationship can be obtained. Recognizing as we do that the present state of the field fails in critical respects to capture the political agency of militaries within their domestic and international settings, we argue for new perspectives, rooted in the (often overlooked) past but aiming to illuminate a still obscure future.

Thomas Crosbie is an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. His research focuses on the intersection of military politics and military operations. In addition to his articles and book chapters on military politics topics, he has edited volumes on the privatization of security (with Ori Swed), paramilitary culture (with Brad West), and maritime operations (with Edward R. Lucas, Samuel Rivera-Paez, and Felix Falck Jensen). He is the editor of Berghahn Books’ Military Politics series.

Note . Evidence for this claim is presented throughout this book. Most notable among recent critiques of civil-military relations is Brooks’s () identification of the “paradoxes of professionalism” that collectively reveal just how much our theoretical debates fall short of addressing the practical realities facing officers. See also Brooks, Golby, and Urben () for an elaboration within the American context.

References Bērziņš, Janis. . “The Theory and Practice of New Generation Warfare: The Case of Ukraine and Syria.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies (): –.

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Brooks, Risa. . “Through the Looking Glass: Trump-Era Civil-Military Relations in Comparative Perspective.” Strategic Studies Quarterly (Summer): –. Brooks, Risa, Jim Golby, and Heidi Urben. . “Crisis of Command.” Foreign Affairs (): –, –. Cameron, Chris. . “These Are the People who Died in Connection with the Capitol Riot.” New York Times,  January . https://www.nytimes.com////us/ politics/jan--capitol-deaths.html. Cohn, Lindsay. . “The Precarious State of Civil-Military Relations in the Age of Trump.” War on the Rocks.  March . https://warontherocks.com/// the-precarious-state-of-civil-military-relations-in-the-age-of-trump/. Crosbie, Thomas. . “Getting the Joint Functions Right.” Joint Force Quarterly (): –. Crosbie, Thomas. . “Six Scenarios for Military Intervention After January : We Have to Be Able to Talk About the Military’s Political Influence.” Defense One.  August . https://www.defenseone.com/ideas///six-scenarios-mil itary-intervention-after-january-//. Goodman, Ryan, and Justin Hendrix. . “Crisis of Command: The Pentagon, the President, and January .” Justsecurity.org.  December . https://www.justsec urity.org//crisis-of-command-the-pentagon-the-president-and-january-/. Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense. . Review of the DOD’s Role, Responsibilities, and Actions to Prepare for and Response to the Protest and its Aftermath at the U.S. Capitol Campus on January , . IG DOD Publication No. --CASE-. US Government. Joyner, James. . “Six Response to Six Scenarios.” Outside the Beltway.  August . https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/six-responses-to-six-scenarios/. Macias, Amanda. . “U.S. Ends -Year War in Afghanistan with Evacuation Flights out of Kabul.” CNBC.  August . https://www.cnbc.com////afghan istan-update-last-us-troops-leave-kabul-ending-evacuation.html. Nagl, John, and Paul Yingling. . “‘. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic’: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley.” Defense One.  August . https://www.defense one.com/ideas///all-enemies-foreign-and-domestic-open-letter-gen-mill ey//. Rosenfield, Karissa. . “Norman Foster’s Interview with The European: ‘Architecture is the Expression of Values.’ ” Archdaily.  October . https://www.ar chdaily.com//interview-norman-foster-on-the-role-of-architecture-in-mo dern-society. Schake, Kori, and Jim Golby. . “The Military Won’t Save Us—and You Shouldn’t Want Them to.” Defense One.  August . https://www.defenseone.com/ ideas///military-wont-save-us-and-you-shouldnt-want-them//. Stoker, Donald, and Craig Whiteside. “Blurred Lines: Gray-Zone Conflict and Hybrid War—Two Failures of American Strategic Thinking.” Naval War College Review (): –. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. . “U.S. Costs to Date for the War in Afghanistan, in $ Billions, FY-.” Costs of War. N.D. https:// watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures//human-and-budgetary-costs-dateus-war-afghanistan--.

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Watson, Eleanor, and Robert Legare. . “Over  of Those Charged in the January  Investigation Have Ties to the Military.” CBS News.  December . https:// www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-january--military-ties/. Zelenskyy, Volodomyr. a. “Ukraine to Consider Severance of Diplomatic Relations with Russia and Other Effective Steps to Respond to Recent Events.” President of Ukraine—Official Website.  February . https://www.president.gov.ua/en/ news/ukrayina-rozglyane-pitannya-rozrivu-diplomatichnih-vidnosin-. ———. b. “Address by the President of Ukraine.” President of Ukraine—Official Website.  February . https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/zvernennyaprezidenta-ukrayini-.

Part I

+ New Theoretical Perspectives

chapter 1

What Is Military Politics? Thomas Crosbie

+ Introduction At the broadest, “military politics” are those political processes pertaining to or primarily involving military organizations. The military politics of the United States—which have a special claim on our attention because of that country’s central place within the system of states—are as broad and varied as are American environmental politics or health politics, encompassing not just top-level executive decision-making but all the debating, defining, shaping, and persuading efforts that take place throughout society. The military politics of NATO, to take a different example, would therefore be the full range of political processes pertaining to or primarily involving NATO as a military alliance, processes taking place within NATO organizations, between states in international arenas, and also within individual member states. In its plural noun form, the term stands in tension with cognates such as “security politics” (e.g., Kessler and Daase ) or “defense politics” (Sapolsky et al. ). “Military politics” in this sense is akin to “hospital politics” or “physician politics,” as those relate to the broader category of “health politics.” Military politics are nested within defense and security realities but are shaped by the gravitational effect of the military as a specific sort of thing. What is signaled by the word “military” in “military politics” is thus the resilience of uniformed services in dominating the expression of state violence on the world’s stage. These sorts of military politics demands we pay attention to militaries, making military organizations, military actors, and military events the centerpiece of analyses of security and defense dynamics. This is no more than a commitment to reality. Despite the rise of paramilitary, private, and irregular units the world over (Swed and Crosbie ; West and Crosbie ; Hoffman ), and despite the extreme confusion associated with discovering sharp analytical boundaries within the “linked ecologies” of the national security sector “blob” (Abbott :

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; Porter : ), traditional militaries retain their primacy. Pushing against the disciplinary preference for the new kids on the block, a broad military politics approach holds that militaries (and particularly military politics) are worthy of special attention and study—as the chapters that follow attest. This chapter aims at something slightly different. I work toward defining a vision of military politics as a collective noun (“military politics is”) and ultimately a proper name. From this vantage point, military politics is an emerging subfield that foregrounds the role of military actors, institutions, and events in explaining political realities, focusing particularly on the active role played by officers in shaping their political environments. For many soldiers and scholars alike, there is something profoundly unsettling about the mere possibility of such a field, and especially about suggesting—as I do—that military politics is particularly important to study in relation to democracies. Indeed, there is a widespread but mistaken belief that while democracies may have military politics (in the plural), those in uniform should have little or no role in how these events play out. In this common view, there is nothing wrong with military politics research per se, but since those in uniform should be kept away from such activities, researchers interested in militaries are discouraged from being interested in military politics (that disciplinary labor should instead be left to researchers interested in bureaucratic politics and other fields). My view is that those among us (in and out of uniform) who view the military as an object of special interest and who acknowledge its unique impact on our social lives are precisely the people who should pay special attention to military politics, and especially the roles those in uniform play in affecting military politics. Is this really such a dramatic claim? Let us return to the “health politics” versus “physician politics” comparison. A military-centered theory of military politics holds that those in uniform are centrally located within the network of actors shaping the way the military instrument is resourced, understood, employed, and restrained. This insight need not place the military at the center of security or defense studies, but it does have important implications for those fields, since it suggests that our experience of security and our collective defense—how these sorts of issues are resourced and understood, and how such agencies are employed and restrained—are somehow shaped by the work of military officers. Likewise, it would seem strange to study “physician politics” without thinking about the role that physicians and their professional organizations sometimes play (appropriately or not) in shaping how their societies resource and understand who has the right to wield a scalpel. And moving beyond the special role of physicians, it seems strange to study “health politics” without recognizing

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that physicians not only have an impact on the health of their individual patients but also—through their collective efforts—have an important impact on our understanding of health itself, including how we resource health issues, how we employ agents to help improve health outcomes, and how we restrain those efforts within acceptable bounds (strictly limiting who wields a scalpel, what products can claim health benefits, and so forth). Military politics makes no more dramatic claims than these: that just as physicians shape the political realities governing their field, with no necessary corruption of their capacity to practice good medicine, military professionals shape the political realities governing their field, likewise with no necessary corruption of their capacity to practice the military arts (although certainly corruption is possible). The same holds true of physicians’ special (but not exclusive) impact on health politics, and military professionals’ special impact on defense and security politics. To champion a military politics subfield, I begin by considering the two most influential theoretical challenges to developing such an approach. The first is Samuel P. Huntington’s () theory of a self-regulating professional officer corps, loosely overseen by civilian masters. This theory rejects the possibility of military professionals appropriately engaging in political processes: military politics, in this view, is not done by military professionals. The second is Peter D. Feaver’s () theory of a bureaucratic officer corps closely controlled by civilian oversight and punishment. This theory likewise posits a threat inherent in military-political behavior by those in uniform: military politics, in this view, is done by those in uniform, but their efforts pit them against civilian interests. Specifically, military politics breaks with these versions of civil-military relations (which is the dominant field of study linking militaries to political processes) by sidestepping the major stumbling blocks in each theory: Huntington’s () assertion that military professionals are apolitical, and Feaver’s () assertion that military interests are advanced only at the expense of their civilian principals. Together, those two very different aversions to military-political behavior contribute to a sort of “allergy” in the mainstream of civil-military relations that military politics can help cure. While the pivot away from these dominant strands of civil-military relations can be justified on these grounds alone, the true motivation for a pivot to military politics is the obvious and troubling gap that has emerged between the scholarship and the practitioners’ realities. To help close this gap, the second part of the chapter explores what those who have written under the banner of “military politics” have discovered so far about the topic. In the final part of the chapter, I draw in a wider literature, not written under the “military politics” banner but which address questions of how officers go about doing the “alignment” tasks (vertical and horizontal) that

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are so central to their political impact. The conclusion returns to the question of what a military politics subfield might look like, a topic taken up for a final time in the closing chapter of the book.

Military Politics and Its Discontents The Origins of Civil-Military Relations Scholarship The term “civil-military relations” (lowercase) was introduced to the lexicon by the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Committee on Public Administration, with an annotated bibliography published in . The term was used to broadly encompass any research “bearing upon those problems of public policy which were posed by the prospect of a continuing high mobilization even in peace time, and by the continuing necessity for a careful coordination of military, diplomatic, and industrialization policy” (Fox : ). These civil-military relations were of interest because they had already begun to show signs of stressing America’s democratic institutions. Rather than enjoying a peace dividend, the United States found itself in the middle of a cold war that demanded immense capital investment as well as the fostering of a large expert community (in and out of uniform) to manage the new weapons systems, to theorize the new strategic balancing, and to staff the new headquarters. Whether it could meet its geostrategic challenges without being utterly transformed in the process was far from clear. The  report mapped civil-military relations along two axes: one concerned with how civilians should manage a growing military sector (vertical alignment), and the other with how military experts should integrate with other elements of national power (horizontal alignment). These twin concerns are still of paramount interest today. For example, contemporary Professional Military Education focuses on supporting the intellectual development of officers as they come to recognize their role as actors within domestic and international political systems (Libel ; Crosbie, Lucas, and Withander ). Likewise, contemporary military operational thought is absorbed by the challenges of interoperability, the comprehensive approach, and the future multidomain operating environment (Paget ; Perkins ; Hachey, Libel, and Dean ). From the classroom to the battlefield, officers today are repeatedly tasked with overcoming the organizational and institutional barriers that separate them from other elements of national power (horizontal alignment) and with ensuring that their tactical effects are consonant with the strategic goals of their civilian masters (vertical alignment). In this sense, today’s militaries are still faced by uncertainty regarding how to align along the horizontal and vertical axes, just as they were in .

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A little over a decade after the term was introduced, several efforts were launched to reappraise American civil-military relations. Members of the American Political Science Association scheduled a roundtable to discuss the topic at their annual meeting in . That same year, the Twentieth Century Fund appointed a committee to study civil-military relations, leading to a multiyear research project housed at Princeton University. At Dartmouth College, two professors started a research project on military education (Masland and Radway ), while at the University of Michigan the sociologist Morris Janowitz started another, very ambitious cross-national survey of the military profession. The following year, the SSRC convened another committee comprised of some of the leading social scientists of the day, now bearing the name Committee on Civil-Military Relations Research (although the members were themselves unhappy with the term) (Fox ). This committee published another annotated bibliography in , but its ambitions were much greater, aiming not to provide an overview of the field but rather to energize it. This seemed to work, as other efforts, at Columbia University, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Corporation, and Brookings Institute all followed shortly thereafter. Among this flurry of activity was a modest project by the young Samuel P. Huntington, a project described in  as “a study of defense policy and expenditures.” Somewhere in the following years, Huntington achieved a theoretical breakthrough, described in more detail in what follows, that introduced the theory of professions as the primary explanans for military effectiveness and subordination to civilian authority. Working closely with the sociologist Morris Janowitz, Huntington () released his major theoretical intervention in this emerging field in , titled The Soldier and the State—and, thanks to Janowitz, bearing the subtitle The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Coletta and Crosbie : ). The breakthrough established what became Civil-Military Relations (capitalized, and abbreviated as CMR), a subfield that coalesced around Huntington’s distinctive vision of civilian control. The subfield was dominated by Huntington’s thinking until Feaver and others disrupted the field in the late s, giving rise to several alternative paradigms. Feaver notably abandoned the use of the military profession as an explanatory variable, and shifted instead to a principal-agent model. The tradition that emerged in the wake of Feaver’s critique of Huntington focused on exploring gaps that separate civilian and military policy preferences, providing insights in this way into why more or less oversight and civilian “punishment” might be required in different circumstances. These two traditions both focused on problems of vertical alignment. Both neglected problems of horizontal alignment. And both are marked by serious theoretical problems that severely limit their conceptual coherence and predictive value. As a result

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of changes in the geostrategic context, neither tradition has much explanatory power today, as Risa Brooks () argued in her analysis of the “paradoxes of professionalism” that both theories neglect to resolve. Before I advance that argument, however, I will briefly summarize the problems with Huntington () and Feaver () as they relate to developing a military politics perspective.

The Officer Corps as Apolitical Profession Huntington’s major theoretical breakthrough in The Soldier and the State was to introduce the theory of professions into an analysis of the vertical alignment problem that had already been identified in the  SSRC report. In Huntington’s (: ) understanding, scholars had thus far conceptualized the military as a bureaucracy (e.g., Brotz and Wilson ), or as a feudal-aristocratic vestige (e.g., Vagts ). Meanwhile, the theory of professions had developed without much reference to militaries. The critical influence on Huntington was Carr-Saunders and Wilson’s The Professions (). This was a major work that attracted wide attention but followed an inductive “constellation approach” (Haberstein : ) in defining what should or should not be considered a profession, with the result lacking much in the way of conceptual rigor. Huntington synthesized the field of professions research, noting that some scholars gave special weight to the ethical dimension, others to the cognitive dimension, and yet others to the collective character of professional groups. From these starting points, Huntington (: –) developed a three-dimensional ideal type of profession. Professions are those occupational groups that most closely approach the ideal of entirely monopolizing a field of expert knowledge (expertise), of fully internalizing a sense of responsibility to one’s client (responsibility), and whose members act with the highest degree of mutual recognition, sharing norms governing who belongs and who does not belong (corporateness). Huntington (: ) argued that while militaries are not exceptionally close to this ideal, the closer that an officer corps gets to the ideal type, the stronger and more effective it is. Although clothed in descriptive terms, the argument itself is fundamentally normative, as becomes clear in the last chapter. There, Huntington shifts into an elevated rhetoric that establishes a compelling vision of how the American officer corps should act in relation to the state. His strongest articulation of the political character of the officer corps comes near the end of the Conservatism and Security section of this final chapter: A political officer corps, rent with faction, subordinated to ulterior ends, lacking prestige but sensitive to the appeals of popularity, would endanger

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the security of the state. A strong, integrated, highly professional officer corps, on the other hand, immune to politics and respected for its military character, would be a steadying balance wheel in the conduct of policy. (Huntington : )

Huntington was at pains to convince his readers that the closer an officer corps draws to the ideal type of military profession, the less it is connected to “politics”—it becomes, in the final instance, “immune to politics.” Thus inoculated, military professionals can occupy a new role within the leadership of the state: rather than compete for power, they will instinctively subordinate their will to that of the political leadership, and will provide objective information (drawn from their monopoly of the expertise needed to employ the military instrument of power). These objective professionals are a “steadying balance wheel” in the doing of policy because they will execute their directives with equal efficiency regardless of who gives the orders, or indeed regardless of whether they agree with the orders they have been given. What exactly makes a professional immune to politics? For Huntington, it is the “responsibility” element of the profession that affects this transformation. Responsibility is double-edged: the professional internalizes a feeling of responsibility to serve the client (ultimately, the society), but also a feeling of responsibility to the expertise he or she wields (a devotion to the skill itself ). Critically, financial incentives must be made secondary to the feelings of responsibility that motivate professional service: otherwise, the professional becomes corrupted and drifts away from the ideal. In Huntington’s view (: ), the profession “becomes a moral unit positing certain values and ideals.” Like the category of responsibility, the category of expertise is based on internalized feelings of duty to the society and to the “management of violence” (Huntington : ). The stress in that famous phrase should be placed on management, rather than on violence: military professionals should not be mistaken for promoters of the use of the military instrument, but rather as mitigators of that instrument, ensuring its responsible use to achieve the military security of the state. Responsibility and expertise are entirely intertwined concepts in this view. But herein lies a problem. All professionals must grapple with the dilemma of a client with bad or dangerous ideas. A lawyer may know that taking a case to trial is an objectively bad idea, and advise his or her client to take a plea deal instead. Nevertheless, the client has the prerogative to disagree and insist upon a trial. Through loyal service to a foolish client, the lawyer ultimately serves the interests of his or her true client, society itself, which demands that those brought before the law be empowered with the ultimate authority

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over their own representation. By contrast, a physician is somewhat more likely to reject a patient’s foolish preference for unnecessary surgery, since physicians view their sense of responsibility through the lens of the Hippocratic oath, which creates a red line (not doing harm) that can be used to reject a patient’s preferences. Professions differ in the degree to which the professional is properly empowered to reject their client’s preferences. Or rather, professions differ in the degree to which the proximate client (the person hiring the professional) stands in for the ultimate client (society itself ). For the military, Huntington parses this as follows: the ideal military professional “is guided by an awareness that his skill can only be utilized for purposes approved by society through its political agent, the state” (: –). He continues: [the military professional] cannot impose decisions upon his client which have implications beyond his field of special competence. He can only explain to his client his needs in this area, advise him as to how to meet these needs, and then, when the client has made his decisions, aid him in implementing them. ()

These meager tools—“explain,” “advise,” “implement”—stand for the entirety of what Huntington views as responsible political engagement on the part of officers. Military professionalism is more complicated than other forms of professionalism because its expert knowledge pertains to the very existence of the client, and logically transcends the client’s own understanding because the expertise has been monopolized by the military. This gives rise to the major problem of Huntington’s theory (at least as it relates to military politics), which becomes obvious when the broader goal of his argument is foregrounded. Throughout The Soldier and the State, Huntington is trying to deductively explain why some states succeed in maintaining militaries that are both effective and subordinate, reflecting his very real fear that the United States will lose the Cold War unless it creates a military that is more effective but no less subordinate. For Huntington (), militaries in democracies are effective and subordinate if and only if the military is professional, and if and only if civilians use objective control—in other words, they allow the officer corps to maintain a strict monopoly over both military expertise and the application of that expertise. As Feaver (: –) argues in Armed Servants, Huntington’s argument is guilty of question begging. Huntington asks: Why do some militaries succeed in being both effective and subordinate? And he answers: Because those militaries have a professional officer corps and lack civilian meddling in military affairs. This works because a professional officer corps has monopolized expert knowledge, has a collective identity, and internal-

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izes a sense of responsibility to the client (the state). In other words, some militaries are effective (expert) and subordinate (responsible) because they are professional (which means, in part, expert and responsible). This is equivalent to saying that in order to succeed, you need to be successful. It fails to actually answer why some militaries develop an officer corps that is expert and responsible, and why others do not. For these reasons, while generations of officers have read and admired Huntington’s glowing portrait of this happy family—a state guided ably by an effective military that is managed by happily subservient officers (akin to the “principal guidance” scenario described in the introduction)—they all too often discover that there is little explanatory value to Huntington’s theory when there is even the smallest amount of “family drama” (whether akin to the principal neglect or principal breach scenarios described in the introduction). After all, the only tools Huntington provides the officer in managing his or her relations with the state are to explain, to advise, and to implement.

The Officer Corps as Bureaucratic Interest Group Unfortunately, Feaver’s () solution to Huntington’s () question begging is also limited in its explanatory power. Feaver tasked himself with solving the same problem as that which confronted Huntington. He rejected Huntington’s solution for two reasons: the first being the question-begging fallacy he identified in Huntington’s reasoning (described above), and the second being the failure of Huntington’s theory to predict events as they ultimately occurred (which he refers to as “Huntington’s Cold War Puzzle,” p. ). Feaver therefore felt that there was still no good explanation as to why some states succeed in maintaining militaries that are both effective and subordinate. To sidestep the circularity of the “professionalism” answer, Feaver draws upon principal-agent theory, arriving at the following conclusion: militaries are effective and subordinate if and only if they are subject to intrusive civilian oversight, which includes realistic threats of severe punishment. His answer is deeply appealing to many for its simplicity and apparent explanatory power. Let us examine his argument more closely. Feaver spends much of his time explaining the presence or absence of shirking, which he uses to refer to all forms of noncompliant behavior by the military, and which he defines as “when the military does not work as the civilians direct” (: , ). A military shirks when oversight is low or when the cost of punishment is low. A military works when oversight is high and when the cost of punishment is high. Similarly, work is defined as “doing things the way civilians want” (). What civilians want can be either a functional goal (protection from enemies) or a relational goal (political control over the military). For

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Feaver, unlike for Huntington, militaries are not assumed to have a special access to knowledge regarding what constitutes state security. Civilian preferences are therefore taken as proxies for the state’s interests. Civilian principals want what they want, which is assumed to be in the interest of the state, and they sometimes need military expertise to get it. Military interests are thus either in the interests of the state (i.e., work) or in the interests of the military alone (i.e., shirk). Let us unfold his argument again, but with an eye to catching the circularity. Why do some militaries succeed in being both effective and subordinate? Because they are managed by senior leaders who are closely overseen by civilian masters who make credible threats to keep them working. They succeed (are effective and subordinate) because they are successful (are effective and are subordinated). But why would we assume that such a tightly managed military is committed to or capable of ensuring the military security of the state? Logically, we would expect almost any other outcome. Militaries run by officers who are primarily motivated by their fear of civilian punishment and who are at all times conscious of civilian oversight seem more likely to become good at buffering from civilian oversight and “satisficing” (according minimal compliance with) civilian preferences than to become good at achieving military security or wielding the military instrument. Providing military security is hard, expensive, and uncertain, and may not even be what the civilian principal wants (as Cohn  and many other American CMR experts seriously began to question in “the age of Trump”). Feaver argues that military leaders, like other bureaucrats, are primarily fighting over “slack,” “the difference between the actual budget appropriation and the minimum cost of providing the service” (: ). He further holds that militaries use accession policies to favor those who are enculturated to military subordination (). By dropping the affective dimensions of the professionalism concept, Feaver sidesteps the circularity of Huntington’s argument only to create a new circularity, descending now from the expertise or effectiveness dimension rather than the responsibility dimension. Feaver posits three motivators for the military agent: controlling policy outcomes, controlling the interpretation of military activities, and managing the oversight of the civilian principal. Notably, none of these has much to do with victory on the battlefield or indeed any other form of military security. (Rather, they concern such matters as media management, public relations, the deployment of unobservable units such as special operators, influence over appropriations, and the like.) Feaver’s argument is very good at illuminating the catand-mouse game between civilian principals and military agents, but is not able to explain military effectiveness, nor to explain noncompetitive forms of interaction.

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To put a slightly different spin on it, Feaver’s theory requires that we assume civilian principals act in the interest of the society, and that civilian principals are capable of correctly identifying how to use the military instrument to achieve military security, independent of military advice. Feaver is aware of this tension, and indeed ends the book with the final sentence clearly stating his perspective: “The republic would be better served even by foolish working than by enlightened shirking” (: ). Note the elision that separates Huntington from Feaver: for Huntington, the state is a proxy for society, whereas for Feaver society is dropped, and the state is the client, with the civilian principal a proxy for the state. Let us return to Huntington’s initial question, although with a slightly different phrasing. Is it possible for a society to manage its resources such that it can boast a military that is both effective and subordinate to democratically elected civilians? This is a classical question of democracy, and a question at the core of the CMR field. CMR scholars have proposed two types of answers, both of which having the important characteristic that they keep those in uniform out of politics. One possibility, offered by Huntington (), is that a professional officer corps can arise that, due to its members’ overwhelming feelings of responsibility to society at large, can be trusted to monopolize military power without feeling tempted to threaten civilian authority. This is an appealing possibility, but the theory fails to explain under what conditions the responsibility element of the profession will suffice to check corruption and inspire effectiveness. Another possibility, offered by Feaver, is that a bureaucratic military, culturally committed to subordination, will dedicate itself to assuring military security (as long as they are closely overseen and subject to punishment for infractions) in order to reap the benefits of the slack between the budgeted resources and the actual costs of satisficing the civilian master. This is a more cynical, but more persuasive, explanation, yet the theory fails to explain why such a military would dedicate itself to achieving effectiveness, and why the civilian master wants to ensure the security of the state in the first place. Since the specter of a “faithless principal” once again haunts democracies (in the form of the principal breach dilemma), such a dynamic must be accounted for in our theories. Missing from both explanations is a willingness to consider the obvious alternative. Military leaders are not outside politics but rather inside it, helping to define the civilian principal’s perception of security either through commission or omission, and may prefer to do so in ways that advance themselves, their organization, or indeed their society. In other words, perhaps it takes various (as yet unspecified) forms of labor by military leaders to successfully align their interests with those of the public and the elected officials who wield ultimate authority. And returning to the

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origins of the field, it seems likely that such efforts would be both vertical (as has been the focus of CMR research) and horizontal (long neglected by scholars, but often the primary interest of practitioners).

Toward a Military Politics Paradigm Fundamentally, the foundation for a military politics paradigm is already embedded in the existing civil-military relations subfield, and requires only two pivots to gain the sort of conceptual coherence that scholars might reasonably demand of an emerging approach. The first pivot is a conceptual audit that identifies previous attempts to define the concept by scholars working in three regional subfields (Indonesian, Russian, and Latin American). The second pivot is a genealogy that pulls core concepts from the broader literature and reframes them as elements of an inchoate, latent, but rapidly emerging subfield.

Military Politics: A Conceptual Audit This chapter began by contrasting a generalist, plural version (“military politics are”) with a more focused group-noun form (“military politics is”). This section is intended to make a final move to Military Politics as a proper noun (and still a group noun). Since the term is not new, there is a danger that confusion will seep in between these three nested uses (the general, the focused, and the specific). To avoid that, it is worthwhile to trace the existing uses before making the analytical cuts that can help establish the core of a new subfield. As noted above, “civil-military relations,” although widely credited as an invention of Huntington (), had already been established as a general sort of term gesturing broadly to relationships between civilian and military actors and institutions. Huntington in the early s still seemed uncertain regarding the language of the field. For example, in an influential article published in , he used “military politics” and “civil-military relations” interchangeably, and chose this for the name of a widely reviewed edited volume he published in , Changing Patterns of Military Politics. As the CMR field grew, he dispensed with the alternate language. It seems likely that Huntington’s use of the term gave no particular flavor to subsequent conceptualizations, except for as a viable alternative to “civil-military relations.” Although it was introduced alongside CMR, “military politics” was thus abandoned by the core of the field by the early s. Based on a search of two databases, “military politics” has appeared in the title or subtitle of fifty-one documents (twenty-seven articles, twenty

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books, three chapters, and one report). As the high ratio of books to articles suggests, the term appears more often as a marketing tool rather than as a fully realized concept driving analyses. It has been used consistently if infrequently, with popularity highest in the s and s, declining in the s and early s, and rising through to the present. Although no one military politics field has emerged in that time, the term has been used consistently within several regional literatures, three of which are worth exploring briefly. Indonesian Military Politics The term “military politics” has appeared more frequently and consistently in the literature on Indonesian politics than in any other field or subfield. The term appears in monographs by Sundhaussen (), Jenkins (), Kammen and Chandra (), Honna (), and Mietzner (), and in articles by Smail (), Crouch (), Chandra and Kammen (), and Honna ()—together, a fifty-two-year tradition stretching from Sukarno to COVID-. Smail’s () initial formulation took for granted an understanding of military politics to mean a political system formally controlled by a military—his article concerns the politics of the “first military region” in North Sumatra. Crouch (), who used the term in his title but not in his text, described the Indonesia military as a whole as a modernizing entity, acting in effect as a singular, highly empowered political interest group. Sundhaussen’s () book-length study concerns the Indonesian Army’s military politics, separating out that service’s leadership as an interest group within a hotly contested partisan arena. Jenkins’s () use of the term is somewhat nimbler, used to distinguish between “principled” and “pragmatic” approaches to domestic political engagement, applying it analytically rather than categorically. Kammen and Chandra () advanced this approach through their focus on peer groups acting within military populations, with differing effects upon military politics (see also Chandra and Kammen ). More recent research, by Honna (, ) and Mietzner (), continues in the tradition of looking at the Indonesia armed services as consisting of multiple political interest groups affecting domestic politics. Notably, this more recent scholarship has consistently argued that the Indonesian military affects domestic politics through a mixture of both the omission and commission of actions. Russian Military Politics Five scholars have written about “Russian military politics.” The first was Timothy J. Colton, a student of Samuel Huntington. In his  article, he used “military politics” interchangeably with “civil-military relations” (), echoing Huntington’s (, ) usage. Notably, Colton () preferred

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the former as it better captured the interpenetration of the military factions and Communist Party factions as they sought to adjust the vertical integration of state power. Colton expanded these insights in a monograph published three years later, revealing there the degree to which civilian and military groups struggled over both civilian and military affairs at a deep managerial level (Colton ). Kenneth M. Currie’s () monograph, which appeared shortly after the  coup, likewise used the term synonymously with (and preferentially over) “civil-military relations.” His concern was to demonstrate the consistency of the political role played by officers throughout the Soviet era, arguing (with Colton ) that the professional officer corps was also a network of competing political interest groups throughout Soviet history. David R. Stone () explored essentially the same story from the perspective of a single, politically astute officer. For Zoltan Barany (, ) and for the contributors in Stephen J. Blank’s () SSI report, “military politics” is used interchangeably with “civilmilitary relations.” Latin American Military Politics Scholars of Latin American politics have used both terms, “military politics” (política militar) and “civil-military relations” (relaciones cívico-militares), for many decades. Ronald H. McDonald () has described the “rise” of military politics in Uruguay in the sense of the rising influence of military actors of the national political system as a whole. This specialized use was shared by the contributors to New Military Politics in Latin America, edited by Robert Wesson, which includes a clear definition by the contributor Edwin Lieuwen (: ): the new military politics is the “unprecedented assumption by the armed forces of an exclusive political mission of indefinite duration,” which, however, he argued was in decline, “unlikely to expand elsewhere.” This conceptualization was refined by Alfred Stepan (: x), who argued that because Latin American states are characterized by the predominance of the military among the other state structures, democracy advocates are forced to develop “a democratic strategy toward the military” (italics in original), which he takes as the meaning in Spanish of “política militar.” Daniel Zirker () drew upon this usage in his work. For Philip Mauceri (), “military politics” reverted to the McDonald–Lieuwen understanding, referring not to how civilians interact with the military but rather with how the military dominates a given political ecosystem. Maiah Jaskowski’s () well-received monograph on military politics in the Andes also hews closely to the McDonald–Lieuwen understanding, although Jaskowski argues persuasively that contemporary military leaders in the region seek to shape their political environment simply in order to maintain predictability in their funding and mission, and use a

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wide variety of techniques to act within their political system to achieve these relatively modest goals. The findings of our audit can be summarized as follows. “Military politics” has proven to be a useful term for scholars working across many fields for many decades, although it has resonated primarily with scholars interested in authoritarian and developing states rather than in democratic, developed states. It has never consolidated as a subfield of its own and the term itself remains exceptionally underdetermined. What precisely constitutes the military politics of Indonesia or Uruguay, for example, is not agreed upon even by the handful of experts of write about these exact questions (and use this exact term). Nevertheless, some important theoretical insights can be gleaned from the accumulated work in these diverse fields, and these in turn can spur us toward sketching the genealogy of our new field. Lesson : Modern, Professional Militaries Are Political Actors The most obvious insight from the dozens of books, articles, and reports that bear the title “military politics” is that many of the world’s modern, professional militaries can only be understood by interpreting them as political actors (e.g., Crouch ; McDonald ; Sundhaussen ; Lieuwen ; Mauceri ; Currie ; Jaskowski ). It is hardly surprising to observe that the armed services of Indonesia, Russia, and many countries in Latin American tend to get involved in politics. More surprising is that the potential corruption of politics, as viewed from Huntington’s () normative perspective and from Feaver’s () principal-agent logic, does not entirely forestall the development of relevant military expertise, nor does having a very politically engaged military doom a country to military dominance. (As argued in the following section, similar conclusions were drawn by Pion-Berlin and Ivey [] regarding Latin American civilmilitary relations.) Experts in all three regions view the military as an important political actor no matter what it does, simply because it is so much more empowered relative to the other state structures. There is no “off ” switch for the military politics of Indonesia, Russia, or many Latin American states, regardless of how those in uniform act or do not act. Lesson : Militaries Are Plural Actors An equally important insight is that militaries are often better understood as plural actors with respect to their engagement with domestic political processes (Jenkins ; Stone ; Chandra and Kammen ; Honna , ; Mietzner ). These scholars frequently chastise their fellow regional specialists for mistaking the political agency of a faction within the military for that of the institution as a whole, and many of the most cele-

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brated studies in these three regional fields have focused on unpacking the plurality of political actors within military ecologies. Lesson : Military and Civilian Spheres Are Overlapping Fields A third lesson that can be drawn from these literatures is that we miss a great deal if we take too many pains to analytically separate the civilian sphere from the military sphere. Virtually all the scholars cited here have focused on the interpenetration of the two spheres, viewing political outcomes as co-constructed through the collaboration, competition, and outright conflict between factions that include multiple military groupings as well as multiple civilian groupings (e.g., Colton ; Stepan ). By contrast, civil-military relations scholars (as the name suggests) have tended to purposefully exaggerate the difference between civilian and military spheres, intending in this way to gain theoretical leverage over the tensions that sometimes arise between the two (Feaver ; for an early critical perspective, see Albright ). Feaver (: ) explicitly argues in favor of exaggerating this distinction on the basis that it maintains consistency with the framing of the field as “civil-military relations” (meaning, as the study of the relations between two distinct entities).

Military Politics: A Genealogical Sketch In order to establish military politics as a subfield (and a proper noun), I have so far followed two approaches. First, I have demonstrated why two popular objections to such an approach fail on theoretical grounds. Second, I have investigated uses of the term in three regional subfields— Indonesia, Russia, and Latin America—and extracted three lessons that are shared across these diverse fields and should ideally form a basic set of assumptions for the new field. I now adopt a third tactic: I will provide very brief genealogies of scholarship on how officers act to achieve vertical alignment (the first genealogy) and horizontal alignment (the second genealogy). In this way, I hope to demonstrate that while a military politics approach may look and feel somewhat different from the CMR we are most accustomed to, it builds seamlessly on some of the most compelling research in the field. First Genealogy: Vertical Alignment Although frequently challenged (e.g., Owens ), the normative preference for an “apolitical military” remains very much alive. Kori N. Schake () and former secretary of defense James Mattis (Macias ) are just two well-known voices who urge extreme caution regarding virtually any form of political utterance or action by officers, for example. Although I

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have already challenged the specific concerns of Huntington () and Feaver (), there are many good reasons to fear an empowered military—indeed, the military politics of Indonesia, Russia, and Latin America all provide many examples of what specifically can go wrong. What military politics argues is that the officer corps has latent political agency, regardless of how officers view themselves and regardless of what scholars might prefer to be the case. An officer corps that is strictly encultured to avoid and ignore politics would not thereby dissolve its political agency. Rather, it would simply facilitate (through inaction) the capture of that agency by other actors—other state structures, civilian leaders, or social groups (or indeed foreign entities). This is widely observed by commentators in the popular press under the concept of a “political shield” (e.g., Lee ), the organizational equivalent of “stolen valor.” Building a genealogy of the scholarship on the political agency of officers must therefore root itself not in normative preferences but rather in descriptive realities. The starting point of such a literature would surely be Janowitz ( []), and particularly his fifth hypothesis (Coletta and Crosbie ). For Janowitz, the officer corps is intrinsically a political interest group and can wield its political agency wisely or foolishly. Despite the success of his book, much of Janowitz’s broader project was abandoned, and the book itself reflects a mismatch between his ambitions and the available data (which ultimately was borrowed from Masland and Radway ; Janowitz  []). Not surprisingly, The Professional Soldier offers only a rough guide to analytically approaching the military profession as political actor (Coletta and Crosbie ). Sam C. Sarkesian’s theory of equilibrium, developed specifically to encompass “the political dimension of military professionalism” (: ), provides one such Janowitzian approach. The theory holds that effective civil-military relations are simply those relations in which there is an equilibrium achieved between the “political powers and purposes” of the military profession and its civilian masters. Officers play their part in achieving this equilibrium through what Sarkesian describes as “enlightened advocacy” (). What this looks like in practice is described in detail: Enlightened simply means horizons and perspectives that are not bound by purely military factors [but also] consider political and social implications. . . . Advocacy means the articulation of a particular point of view or policy while attempting to influence the political system to accept such a point of view or policy. Enlightened advocacy therefore presumes not only the advocation of a particular position or point of view, but also that this be done with sophistication and maturity within the accepted principles of liberal democratic society. (; italics in original)

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“Enlightened advocacy” suggests a proactive, politically savvy style of military advice, although the contours of such a style were never entirely clear in Sarkesian’s work. One set of answers was provided by Yoram Peri in his landmark studies of Israeli military politics. Peri argues that “democratic theory must account for the fact that military organizations have become heavyweight players in the running of state affairs and exert vast influence in the international system” (: ). Based on a deeply researched investigation into the Israeli case, Peri theorizes that the Israeli political system was best described as a “political-military partnership” (: ), wherein “the actors participating in the game are not officers subordinate to their political bosses, but rather one coalition of officers and politicians competing against another coalition of officers and politicians.” A similar line of reasoning was advanced by Yagil Levy (), also focused on the Israeli example. Levy evolved Sarkesian’s concept of equilibrium to encompass two related forms of exchange (the republican exchange and the control exchange), giving rise to four scenarios within which military-political actions unfold. In chapter  of this book, Levy expands upon these insights. Rather than study the officer corps as a political interest group, as military politics scholars have done in developing states, as Sarkesian () has theorized, and as Peri (, ) and Levy () have done in the Israeli context, CMR scholars interested in the influence of officers on politics have more often focused on the metaphor of an “unequal dialogue” (Cohen ) between the military’s most senior officers and their immediate civilian superiors. In the background of such debates is the logic of dissent within complex organizations: the famous exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect options defined by Albert O. Hirschman (, ; see also Hess ), and frequently referred to as the EVLN model. In the military, like in any other complex organization, actors can quit (exit), speak up when they are unhappy (voice), be loyal to the guidance they are given by the superiors (loyalty), or be minimally compliant with those orders (neglect). Within the logic of the civil-military dialogue metaphor, both sides have a voice and both can challenge the claims of the other, but only the civilian superior has the final say (and hence the dialogue is unequal in favor of the civilian). For some, the dialogue is so imbalanced that, as Feaver (: ) has argued, the civilian has “the right to be wrong” (or right). Using Hirschman’s () dissent options, the back-and-forth between a senior officer and his or her civilian master is resolved by the civilian making a decision (giving an order or giving guidance), in response to which the officer loses his or her “voice” option. In such scenarios, the officer may be loyal and do as directed, neglect and do the least possible, or exit by resigning their commission. The latter option was debated extensively in a

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 special issue of Armed Forces and Society (Dubik ; Feaver ; Kohn ; Shields ; Snider with contributors arriving at a wide range of preferences, some quite permissive (e.g., Snider ) and others quite restrictive (e.g., Kohn ). Thus, a standard CMR perspective has emerged among American scholars that presents officers as quite constrained within the civil-military dialogue, expected in most cases to shut up and follow orders even if the civilian is quite grievously in error. An alternative, critical literature, one challenging many of these points, has also evolved, and it is this literature that can be taken as a starting point for developing a new military politics perspective. Most dramatically, the civilian’s asymmetrical advantage described by Cohen () and Feaver () has been challenged by those anxious about the “foolish working” possibility that Feaver () dismissed. The concern is that the normative limits that CMR scholars place on appropriate military-political behavior create a vulnerability. Corrupt civilian leaders may be emboldened to make transgressions against the democratic order based partly on their belief that military leaders will be unwilling to dissent. The Trump administration made this more than an academic concern. David Pion-Berlin and Andrew Ivey (: –) have argued for “scrutiny or revision” of the right to be wrong based on a wide range of evidence from Latin American states, where military dissent “has garnered no new powers for the military, nor has it eroded civilian supremacy,” but has effectively checked certain forms of corrupt behavior by civilian leaders. Likewise, the role of military “voice” has been questioned by several scholars. Dubik (, ) accepts the civilian principal’s “right to be wrong” but offers various techniques to ensure that the exchange between civilian and military actors was “rough and tumble,” intending in this way to minimize the risk of excessive deference to civilians. He further argues in favor of “continuous dialogue.” Military “voice” as iterative dialogue has been further explored by Rapp (), Allen and Coates (/), and Golby and Karlin (), among others. These critical perspectives on the “unequal dialogue” share in common a discomfort with the limits of the “conversation” metaphor, and particularly the ecological fallacy of applying lessons from the micro level of interpersonal relationships (occurring between senior officers and elected officials) to the meso level of institutions. Returning briefly to the first section of this chapter, recall that Huntington (: ) describes military-political agency as constituted of “explaining,” “advising,” and “implementing.” To this, Sarkesian (: ) added “advocating,” Cohen (: ) added “unequal dialoguing,” and Feaver (: ) added “shirking.” In this line of reasoning, two other major contributions should be noted to bring this aspect of the genealogy up to date. A major survey conducted by the Triangle Institute for Strategic Studies

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and published in Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn’s Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security () provided additional categories of agentic behavior: in addition to “advocate” and “advise,” military actors are described as being able to “insist” or “be neutral.” Working at a finer grain of analysis, Brooks () identifies five quite specific actions taken by senior officers to shape their domestic political environment: “public appeal,” “grandstanding,” “politicking,” “alliance building,” and “shoulder-tapping.” This very basic genealogy of the officer corps as a political actor thus provides us with the following insights. Contra Huntington (), many scholars have accepted that the officer corps can be understood as a political interest group without thereby invalidating its claims to professional purity. Such political behavior manifests within an existing environment, which may be balanced or imbalanced (Sarkesian ; Levy ), but over which officers will inevitably have an effect. The way they shape their political reality is through some combination of the following: explaining, advising, implementing, advocating, shirking, insisting, remaining neutral, making public appeals, grandstanding, politicking, alliance building, and shoulder-tapping. All of these efforts, with the exception of Brooks’s “alliance building,” concern the vertical alignment of military actions with civilian prerogatives, and many assume that military actors appropriately act to pressure civilians to provide the right sort of direction and guidance to the military. This basic genealogy is summarized in table ., where I categorize the military-political activities explored in the secondary literature by Hirschman’s () EVLN category. Aside from the brief  debate over resignation, the literature has been focused on developing theories of Table .. EVLN categories and military-political activities. © Thomas Crosbie. EVLN Category Military-Political Activity Exit

Resign in Protest (Dubik ; Feaver ; Kohn ; Snider ; Mueller )

Voice

Explain, Advise (Huntington ); Enlightened Advocacy (Sarkesian ); Unequal Dialogue (Cohen ); Insist, Advocate, Advise (Feaver and Kohn ); Appeal, Grandstand, Politik, Shoulder Tap (Brooks ); Continuous Dialogue (Dubik ); Iterative Dialogue (Golby and Karlin )

Loyalty

Implement (Huntington ); Work (Feaver ); Be Neutral (Feaver and Kohn )

Neglect

Shirk (Feaver )

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military voice. Notably, scholars disagree on how strenuously officers should fight for their beliefs, although there is a growing recognition that military-political exchanges are extremely consequential for states and cannot be simply reduced to the face-to-face interactions between the most senior officers and statesmen. Second Genealogy: Horizontal Alignment In her  lecture “On Military Obedience,” Judith N. Shklar (: ) contemplates the twin elements of military obedience (following hierarchical orders) and military conformity (following nonhierarchical norms), and concludes, counterintuitively, that “conformity to one’s peer group is, in fact, a far greater element in determining military conduct than obeying orders.” Shklar’s keen sense of the centripetal character of military collective action dynamics is a helpful starting point in thinking through the challenges of (and motivations behind) horizontal alignment. Officers are increasingly tasked with aligning their efforts horizontally in order to overcome quite significant institutional, intraservice, interservice, interagency, multiagency, and multinational barriers. The scholarly recognition of the political valence of such efforts can be dated back to Warner R. Schilling’s contribution to Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (Schilling, Hammond, and Snyder : ), where he argued that rational decisions about the US defense budget are impossible, and that ultimately all such decisions must be viewed as “a matter for political resolution.” The complex process of creating a defense budget pulls officers in at multiple levels, requiring them to work collectively, create factions, and negotiate with opposing factions to achieve outcomes (which presumably differ from the initial preferences arrived at through military expertise alone). Weiner (: ) demonstrated that when officers act in policy domains not directly related to their work, their approach is very much shaped by whether the officer conceives of his or her role in terms of a faction within the military or in terms of the military as a whole. She argues that successfully internalizing a joint (i.e., all-military) perspective increases the propensity to engage in a wider range of political topics—in effect, jointness breeds the characteristics of being a political interest group. In chapter  of this book, she examines the implications of this for the American context. Horizontal alignment should not be conceptually limited to jointness. Moelker, Soeters, and vom Hagen () argue that frequent contact was a critical factor in explaining effective collaboration between military personnel of different countries, while Ruffa and Vennesson () assert that military actors accustomed to working with nonmilitary agencies of their own country fared better in aligning their interests with collaborating nongovernmental organizations. These cases suggest that officers build or

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neglect the skill sets associated with effective horizontal alignment collectively, not individually. These scholars share an intuition that officers play an important role in shaping the domestic political arena, and they do so not simply by following or not following direct orders from their civilian masters, but by building networks and alliances with other political interest groups. This allows officers to affect all elements of national power, not simply the military instrument over which they have a putative monopoly (but not, as too many scholars have assumed, an exclusive interest). This should not be viewed as some sort of ominous shadow governance. NATO’s militaries are not secretly accruing political power in order to topple their democratically elected masters, but rather they are openly and (in the minds of their leaders) very appropriately working toward mastering NATO’s “comprehensive” approach, which means crafting advice about the use of the military that already encompass the diplomatic, information, and economic instruments of power. Thus, at the lower operational and tactical levels, NATO’s officers learn to horizontally align military and nonmilitary interests through such techniques as Comprehensive Operations Planning (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe ). At the highest levels, officers are periodically compelled to navigate principal-level political environments, including such venues as the Political and Security Council of the EU, and NATO’s North Atlantic Council (e.g., Smith, Tomic, and Gebhard ). Between these levels, however, officers predominate in shaping the “civil-military interaction” that defines how states align internally and in coalitions to project force and achieve security. This arena, especially those organizations located at the “military-strategic level of operations” in NATO doctrine, remains almost completely unexplored by scholars, although it is a matter of great professional interest to officers. The lack of scholarship means that we lack an equivalent language for horizontal alignment as we have with vertical alignment (but see Part III of this volume for emerging answers to questions of horizontal alignment).

Conclusion: Military Politics as Subfield While this book as a whole aims to justify the importance of military politics research for understanding the dramatic recent developments in military affairs, this chapter makes a case for a narrower approach moving forward, a military politics subfield that challenges civil-military relations for dominance in explaining recent phenomena and in informing scholars and practitioners alike about how those in uniform shape their political environments. To advance this argument, I took three steps.

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First, I challenged misconceptions within the CMR field. This section opened with a historical perspective on the original framing of the field, indicating that it has failed to fulfill its original promise of exploring both the vertical and horizontal alignment challenges associated with democratic militaries. I then considered the two major obstacles to focusing research on military politics. The first challenge came from Huntington (), who argued that officers are polluted through contact with politics, and thus dismissed the possibility that officers should do political work. The second challenge came from Feaver (), who argued that officers do plenty of political work but do so at the expense of their civilian masters. I rejected both claims based on their theoretical incoherence. Second, I explored the work that has used the term “military politics” in the past. This section also opened with some historical reflections, indicating that the term was initially used synonymously (by Huntington and others) with civil-military relations. As the CMR field consolidated, the term “military politics” was slowly abandoned, except for within a handful of regional subfields, namely Indonesia, Russian, and Latin American military politics. These subfields all dealt with political arenas in which military actors are clearly influential. They share at least three lessons that I highlighted: they take seriously that professional militaries are also political; they increasingly view militaries as composed of multiple politically agentic factions; and they view the civilian and military spheres not as distinct entities but rather as co-constructed, overlapping fields. Third, I provided two very brief genealogies to demonstrate that some scholars, lacking the skepticism toward politics as demonstrated in the work of Huntington and Feaver, have already provided exceptional foundations for a military politics field built upon rethinking both vertical and horizontal alignment efforts. The vertical alignment research provides a network of concepts across the EVLN framework that can benefit from adjudication and refinement. The horizontal alignment research is much more limited, but no less significant given the large and growing importance of this work in determining how states act. At its core, a military politics subfield would give special attention to the political agency of officers. A subfield of this sort would guide officers to become reflexive practitioners in their domestic political arenas. Carsten Roennfeldt (), a scholar who educates officers at the Norwegian Military Academy, has argued for “wider officer competence,” specifically in managing politically dilemmas. (In chapter , he expands upon these insights.) Charles D. Allen (), a scholar and educator at the US Army War College, proposed that the field adopt Gerald Ferris’s “political savvy” scale to describe the political attributes that officers need to succeed. These attributes are social astuteness, interpersonal influence, networking ability,

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and apparent sincerity. Damon Coletta and I are also both scholars who teach officers. We have argued that officers should be encouraged to develop not just wisdom but also “virtù” (Coletta and Crosbie ). What these suggestions share in common is the idea that our scholarship should help officers be more effective in their political engagement, not in order to advance the interests of the military relative to other state structures, but rather in order to achieve better democratic outcomes. Perhaps one reason that such calls for a military politics approach come frequently from those who work within military educational institutions is because we are the ones forced to translate the findings of the field into meaningful terms for those in uniform. We struggle against the biases embedded in much of the CMR literature because we know that our students will almost inevitably be confronted with political dilemmas throughout their careers, and only very rarely will the best option be to “be neutral.” Many other skills and competencies, thus far only hinted at here, will hopefully emerge from a literature better oriented to ask these questions and to find the answers—that is, from a military politics subfield. Thomas Crosbie is an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. His research focuses on the intersection of military politics and military operations. In addition to his articles and book chapters on military politics topics, he has edited volumes on the privatization of security (with Ori Swed), paramilitary culture (with Brad West), and maritime operations (with Edward R. Lucas, Samuel RiveraPaez, and Felix Falck Jensen). He is the series editor of Berhahn Books’ Military Politics series.

Notes . Neither project was fully realized. Masland and Radway () released one book but abandoned their larger project following the unexpected death of their third collaborator. Janowitz’s ( []) full vision was never realized, but he did inherit Masland and Radway’s data, and combined this with his own research in The Professional Soldier. See Coletta and Crosbie (). . The members of the committee were McGeorge Bundy, Gordan A. Craig, John P. Miller, Harold Stein, and William T. R. Fox. . Searching by title or subtitle is the most tractable approach, since searching within the text creates an enormous number of false positives, due to the frequency with which the terms appear alongside one another in various sorts of lists. The databases used here were Web of Science and JSTOR. A search of SCOPUS yielded no additional results.

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. Because Spanish does not distinguish between policy and politics (both are politica), the term “military politics” can be understood either in a very broad terms as a reference to any form of military policy, or in the more specialized forms that interest us here. . Janowitz’s ( []) influence over the field was significant, but it generally had little to do with his fifth hypothesis. His most successful students either left the study of the military behind (as in the case of Andrew Abbott), or focused on the military as it intersects with traditional sociological concerns (as in the case of David Segal). His legacy was drawn even further from the political arena following the debates with Charles C. Moskos () and others. This helps explain why there was so little Janowitzian research into the military as a political interest group, but does not significantly aid our present cause. . Heidi Urben () replicated this survey. In  and  I used parts of the survey instrument in a survey of American Military Experts I conducted with my colleague Meredith Kleykamp (Crosbie and Kleykamp ). . The desire to collaborate effectively within and across agencies at many levels are more than mere piety, but rather a widely voiced professional commitment to the belief that such horizontal alignment is critical to success in both conventional and unconventional operations. As the capstone doctrine of the United States Department of Defense has it, “the nature of the challenges to the US and its interests demand that the Armed Forces operate as a closely integrated joint team with interagency and multinational partners” (Joint Chiefs of Staff : i.). See also Department of the Army (), and for an Alliance perspective, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (). . This “special attention” is simply due to the hierarchical character of military organizations. It should not be taken to exclude research on such important populations as enlisted, noncommission and warrant officers, military spouses and families, contractors, and related defense-sector professional and occupational fields.

References Abbott, Andrew. . “Linked Ecologies: States and Universities as Environments for Professions.” Sociological Theory (): –. Albright, David E. . “A Comparative Conceptualization of Civil-Military Relations.” World Politics (): –. Allen, Charles D. . “Military Officers Need to Be Politically Savvy.” Australian Institute of International Affairs. Allen, Charles D., and Breena E. Coates. /. “The Engagement of Military Voice.” Parameters (): –. Barany, Zoltan. . Democratic Breakdown and the Russian Army: Military Politics and Institutional Decay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. . “Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Decay: Explaining Russian Military Politics.” Europe-Asia Studies (): –. Blank, Stephen J. . Russian Military Politics and Russia’s  Defense Doctrine. Carlisle, PA: SSI Monograph.

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Brooks, Risa. . “Militaries and Political Activity in Democracies.” In American Civil-Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era, eds. Suzanne C. Nielsen and Don M. Snider. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brooks, Risa. . “Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States.” International Security (): –. Brotz, Howard, and Everett Wilson. . “Characteristics of Military Society.” American Journal of Sociology (): –. Carr-Saunders, Alexander, and P. A. Wilson. . The Professions. New York: The Clarendon Press. Chandra, Siddharth, and Douglas Kammen. . “Generating Reforms and Reforming Generations: Military Politics in Indonesia’s Democratic Transition and Consolidation.” World Politics (): –. Cohen, Eliot A. . Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. New York: Anchor. Cohn, Lindsay P. . “The Precarious State of Civil-Military Relations in the Age of Trump.” War on the Rocks.  March . https://warontherocks.com/// the-precarious-state-of-civil-military-relations-in-the-age-of-trump/ Coletta, Damon, and Thomas Crosbie. . “The Virtues of Military Politics.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Colton, Timothy J. . “Military Councils and Military Politics in the Russian Civil War.” Canadian Slavonic Papers (): –. ———. . Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Crosbie, Thomas, and Meredith Kleykamp. . “Civilian Military Experts: Findings from the  Survey of American Military Experts.” In Rethinking Military Professionalism for the Changing Armed Forces, eds. Krystal K. Hachey, Tamir Libel, and Waylon H. Dean. New York: Springer. Crosbie, Thomas, Edward R. Lucas, and Nicolai E. Withander. . “Educating Military Elites: Professional Military Education in NATO Countries.” In Processes and Practices in Military Education and Training, eds. Antti-Tuomas Pulkka and Soili Paanenen. Tartu: National Defence University Press. Crouch, Harold. . “Military Politics under Indonesia’s New Order.” Pacific Affairs (): –. Currie, Kenneth M. . Soviet Military Politics: Contemporary Issues. New York: Paragon House. Department of the Army. . Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies (FM –). https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm-.pdf. Dubik, James M. . Just War Reconsidered. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. ———. . “Taking a ‘Pro’ Position on Principled Resignation.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Feaver, Peter D. . “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. ———. . Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. . “The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision.” International Security (): –.

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Lee, Carrie. . “The Military Doesn’t Love Trump Back. This Is Why.” The Monkey Cage.  November . https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/ wp////the-military-doesnt-love-trump-back-this-is-why/. Levy, Yagil. . “A Revised Model of Civilian Control of the Military: The Interaction Between the Republican Exchange and the Control Exchange.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Libel, Tamir. . European Military Culture and Security Governance: Soldiers, Scholars, and National Defence Universities. Abingdon: Routledge. Lieuwen, Edwin. . “The Problem of Military Government.” In New Military Politics in Latin America, ed. Robert G. Wesson. Westport, CT: Praeger. McDonald, Ronald H. . “The Rise of Military Politics in Uruguay.” Inter-American Economic Affairs (): –. Macias, Amanda. . “Defense Secretary Mattis: I’ve Never Registered for Any Political Party.” CNBC.  October . https://www.cnbc.com////def ense-secretary-mattis-never-registered-for-any-political-party.html. Masland, John W., and Laurence I. Radway. . Soldiers and Scholars: Military Education and National Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mauceri, Philip. . “Military Politics and Counter-Insurgency in Peru.” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs (): –. Mietzner, Marcus. . Military Politics, Islam, and the State in Indonesia: From Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Moelker, Rene, Joseph Soeters, and Ulrich vom Hagen. . “Sympathy, the Cement of Interoperability: Findings on Ten Years of German-Netherlands Military Cooperation.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Moskos, Charles C. . “From Institution to Occupation: Trends in Military Organization.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. . Allied Joint Doctrine (AJP-). https://as sets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file//-doctrine_nato_allied_joint_doctrine_ajp_.pdf. Owens, Mackubin Thomas. . “What Military Officers Need to Know About Civil-Military Relations.” Naval War College Review (): –. Paget, Steven. . “Interoperability of the Mind: Professional Military Education and the Development of Interoperability. RUSI Journal (): –. Peri, Yoram. . “The Political-Military Complex: The IDF’s Influence Over Policy Towards the Palestinians Since .” Israel Affairs (): –. ———. . Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israeli Foreign Policy. Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press. Perkins, David G. . “Multi-Domain Battle: Driving Change to Win in the Future.” Military Review, –. Pion-Berlin, David, and Andrew Ivey. . “Military Dissent in the United States: Are There Lessons from Latin America?” Defense and Security Analysis (): –. Porter, Patrick. . “Why America’s Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment.” International Security (): –. Rapp, William E. . “Ensuring Effective Military Voice.” Parameters (): –. Roennfeldt, Carsten F. . “Wider Officer Competencies: The Importance of Politics and Practical Wisdom.” Armed Forces and Society (): –.

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Ruffa, Chiara, and Pascal Vennesson. . “Fighting and Helping? A HistoricalInstitutionalist Explanation of NGO-Military Relations.” Security Studies : – . Sapolsky, Harvey M., Eugene Gholz, and Caitlin Talmadge. . US Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy. rd edition. Abingdon: Routledge. Sarkesian, Samuel C. . “Military Professionalism and Civil-Military Relations in the West.” International Political Science Review (): –. Schake, Kori N. . “What Is Happening to Our Apolitical Military?” The Atlantic.  July . https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive///us-military-pol iticization-mark-milley//. Schilling, Warner Rolling, Paul Y. Hammond, and Glenn Herald Snyder. . Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets. New York: Columbia University Press. Shields, Patricia M. . “Introduction to Symposium.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Shklar, Judith N. . “On Military Obedience.” In On Political Obligation, eds. Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smail, John R. W. . “The Military Politics of North Sumatra: December -October .” Indonesia (): –. Smith, Simon J., Nikola Tomic, and Carmen Gebhard. . “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost: A Grounded Theory Approach to the Comparative Study of Decision-Making in the NAC and PSC.” European Security (): –. Snider, Don M. . “Dissent, Resignation, and the Moral Agency of Senior Military Professionals.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Stepan, Alfred. . Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stone, David R. . “Tukhachevsky in Leningrad: Military Politics and Exile, – .” Europe-Asia Studies (): –. Sundhaussen, Ulf. . The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics, –. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. . Comprehensive Operations Planning Directive (COPD V.). Swed, Ori, and Thomas Crosbie. . The Sociology of Privatized Security. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Urben, Heidi. . “Civil-Military Relations in a Time of War: Party, Politics, and the Profession of Arms.” PhD dissertation. Washington: Georgetown University. Vagts, Alfred. . A History of Militarism. New York: W.W. Norton. Weiner, Sharon K. . “Military Advice for Political Purpose.” In Mission Creep: The Militarization Of Foreign Policy, eds. Gordon Adams and Schoon Murray. Washington: Georgetown University Press. West, Brad, and Thomas Crosbie. . Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture: Post-Heroic Reimaginings of the Warrior. New York: Springer. Zirker, Daniel. . “Property Rights, Democratization and Military Politics in Brazil.” Journal of Political and Military Sociology (): –.

chapter 2

Rethinking Clausewitz’s Chameleon Is It Time for Western Militaries to Abandon the Idea of War’s Immutable Nature? Anders Theis Bollmann and Søren Sjøgren

+ Introduction When dealing with a “thing” ontologically, one questions what it is or how it is. “What is war?” is thus an ontological question. Our assumptions about things provide the foundation for how phenomena relate to each other, their causality, and their mechanisms. How military practitioners imagine things fitting together actively shapes how they see the world, affecting action and judgment (Angstrom and Widen ; Ansorge ; Eden ; Jasanoff ; Lawson ; Öberg ; Nordin and Öberg ). Theory also rests on ontological assumptions, and military professionals draw on theory to better understand their profession, act quicker, and make better decisions (Vego : –). Similarly, theory informs doctrine. Moreover, doctrine itself rests on ontological assumptions (Høiback ; Jackson ; Sjøgren ; Vego ). Viewing war as having a distinct duality between an immutable nature and changeable character is a specific approach to conceptualizing the ontology of war. From here on called “the dual ontology of war,” this distinction is widely attributed to Carl von Clausewitz. The dual ontology of war permeates much of contemporary military theory as well as most Western military doctrine and thinking close to the military practice (Department of the Army ; Army ; Joint Chief of Staff ; Friedman ; Jackson ; McInnes ; Mewett ; NATO ; Schøning ). The problem of a fixed nature is twofold: first, it holds the promise of arriving at a correct understanding of this enduring nature, and second, academic arguments or operational experiences that question the nature of war can be dismissed concerning the unchanging nature. A focus in theory

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and doctrine on rationalism and logical coherence over empiricism might follow. Historian Andrew Gordon () provides an illuminating example of the Royal Navy dismissing lessons learned in the Falklands war in . They did not fit into how the service imagined war against the Warsaw Pact. Today, similar problems emerge in debates on future wars, civil-military relations, insurgency, emerging technology, and how militaries should integrate or unlearn the lessons of the global war on terror including the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, the sharp distinction between nature and character threatens to derail the debate. We also note that the sharp distinction between nature and character is a recent invention. Michael Howard () has discussed how technology changed the nature of war. A US Army commanders’ conference after the Tet offensive in Vietnam discussed the changing nature of that conflict (Sorley ). As late as , the director of the US Army combined arms doctrine directorate wrote in the foreword to a book on time and the art of war that the author discussed the changing nature of war (Leonhard ). Although Clausewitz is often attributed to the formulation of war’s dual ontology, he cannot be blamed for this invention. This “paradox of things” is described very concisely by philosopher Brent Adkins, who has pointed out that all things—like the contents of his office desk, the Himalayas or himself—all are imbued with the same paradox: They consist of both elements of stability and elements of change at the same time (Adkins b: ). Adkins (b) argues that most philosophers have approached this paradox by emphasizing a discontinuity or separation between the intelligible and the sensible. The stability of things is attributed to their intelligible nature or essence. Things’ ability to change is attributed to their sensible nature. This way of solving the paradox entails a dual ontology between the intelligible and stable nature on the one hand and the sensible and changeable character on the other. The framework of war’s dual ontology can arguably be understood as rooted in this idea. Adkins was, of course, merely paraphrasing one of the mainlines of Western philosophical thought. In ancient Greece, Plato operated with a similar dualism between the world of forms and a world of appearances. The former belongs in the realm of the nonphysical, nonextended, and perfect. Plato calls this realm reality, and it is only accessible through reasoning. These appearances are physical, extended, imperfect, and mutable (Plato ). This same duality underpins any Abrahamic religion in which God resides in the former realm while humans inhabit the latter. Plato also struggled with precise definitions. According to third-century biographer Diogenes Laërtius, Plato defined humans as two-legged animals without feathers. Diogenes the cynic then plucked a cock, brought it into the Academy, and said, “This is Plato’s man” (Laërtius ).

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Two questions emerge from this short story: precise definitions and demarcations are complex, as in Plato’s case. First, would a human without legs not constitute a human? Second, does one need a precise definition of the ideal human to talk about humans? The default approach is not the only way to approach the paradox of things or the general question of what things are. German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that there is no reason to believe that our words correspond to a particular essence of things. Instead, humans participate in language games in which the connection between an object and its name is the act of naming. Philosophical problems arise when language is insufficient or, in Wittgenstein’s words, when “language goes on holiday” (: ). An alternative is thinking in assemblages. An assemblage is a set of heterogeneous elements arranged to form some sort of order. Assemblage theory allows one to think in terms of processes: becoming, stabilization, and order. A specific assemblage results from a process rather than revealing an underlying order of nature. Assemblages are open to change, and while they are very concretely arranged in one way at a specific time, they could have been set or ordered in another way had the process been slightly different. Instead of revealing something about the immutable nature of things, assemblages are manifestations of processes, ways of ordering the messy social reality and often linked to questions of power (Deleuze and Guattari ; Buchanan ; Nørgaard and Sjøgren ). This does not mean that stable categories or thresholds between war and not-war are redundant. Binary oppositions might be paramount for military forces to operate, to provide clarity for strategic thinking, or to delineate between forms of legislation (Stoker and Whiteside ). However, this does not mean that these categories are revelations of an underlying enduring nature. Instead, they might be products of particular conditions and circumstances and change when conditions and circumstances do (Heuser ). This chapter proceeds in four sections. First, it will account for the two schools of thinking about war’s nature. Second, it will lay out Clausewitz’s position concerning change and stability in war. Third, it will point to the conceptual and practical challenges that this way of ontologically conceptualizing war creates for the theorizing about war. Finally, the article will outline the contours of an alternative ontological framework rooted in assemblage thinking.

War’s Nature: Two Schools of Thinking The debate on war’s nature can be separated into two schools: those who think war’s nature changes and those who do not. Interestingly, both

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sides cite Clausewitz for support. An example of the immutable school of thought, heavily institutionalized in Western militaries, is the US Army ADP - Doctrine Primer, the US Army doctrine on doctrine. It states that “doctrine is based on an accurate understanding of the nature of war” and that “while the nature of war is constant, warfare changes constantly” (Department of the Army : –). This nature is defined as a violent clash between “two or more forces” (: –). The dual ontology is echoed in the UK Army’s doctrine primer. The following is presented as a quote directly from On War: “War has  [sic] components that endure: its nature (the objective) remains constant under all circumstances; while its character (the subjective) alters according to context” (Army : –). In the NATO capstone publication AJP- Allied Joint Doctrine a section is simply headlined “Enduring nature of conflict,” which again states that the nature of conflict remains constant (NATO : .). This premise is also found in academia where for instance, Mansoor (: ), in the introduction to his coauthored book on hybrid war, writes that hybrid war is a “buzz word [that] has become fashionable among both political leaders in the pentagon and elsewhere.” However, he argues and cites Clausewitz for support, while “war change its characteristics in various circumstances, in whatever way it manifests itself, war is still war” (Mansoor : ). In a  article on Clausewitz, Christopher Mewett () takes the same position: War’s nature does not change—only its character . . . The nature of war describes its unchanging essence: that is, those things that differentiate war (as a type of phenomenon) from other things. War’s nature is violent, interactive, and fundamentally political. Absent any of these elements, what you’re talking about is not war but something else.

Mewett thus argues that war has an “unchangeable essence” that is violent, interactive, and fundamentally political. According to Mewett, this will never change. He points out that the character of war is all those things that are contingent and changes through time and place, such as “technology, law, ethics, culture, methods of social, political, and military organisation” (Mewett ). Mewett’s article critiques a concept paper for a then-upcoming project about “The Future of War.” In defense, Rosa Brooks () states: “I’m not quite ready to accept the claim that the nature of war is ‘universal and eternal’—or, at any rate, I’m not sure that this is a particularly useful construct for understanding what is at stake in many current debates about what constitutes war.” According to Brooks, new phenomena like cyberwarfare pose a severe challenge to understanding war’s nature since they are not violent, at least in a “Clausewitzian” sense. Former US secretary of defense and US Marine Corps General James Mattis was also known as a staunch defender of the view that war’s nature is immutable, but artificial intelligence might challenge even his view. When asked by

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a journalist about AI’s impact on the war, Mattis answered, “I’m certainly questioning my original premise that the fundamental nature of war will not change. You’ve got to question that now. I just don’t have the answers yet” (Mattis as cited in Kostopoulos ). Furthermore, former US vice secretary of defense Robert O. Work noted at a conference on AI in : There’s widespread agreement in the military that artificial intelligence, robotics, and  human-machine teaming  will change the way that war is waged . . . but I am starting to believe very, very deeply that it is also going to change the nature of war. There’s no greater sin in the profession than to suggest that new technology could change the “immutable” nature of human conflict, rather than just change the tools with which it’s waged. (Work as cited in Freedberg )

Thus, Brooks (, ), Mattis (as cited in Kostopoulos ), and Work (as cited in Freedberg ) are all questioning whether the nature of war is immutable after all. In all three cases, the driver for this debate seems to be the technological development that might enable states to achieve the political aims of the struggle with nonviolent means. Contemporary Clausewitz scholars (Barkawi and Brighton ; Beyerchen ; Cormier ; Echevarria II ), new war theorists (Kaldor ; Münkler ; Singer and Brooking ), and empirically oriented military scholars (Bousquet ; Bosquet, Grove, and Shah ; Nordin and Öberg ; Zweibelson ) also sit on this side of the fence, either denying the immutable nature of war or simply sidestepping the question altogether. For the purposes of this article, the point is twofold. First, if the nature of something can indeed change, then this nature is neither immutable nor fixed. What follows is that the distinction between nature and character as something ontologically or radically different becomes meaningless. Second, while scholars argue on the validity and applicability of the immutable nature of war, military practitioners seem to hold on to the dual ontology of war; Western militaries reify it in doctrine and learn through socialization. Indeed, the very idea of entanglement leads to confusion. In debates on future war(fare) and civil-military relations, the dual ontology constitutes a gap that needs to be closed or addressed.

Clausewitz and the Dual Ontology of War Clausewitz did not distinguish between an immutable nature and a changeable character of war. He did use the concept of nature and character as somewhat interchangeable. Furthermore, his concept of nature meant

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something different from the immutable essence in the contemporary debate (Cormier ; Echevarria II , ; Simpson ). This section will sketch a short outline of Clausewitz’s theoretical and methodological approach to war. Furthermore, it will point out the misunderstandings that play an essential part in the conception from which the dual ontology of war stems.

Clausewitz’s Use of Dialectics Clausewitz’s theoretical and methodological approach was his contemporary sources of inspiration, philosophers such as G.W.F. Hegel and Johan G. Fichte, who provided him with what was in effect a form of dialectics or a “dialectical theory of war” (Cormier : ). His point of departure outlines a notion of absolute or abstract war wherein he describes war as “an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes” (Clausewitz : ). In this sense, war is escalatory and will escalate to its utmost extreme. However, wars in the real world are neither governed by logical necessities nor are they fought in a vacuum; they are governed by probabilities and are inherently political. To Clausewitz, it is not inconsistent that specific wars can range from “war of extermination down to simple armed observation” (Clausewitz : ). Instead, this apparent opposition between the absolute and the real is used to discover paradoxes by asking why these differences appear (Aron : ). This is how Clausewitz arrives at war’s political nature (Clausewitz : –; Cormier : ). By the same token, Clausewitz states that war is inherently social or “an act of social intercourse,” denying that war is neither art nor science (: ). Thus, Clausewitz uses dialectics to tease out the paradoxes that make up war in the real world, most notably the Napoleonic in this own time. In his own words, “the role of theory is to clarify concepts and ideas that have become entangled” (Clausewitz : ). Thus, Clausewitz also struggled with “the paradox of things” but lacked the precise language to capture that notion. It is important to note that abstract or absolute war is a theoretical or conceptual construct that has no materialization in the real world. Clausewitz holds this “pure concept of war” up against the real world or in its concrete form, as he also calls it (Clausewitz : , ). Real war will not follow the law of escalation since a wide array of different factors limits it. First, as Clausewitz notes, real war is not just intertwined with but subjugated to politics; it is a “continuation of politics by other means” (: ). This means that wars in the real world are limited by the political purpose

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for which they are fought. The direr the motives, the more war will resemble its pure concept. However, even the most extreme cases of war, like the world wars of the twentieth century, are still not absolute wars since absolute war is a theoretical concept without materialization in the real world (Aron ; Beyerchen ; Cormier ; Sumida ). Phrased differently, war as an abstract notion is simply pure contestation between actors, but war as a real thing is contestation limited to greater or lesser degrees by political purpose, since politics affects the available resources, workforce, geography, technology, social and political factors (besides the overall goal), and geography. Real wars differ from the “pure concept of war” in another important respect: they are plagued by what Clausewitz calls “friction.” Friction is all the unforeseen subjective and objective factors that influence war; it is fear clouding judgment, lousy weather affecting troop movement, logistics not being there on time, and the enemy misleading you (Clausewitz : ). All these known and unknown factors entail that war in the real world differs from its pure concept (Cormier ; Echevarria II , ). It is perhaps unfortunate that Clausewitz provides his war theory with a dialectic ontology between absolute and real war, since it has led to much confusion (Cormier : ). However, as Cormier notes, Clausewitz viewed absolute and real war as mutually exclusive. Absolute war is not war’s immutable nature; it is an abstraction or a concept that, in Clausewitz’s dialectical method, is held up against real war and is therefore not in itself real war. Clausewitz’s dialectics are not like the dual ontology of war in this article. Instead, they are a method to untangle concepts and ideas and expose paradoxes that constitute the war. In other words, rather than platonically define an ideal of war and then observe its real manifestations, Clausewitz dialectically posits one conceptualization (war as pure contestation), which he then challenges with an alternative conceptualization (real wars as actually manifested), and then synthesizes the two extremes to arrive at some deeper insights into war as such. This entails a flat structure rather than a hierarchy in which one realm is more real or ideal than another.

The Trinity This paradoxical trinity is another crucial aspect of Clausewitz’s thinking. In a much-quoted part of On War, Clausewitz describes war as follows: War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred,

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and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone. (: )

Some who hold that war’s nature is immutable equate it with the trinity (Hoffman ; NATO ; Mewett ). This, however, is problematic for several reasons. First, as Frank G. Hoffmann has pointed out, some readers have thought that Clausewitz, when he states that war is “more than a true chameleon,” compares war with a chameleon that changes its colors or outer characteristics according to the environment but stays the same at the core (Hoffman : ). This reading, of course, aligns very well with the dual ontology of war. However, Clausewitz did not describe war as a chameleon but described it as “more than a true chameleon.” Interestingly, the original German text does not use the word “characteristics.” Rather, it states that the war “in jedem konkreten Falle seine Natur etwas ändert” (in each concrete case it changes its nature somewhat) (Clausewitz ). This leads Aron () to conclude that war is a chameleon in two senses: first, it is diverse in itself because of the strange trinity, and second, it is diverse in its expression. The problem of diverse expression is epistemological—some wars are small, some are large, some are highly violent, some are not very violent at all—and thus wars, like chameleons, appear different in various times and places. The trinity problem is ontological: any given war will manifest emotional, probabilistic, and rationalistic elements, and thus, like a chameleon, war is not one color but a constant play of colors that in their combination give rise to many variations. We can add to Aron’s two insights a third insight, advanced by Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton (). They argue that Clausewitz’s remark that war is “more than a chameleon” should be read radically rather than superficially. War has, they claim, the potential to cast social and political orders in motion. War consumes, reworks, and produces truths (Barkawi and Brighton ). This is another way of thinking of the chameleon metaphor ontologically: wars manifest within social contexts and are shaped by social and political realities. Think of a chameleon that partly reflects its surroundings. But wars also change that context, often radically. To continue the analogy, war is something like a chameleon that changes its landscape even as it is changed by the landscape. Our point is that it is essential to note that these three tendencies in the trinity at the very center of war are not fixed; on the contrary, they vary as a part of their nature. This, for Clausewitz, was as important as their more stable characteristics:

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These three tendencies are like three different codes of law, deep-rooted in their subject and yet variable in their relationship to one another. A theory that ignores any one of them or seeks to fix an arbitrary relationship between them would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless. (Clausewitz : )

The different elements or tendencies of the trinity are both tendencies of changes and stability. They manifest themselves in each concrete case; however, they also change in each case and so does their relationship. Thus, if one conceives the trinity as identical with the war’s nature and argues that war’s nature is unchangeable, one seems to be arguing against Clausewitz. In fact, in the wake of his description of the trinity, he states that “the nature of war is complex and changeable” (: ). Clausewitz did not operate with a dual ontology of war, and it was somewhat unclear what he precisely meant about the subject. However, what is certain is that both change and continuity played a central part in how he understood war. In this section, we have shown that the dual ontology of war is misattributed to Clausewitz. Furthermore, we have rooted out some misunderstandings on Clausewitz’s thinking on war’s ontology. We will proceed with an analysis of the conceptual and practical problems created by the idea of the dual ontology of war.

Problems in the Dual Ontology of War Three problems stand out: First, upon close inspection, there is no agreement on the immutable nature of war, rendering its analytical value redundant. Second, the problem of induction: one cannot logically deduce the immutable nature of something through observation, since there is no logical demand on why the future should resemble the past. Third, the distinct ontological categories are used insistently. All three constitute a practical problem since the idea of a fixed nature does not add much relevance for the military practitioner.

Lack of Agreement on What Constitutes War’s Immutable Nature The first problem arises because there is no agreement on precisely what constitutes war’s immutable nature. Citing Clausewitz, some argue that the notion of abstract or absolute war is what makes up its nature (Simpson ). Others argue, also citing Clausewitz, that violence and the escalatory dialectics of absolute war constitute war’s nature (Malick ). The US doctrine primer focuses on “the three elements of the Army’s vision of war: it is inherently chaotic, it is a human endeavor, and it takes place among

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populations.” The latter element is not Clausewitz’s; instead, it echoes the central thesis of British general Sir Rupert Smith’s book The Utility of Force () and US Marine Corps general Charles Krulak’s late s concept of the “three-block war” (Krulak as cited in Dorn and Varey ). NATO doctrine defines the unchanging challenges that service personnel face as fiction, uncertainty and chaos, danger, and stress (NATO : .). Others citing Clausewitz argues that the trinity elements comprise the nature of war (Hoffman ). Others again argue for a combination of these things (Mewett ; Taber ). The UK doctrine primer also offers a mix stating that “conflict will always be a violent contest: a mix of chance, risk and policy whose underlying nature is human and volatile” (Army : –). Finally, as argued previously, Clausewitz himself did not seem to have a definitive answer. Even though these interpretations are connected through their invocation of Clausewitz, they all point toward different aspects of his thinking and exalt them to being war’s immutable nature. War’s immutable nature is not agreed upon by those who argue for its existence, which seems contradictory to the notion that war has an intelligible nature. This needs not to be a problem per se since one of these interpretations are correct and the others are wrong. However, using the dual ontology of war, especially the concept of war’s nature, becomes analytically and conceptually problematic, since the term denotes different things for different people. Thus, this is instead a problem of the analytical qualities and rigor of the concept than a problem of incoherence per se. From this follows, however, a more serious challenge: the notion of the dual ontology creates a set of dichotomies or categorical separations that makes military professionals, scholars, and others who think and theorize about war approach it in a specific way. It forces binary categories and installs thresholds between war and not-war that do not reflect the plurality of war.

The Problem of Induction One approach often used to search for war’s immutable nature is to deduce from history or historical experience that war’s nature will never change. This is the path trodden by Williamson Murray in America and the Future of War (). In a chapter on the ontology of war, Murray puts up an eloquent defense of the dual ontology. However, he uses prior historical experience as a definitive “proof ” of what he refers to as the “two inseparable sides of the Janus-like face of war” (: ). Murray writes that “the fundamental nature of war itself has remained constant throughout history” (). Furthermore, he points out that “there are aspects of human conflict that will not change no matter what advances in technology or computing power may occur” (). The argument is that we can deduce the nature of

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war through history. However, if one views the nature of war as an empirical question, one is left with a question that cannot be answered. Even if what Murray defines as the war’s nature has been constant until this point in history, we cannot be sure that it will be so tomorrow even though we can make qualified guesses. This is the problem of induction (Hume ; Popper ). The question of what comprises the nature of war is not a question that can be answered with an empirical or historical approach. The argument is not that historical knowledge or best practices codified in doctrine or established civil-military relations are useless. Instead, such knowledge is to be approached with a hint of skepticism and constantly evaluated against its usefulness. Even though there seem to be historically visual continuity or stability in war, nothing logically demands that this will be so in the future. One could, for instance, argue that the increased use of airpower, drones, or robots, is removing the danger, fear, and risk from at least some belligerents. If this is the case, is it only one side of the conflict that conducts war? French philosopher Jean Baudrillard () argues that if only one side carries risk, it is a “non-war.” Professor of law and humanities at Yale Law school Paul Kahn () writes that such an intervention where one part is rendered defenseless would constitute a policing action, and thus not war, and thus require a different mandate for the legitimate and ethical use of force. However, rendering the enemy defenseless is the very purpose of the engagement, according to Clausewitz. Clearly, there is a disconnect between those scholars and doctrine writers who are so supremely confident about the immutability of war, and the ambiguities that are currently stressing our policy and regulatory norms.

Inconsistent Use of Categories The final problem is the inconsistent use of categories. Some who argue that the nature of war is changing and therefore not immutable still seem to hold on to the distinction between nature and character. Nevertheless, if the nature of war is not immutable, does it make sense to construe war’s nature and character as distinct ontological categories? If the nature of war does change, then it cannot be immutable. Thus, the elements that make up war’s nature (whatever they are) can only be more stable than the elements constituting its character (whatever they are), but since they are not immutable, they are not different. In other words, it must be concluded that if war’s nature does change, then ontologically speaking, it differs from its character not in kind but in degree only. One example can be mentioned here. In several books and articles, Christopher Coker () has writes that the nature of man and war is intertwined and has, paraphrasing Thucydides, called war “the human thing.”

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Coker, using a rich arsenal of military and other historical examples, argues that war has always been interwoven with human nature but that this may be changing due to technological advancements such as AI, neurotechnology, and biotechnology. Even though Coker’s conclusion is as much about human nature as the nature of war, he is falling into an inconsistent use of categories: if the nature of war or of humanity changes, is it then a nature (essence) in a strict ontological sense at all, and does it then make sense to distinguish the two categories ontologically?

Practical Problems in the Dual Ontology of War If one cannot define rather clearly the nature of war, it does not make any practical sense to have a rigid demarcation before it meets the realities of life. This does not mean that war ceases to exist or that anything can be war. Instead, war is a label attached to certain social phenomena, often depending on context while not connected to others (Brooks ). This is visible when we move close to the threshold of whether a particular conflict is a war. Let us explore this through a series of questions. At what point should an insurgency or a rebellion become labeled as a war? At what point would a cyberattack constitute an act of war? Is a naval blockade an act of war? Is an economic embargo? Could political organizations other than the state be allowed to wage war, and when does an organization become a legitimate state? The answer to all these questions seems to be “it depends.” The notion of war’s nature (whatever that is) against war’s character (whatever that is) does not help answer questions close to the threshold. How such questions have been resolved in the past might help us understand the powers at play when assemblages are named. This would help practitioners understand that the categories they use to demarcate war and not-war or appropriate civil-military relations are both stable and needed for coordination and cooperation but also able to chance since they are not of a natural kind but the result of a process.

The Suggestion: From the Dual Ontology of War to the War Assemblage The previous section has outlined why the commonly held approach to the ontology of war found in much military theory and doctrine is problematic. The purpose of this section is to provide an alternative ontological framework for understanding war and assessing stability and change. The first part of this section will formulate such a framework. The second part

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will outline how this new framework of the war assemblage will sidestep the problems with war’s dual ontology. The last part will reflect on the consequences of military doctrine and the traditional approaches to civilmilitary relations.

The Assemblage: An Alternative Approach to the “Paradox of Things” The concept of the assemblage was first introduced by philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (). Assemblage thinking has since been used and elaborated upon by scholars in fields as diverse as history, archaeology, human geography, anthropology, and International Relations (IR). It draws upon some of the same notions as complexity theory, including concepts such as nonlinearity, emergence, and open systems, which have inspired Deleuze and Guattari () and other scholars subscribing to assemblage thinking (Acuto and Curtis ; Bousquet and Curtis ). Assemblage thinking is not one unified theory: it is “a repository of methods and ontological stances towards the social” (Acuto and Curtis : ). How do we link assemblage thinking back to Clausewitz? Let us recall that war is, according to Clausewitz, a social phenomenon or a social device (: ; Cormier : ). Returning to philosopher Brent Adkins (a), the assemblage is a conceptual answer to the “paradox of things.” Adkins argues that the concept of assemblage addresses the paradox of things in a radically different way than essentialism, replacing “the discontinuity of the sensible and intelligible with a continuity of the sensible and intelligible” (a: ). Instead of thinking things in terms of nature and character, an assemblage is a way to understand phenomena as “possessing in some respect both stasis [stability] and change” (). According to Adkins, the concept of assemblage solves the paradox by “claiming that an assemblage always possesses tendencies toward both stasis and change as the abstract poles of a single continuum” (). Things exist between the stasis and change poles not by being either-or but by being both-and. Adkins notes that “the abstract poles that orient any assemblage are not different in kind; they are only different in degree” (b: ). IR-scholar Antoine Bousquet points out that stability and change of the assemblage stem from the possibility of “the addition or subtraction of elements or the reorganisation between those elements” (: ). Not unlike the notion of open systems within complexity theory, philosopher Manuel DeLanda argues that assemblages are to be viewed as individuals and more than a sum of their parts because they are open for changes and can affect the different elements that constitute them, through the processes of addition, subtraction, and reorganization. They can affect other assemblages as well (DeLanda : ). Therefore, assemblages are themselves made up of

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assemblages or, as DeLanda puts it, “assemblages always exists in populations of assemblages” (: ). Since all things, be they material objects, biological entities, chemical processes, or social phenomena in assemblage thinking, can be viewed as assemblages, it does away with essentialism and provides us with a so-called flat ontology (Acuto and Curtis ; DeLanda ; DeLanda : Harman ). An objection at this point could be to ask whether what we are saying is that war is complex. Indeed, a critique of assemblages is that they amount to no more than adjectives: it notes that something is complex (Buchanan ). However, one need not invoke postmodern French philosophers to drive home that war is complex. Clausewitz argued along similar lines. It is one thing to say that all things can be viewed as assemblages; another question is whether they should. At a very practical level, the suspension of premature closure is probably what the assemblage does best by reminding us that the complex cannot be reduced to a few variables. It insists that there are always several co-constituent forces that make up an event, and while they might not be equal in force, they should not be differentiated ontologically even before an inquiry is made. Thus, by adopting the concept of the war assemblage, one insists that war is complex and should be studied as such. Bousquet, for instance, uses assemblages to critique the idea that technology has causative powers in war, and he argues that such accounts rest “on simplistic and selective treatments of the historical record” (: ). The assemblage likewise emphasizes Michael Howard’s () claim that there is no Archimedean point outside events.

The War Assemblage and Its Implications Viewing war as an assemblage entails a break from war’s dual ontology, since the inherent notion in the assemblage is that nothing is unchangeable but that some things are more stable than others. Thus, conceptualizing war as an assemblage allows viewing some elements as more durable than others without treating them as ontologically different. The war assemblage comprises many different “things”—some material, other ideational, and others again social. Approaching these things with a flat ontology solves the three conceptual problems we sketched. One problem was that scholars tried to prove empirically that war had an immutable nature. By thinking of war as an assemblage, this task becomes redundant. It becomes interesting to understand why a given assemblage is formed, how the different elements got added into it, why other factors have been subtracted, and which processes of territorialization and deterritorialization have come before. Instead of empirically proving something that cannot be proven empirically, military historians and

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other scholars can focus on understanding how different stable elements become what they are and why, without making dubious claims about the immutability of those elements. For example, one could place the pieces that proponents view as comprising the nature of war closer to the abstract pole of stability in the continuum of the war assemblage and identify those elements comprising the character of war nearer toward the abstract pole of change. Thus, different aspects of war can be viewed as stable without creating ontologically distinct categories, such as nature or character. Instead, one can approach different elements of war as being more less stable. Furthermore, turning from war’s dual ontology to the war assemblage allows for a better analysis of how the tendencies of stability and change are related. Instead of indirectly viewing these as ontologically separated, one can view them as part of the same continuum. This also means that questions such as “Does war have a nature?” or “Does this nature change?” become redundant, since the war has no inherent essence but is made up of more or less stable elements. Rosa Brooks’s claim that cyberwarfare is changing the nature of war needs not be answered through a debate about whether the nature of war is changing or only its character. Instead, the question should be approached through the lens of what the inclusion of cyber(assemblages) into the war assemblage means for the stability and instability of other elements. One could argue that the physical violence element of war is destabilized since war is suddenly not only waged by physically violent means. Something similar can be said about the emergence of AI. It is possible to imagine that the human element of war will change its relationship with other assemblages making up the war assemblage. Finally, this also entails that discussing what exactly comprises the nature of war also becomes redundant. In this view, all such debates on the nature of war can be brushed aside. In their place, we may question how new assemblages fit into the war assemblage and become pertinent or, conversely, how other assemblages become less relevant. One could also argue that the traditional binary opposition between war and not-war is destabilized. A more nuanced understanding emerges where the threshold between war and not-war is blurred. This does not mean that military practitioners and their political masters can or should do away with the concept of war, with its concomitant state of exception, which facilitates different regulatory, normative, and political logics. The point is that the messiness of war, as a regulatory, normative, and political category, derives from its messy social reality rather than from our failure to name the true and eternal nature of war correctly. A few examples of such approaches that insist on complexity are prudent. First, Margaret MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us () outlines how the development of war and society are co-constituent forces

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and describes how war and society have changed over time. Although MacMillan declares that “war in its essence is organised violence” (: ), she still insists on war’s complexity and ability to transform itself over time, and indeed takes pains to describe this process. Second, Robert A. Doughty’s The Seeds of Disaster () outlines the multiple actors and interests involved in French interwar doctrine development and thus analyzes the processes that led to a complex phenomenon rather than reduces it to a few simple variables. Third, Lynn Eden’s Whole World on Fire () is an inquiry into how and why the US arsenal of nuclear weapons evolved to absurd amounts of warheads during , enough to set “the whole world on fire.” By tracking down what the actors took for granted, Eden found that knowledge-laden routines such as handbooks and procedures carried over predictions and understandings. In turn, these organizational frames worked to frame the problems that the organization then solved. In Eden’s case, this was the question of destroying structures by a blast from the nuclear device instead of addressing whether nuclear weapons might render that problem redundant because of fire damage. The three examples have in common that they show how understandings, naming, and labeling helped arrange these assemblages. Although none of these authors explicitly used the word “assemblage,” they demonstrate the ontological stance that the war assemblage advances. Describing who acts, who is allowed to voice their opinions, and how these actors make things work is the aim of their very different analyses. This is a different objective than a revelation of the true nature of things.

Take It Easy on the Doctrine! Clausewitz did not claim that war had an enduring and timeless nature while only its characteristics changed. Instead, he claimed that the very phenomenon of war constantly changed. If nothing else, the war assemblage will emphasize this point. Social phenomena exist on a continuum between stability and change; thus, nothing is unchangeable. This entails that military doctrine cannot be a tree firmly rooted in military history (Drew and Snow ). Doctrine is neither fundamental nor enduring. The authors do not expect military practitioners to develop a loving relationship with postmodern French philosophy by introducing the war assemblage. Instead, we merely hope to tune down the positivist underpinnings of doctrine and increase its sensitivity toward empiricism, creativity, and critical thinking. We wish to refocus discussions of doctrines on their usefulness rather than their enduring and fundamental elements. Doctrine is designed to fulfill a need to standardize, command, and control battles yet leave enough space to be responsive and efficient in unpredictable oper-

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ational environments. This is the “basic doctrinal dilemma” (Høiback ; Posen ). Thus, the doctrine itself also exists somewhere between stability and change. It must be both normative and liberating at the same time, allowing the use of standardized planning processes as well as professional judgement and discretion (Sjøgren ). The war assemblage reminds us to take it easy on the doctrine and not reify it as something that it is not. Doctrine is a way to codify best practices and guide an uncertain future. It is a standard that, on the one hand, needs to be studied, followed, and implemented but at the same time treated with a hint of skepticism. It is only good as long as it serves its purpose, as NATO’s core doctrine states: “The principal purpose of doctrine is to provide Alliance forces conducting operations with a framework of guidance to achieve a common objective. Operations are underpinned by principles describing how they should be planned, prepared, commanded, conducted, sustained, terminated, and assessed” (NATO ). Doctrine is a choice. The civil-military relations advanced in doctrine is a choice. It is the organization’s best possible answer to the complex reality of war. Adopting the idea of the war assemblage allows researchers to ask how this standardization works in military organizations and civil-military relations.

Conclusion This article has shown that Clausewitz has wrongly been attributed with the idea of war’s dual ontology. This article suggests that Clausewitz could be read more radically regarding his views on the nature of war. War is not a chameleon that alters its appearance but essentially stays the same. Instead, each war is its own chameleon distinct from other animals and different from other chameleons. Each is its own assemblage emended in other assemblages from which it not only takes color but also colors. Suppose war is treated as something that exists in a continuum of change and stability. In that case, questions concerning knowledge about war will also change in military theory or civil-military relations. The practical advice is to take it easy on the doctrine and recognize it for what it is; guidelines are written to facilitate coordination and cooperation and to place responsibility. It is a choice. This is not to be confused with a call to discard doctrine but to understand doctrine as a tool and inquire into how it functions in the military staffs that translate it into operational plans or in staff collages to facilitate discussions on tomorrow’s wars and contemporary civil-military relations. If the war assemblage is widely adopted, the subsequent questions concerning doctrine and civil-military relations could advance our understanding of how it is codified, especially in doctrine, how it is taught, and how it is

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used. This would pave the way for what Thomas Crosbie () has called “the strong program approach” to military politics. This approach will shed light on the construction of civil-military relations and show empirically how these relationships are negotiated and thus stabilized. This mapping would help future political and military leaders navigate future challenges.

Anders Theis Bollmann holds an MA in philosophy and history and works as a research assistant at the Centre for Military Studies at Copenhagen University. He has formerly worked as a consultant at the Royal Danish Defence College. His research interests include military theory, the philosophy of war, and the impact of new technologies on the military organization and the operational environment. Søren Sjøgren is an active duty major in the Royal Danish Army and a current PhD fellow at Roskilde University, stationed at the Royal Danish Defence College.

Notes . The word “paradoxical” is a mistranslation in the English version by Peter Paret and Michael Howard. Clausewitz calls it a “wunderliche Dreifeltigkeit,” which means something like “weird” or “wonderous.” Hence, to avoid confusion, in the remainder of this article it will simply be referred to as “the trinity.”

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Mansoor, Peter R. . “Introduction.” In Hybrid Warfare: Fighting Complex Opponents from the Ancient World to the Present, eds. Williamson Murray and Peter R. Mansoor, –. New York: Cambridge University Press. McInnes, Colin. . “The British Army’s New Way in Warfare: A Doctrinal Misstep?” Defense and Security Analysis (): –. Mewett, Christopher. . “Understanding War’s Enduring Nature Alongside Its Changing Character.” War on the Rocks.  January . https://warontherocks .com///understanding-wars-enduring-nature-alongside-its-changing-cha racter/. Münkler, Herfried. . The New Wars. New York: Polity. Murray, Williamson. . America and the Future of War: The Past as Prologue. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. NATO. . AJP- Allied Joint Doctrine. Edition E Version . NATO Standardization Office (NSO). Nordin, Astrid H. M., and Dan Öberg. . “Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies (): –. Nørgaard, Katrine, and Søren Sjøgren. . Robotterne Styrer!: Militær Teknopolitik Og Risikoledelse I Praksis. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. Öberg, Dan. . “Exercising War: How Tactical and Operational Modelling Shape and Reify Military Practice.” Security Dialogue (–): –. Plato. . The Republic, trans. Otto Foss. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Press. Popper, Karl R. . The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Abingdon: Routledge. Posen, Barry R. . “Foreword: Military Doctrine and the Management of Uncertainty.” Journal of Strategic Studies (): –. Schøning, Anna Sofie H. ‘Fortid for fremtid. Historiebrug i Hærens Videregående Officersuddannelse’. Roskilde Universitet, . Shaw, Martin. . The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq. London: Polity. Simpson, Emilie. . “Clausewitz’s Theory of War and Victory in Contemporary Conflict.” Parameters (): –. Singer, Peter W., and Emerson T. Brooking. . Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media. New York: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sjøgren, S. . Hvordan Kan Vi Stå, Når Vi Skal Forstå Doktrin?—En Videnskabsteoretisk Terrænorientering I Studiet Af Doktrin. Militært Tidsskrift. https:// krigsvidenskab.dk/emne/hvordan-kan-vi-sta-nar-vi-skal-forsta-doktrin-en-viden skabsteoretisk-terraenorientering-i-studiet-af-doktrin. Sjøgren, Søren. ‘What Military Commanders Do and How They Do It: Executive Decision-Making in the Context of Standardised Planning Processes and Doctrine’. Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies  (): –. Smith, Rupert. . The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. New York: Penguin. Sorley, Lewis. . A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. Stoker, Donald, and Craig Whiteside. . “Blurred Lines: Gray-Zone Conflict and Hybrid War—Two Failures of American Strategic Thinking.” Naval War College Review (): –.

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Part II

+ New Perspectives on Senior Officership

chapter 3

Military Contrarianism The Case of Israel Yagil Levy

+ Introduction Military contrarianism relates to modes of resistance undertaken by the military command vis-à-vis elected civilians in democracies. Contrarianism as described in this chapter relates to the military command’s attempt to change, even thwart, politicians’ will by resisting it directly or indirectly. Thus, contrarianism has a more specific meaning than Peter Feaver’s “shirking” (: ), namely doing things that are not to the civilians’ satisfaction; or Michael Desch’s “noncompliance” (: –). The question I raise concerns the conditions in which contrarianism appears. Drawing on the case of Israel, this chapter offers a structural analysis of the relations between the military and the political echelon based on theories concerning the military’s bargaining space vis-à-vis the government. I will argue that when the military perceives the conduct of politicians as harmful, rupturing the exchange relations between the two sides, it tends to resist by demonstrating its independence and attempting to thwart politicians’ will. The form and intensity of the military’s opposition derives from the intersection between the level of perceived harm done to the military and the power relations that exist among the echelons—determined mainly by politicians’ need for the military’s legitimation services. The next section presents the theoretical framework; the third section provides a general background to the case of Israel. The following three sections will test the theory by using three cases.

The Theoretical Assumption One of the main theoretical questions is, what leads the military to accept civilian authority? The most comprehensive structural explanation was pro-

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vided by the theory of state formation. Accordingly, since the appearance of gunpowder and mass conscription, rulers must extract the means of war— conscription and taxation—directly from their populations. Consequently, the military’s dependence on civilian institutions for these resources has increased. In turn, extraction of resources requires extensive bargaining between rulers and citizens, and leads the state to allocate rights in exchange for collecting taxes or recruiting military personnel. Historically, this trade-off has also involved granting political rights in a way that established the public’s ability to monitor the military and submit it to the popular will (see in particular Tilly ). Oversight of the military can therefore be conceptualized in terms of relations of exchange between the military and civilian institutions: the military accepts the subordination and the limitations placed on its autonomy in exchange for resources mobilized for it by civilian state institutions. These range from resources that civilian institutions allocate to maintain the military, legitimation granted to the military, and, as Desch (: ) has emphasized, a large measure of autonomy that these institutions cede to the military in its technical sphere. It should be noted that this is not a formal or explicit exchange relationship in which each party is aware of the assets it is trading. Rather, it consists of a structural pattern in which each side’s satisfaction with the emerging situation leads it to institutionalize the exchange relationship and expand it until it is fixed within the civic political culture. As legitimacy resources play a role, politicians can often adopt a military worldview in exchange for the military’s acceptance of their authority. (For this type of exchange, see Ben-Eliezer .) As Samuel Finer (: –) has pointed out, the officer corps’ motivation to act politically to defend its own corporate interests rises when it believes the government is undermining the military’s professional autonomy, thereby threatening the officers’ professional pride and careers. In this spirit, the military’s dissatisfaction with the exchange relations occurs when it subjectively perceives these relations as unbalanced. Such dissatisfaction develops in one of the following situations (and is partly reflected in the cases on which this chapter draws). First, the military feels that it is not receiving either material or legitimacy resources in a manner suited to its politically tasked missions. Second, the military’s room for professional autonomous action is constricted by politicians. Third, political-cultural processes threaten the military’s organizational interests or identity—for example, democratization, demilitarization, or liberalization—which challenge the militaristic character of society and thus also challenge the military’s status (see the introduction to this volume). Fourth, the military is given tasks that it is unlikely to perform successfully and, as a result, a doc-

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trinal dispute develops and intensifies as the military’s concerns increase regarding its future organizational interests that could be harmed by failure. Last, politicians do not respect the military leadership personally or institutionally. (For a summary of this approach, see Levy .) The perception of an unbalanced exchange could lead the military to resist political authority in different ways. This can range from a bureaucratic conflict between the military command and the politicians, as often takes place in Western democracies, or a military coup, as occurred particularly during the s and s in nondemocratic societies. This chapter, however, examines the type of moderate conflicts that characterize democracies like Israel. Since explicit disobedience is not legitimate in democratic systems, the military can take specific action to show its dismay, as follows (the list is not exhaustive): () resignation by military personnel due to disagreements with the political echelon’s orders (Kohn ); () foot-dragging as a pattern of shirking or narrow interpretation of the civilian-directed mission orders (Feaver : ); () publicly expressing a position that challenges politicians’ positions or decisions, and mobilizing other forms of public support in an attempt to thwart the elected politicians’ will (Brooks : –); () recruiting retired senior officers—at the military’s initiative, or that of others—who speak for those in uniform (Cook ); () leveraging disagreements among civilians—typical of the US case—to ally with a particular branch of the administration to influence policy outcome (Avant ). Performing a politicized, rather than professional, advisory role can be part of this maneuvering (Coletta and Crosbie ). Nevertheless, the military’s right to speak out against a policy that it opposes has been disputed among American scholars and military personnel since the Vietnam War (Cook : –; Brooks ). The military’s dissatisfaction grows the more its dispute with the politicians is doctrinal or organizational, and the more it concerns a wide range of military institutions rather than just personal relations between military personnel and politicians. The more intense the dispute, the greater the military commanders’ motivation to justify their contrarian behavior. Whereas the military’s motivation to resist its superiors derives from the perceived level of violation of the exchange relations, the level of the military’s opposition derives from the balance of power among the echelons and can be assessed by its dependence on civilian institutions. A high level of dependence may dictate restraint. Dependence is especially low when the military indeed depends on civilians for resources and legitimacy, but civilians have limited ability to hinder the flow of resources to the military or object to its operations. This situation occurs when politicians are dependent on the military as well. In other words, a high level of politicians’

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dependence on the military weakens the dependence of the military on the politicians. Politicians’ dependence on the military grows mainly when they need its legitimation services. As C. Wright Mills explains, “From the standpoint of the party politician, a well-trained general or admiral is an excellent legitimator of policies, for his careful use often makes it possible to lift the policy “above politics,” which is to say above political debate and into the realm of administration” (: ). The military then helps “sell” the policy that the politicians are seeking to promote, which is common in American politics in recent decades (Hooker –: –). To the extent that the military’s mode of deployment is debated and the parties aspire to mobilize support, the importance of these legitimation services increases. In this situation, the military’s opinion will greatly influence policymaking as it would be used against the opponents of those politicians it serves, and the military would receive relatively broad autonomy in executing the policy. Then, the more the military attempts to loosen the reins of political oversight, or disagree publicly with the government’s position, the more limited the politicians’ ability will be to punish it for deviating from instructions or from the rules of conduct (Feaver ). Furthermore, the less divided the political elite on questions concerning military deployment, the greater its ability to discipline the military. Under such conditions, the military has limited ability to maneuver between competing political groups or branches in order to raise the support necessary to advocate against the policy or instructions dictated by the government (Avant ). The freedom of operation given to the military is therefore an asset in the exchange relationship: freedom of action (professional autonomy) is given to the military in exchange for obedience, as identified in Samuel Huntington’s classic work The Soldier and the State (). At times, freedom of action can also be exchanged for the military refraining from political mobilization that would thwart the will of elected politicians. Just as there are divisions within the political system, the military establishment is sometimes also divided. Under these circumstances, politicians can exploit intra-military divisions by assisting one element in the military to persuade an opposing element to get the military to accept the politicians’ position or to weaken the generals’ ability to resist. This situation, for example, helped President George W. Bush persuade the military leaders to endorse the surge strategy in Iraq in  (Feaver ). Military restraint also increases when the politicians in charge of the armed forces have military experience. In the United States, for example, civilians who served in the military would bring a larger measure of moral competence than those who had avoided serving, thus further weakening

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the hand of a military command to resist civilian directions (Feaver : ). In this case, the military’s legitimation services are not in such demand. In conclusion, the military scope of options for contrarian behavior toward politicians is shaped by the intersection between the military’s perception of the intensity of harm caused by the politicians and the power balance between the military and civilians, which is largely determined by the military’s legitimation services required by elected civilians. Accordingly, the perception of a high level of harm and civilians’ high level of dependence on the military produce direct, high-level contrarianism—modes of resistance that are relatively strong and open to the public. Low levels of both variables produce a moderate pattern of resistance that may also be indirect. This theoretical framework provides the tools for explaining the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) command’s repertoire of opposition to the political leadership. To test this theoretical assumption, I will analyze three cases that represent high, medium, and low levels of contrarianism respectively.

Background Even before the formal establishment of the state in , the principle of political supervision over the military was consolidated in Israel with the subordination of the main underground paramilitary organizations to political authority, largely thanks to the development of strong pre-state Jewish institutions. These funded the paramilitary organizations and recruited the human resources (volunteers) needed, thereby establishing the organizations’ material dependence on the political institutions. Nonetheless, friction between politicians and generals did develop in the state’s first years over the delimitation of authority between the military and politicians. Tensions were also evident on the eve of the Six-Day War (), when disputes arose over the use of force and the military’s deployment. However, civilian control of the military grew much tighter in subsequent years—Basic Law: The Military () established the military’s subordination to political authority. Concurrently, arrangements were established to limit the military’s freedom of operation. Its ability to challenge the politicians by initiating retaliatory action without explicit political approval— which occurred in the s and s—was gradually reduced. (This summary is based on Levy .) The  war and, more profoundly, the first Lebanon war () marked a change in the mode of civilian control with the emergence of extra-institutional control mechanisms. Extra-institutional control is action generally taken by nonbureaucratic actors (mainly social movements

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and interest groups) acting in the public sphere in an attempt to bargain with the military, or to restrain it, either directly or through civilian state institutions. Extra-institutional actors monitored various spheres of military activity, such as the draft policy (particularly with regard to reserve duty and service by women and the ultra-Orthodox), or the deployment in the West Bank (through settlers’ and civil rights organizations) (Levy and Michael ). With the increasing involvement of both lawmakers and the Finance Ministry’s Budget Department, oversight of the military’s financial resources also gradually strengthened. These processes led military scholar Stuart Cohen () to argue that the military was becoming “overly-subordinate” to civilian oversight. Nevertheless, the leeway given to the IDF—like that of any other military operating in a democratic environment—not only derives from formal arrangements but is also greatly influenced by the balance of power between the military and the state’s civil institutions, as theorized earlier in the text, and as is evident in the cases presented in what follows.

High-Level Contrarianism: The First Months of the Second Intifada The second intifada, a new round of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, erupted in September , following the failure to reach a final Israel-Palestinian peace agreement as prescribed by the  Oslo Accords. This period saw a series of frictions between Shaul Mofaz, the IDF chief of staff (hereinafter CoS), and the government headed by prime minister and defense minister (and former CoS) Ehud Barak. From the military’s point of view, the exchange relations with state institutions had become unbalanced. The trends toward liberalization and demilitarization during the second half of the s forced the military to reassess its identity in the new reality in Israeli society, in which it was gradually losing its centrality. A few months before the intifada broke out, the military withdrew from Lebanon after eighteen years of war; ultimately this was perceived as a withdrawal under fire resulting from the pressure of civil protests (especially, as most Israelis believed, those staged by the Four Mothers movement—see Yaar and Hermann ), thus harming the military’s self-image and of course its public image as well. The military expressed its opposition to a unilateral withdrawal, which it considered dangerous and therefore likely to harm the standing of the military as a future provider of security, and this opposition leaked out (Peri : –). If that were not enough, the military’s resources were reduced, with the

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last cut dictated by Prime Minister Barak on the eve of the second intifada (Drucker and Shelah ). The imbalance of the exchange relations was exacerbated with the outbreak of the intifada that further undermined the image of the military as having failed again to provide security for the community of citizens. All this followed the collapse of the Oslo Accords, of which the military had been one of the architects. Furthermore, the IDF had already been harmed in the Western Wall tunnel crisis, which generated clashes with Palestinian militias in September  and resulted in the death of seventeen IDF soldiers and around a hundred Palestinians. On the basis of the lesson from this painful experience, the military drafted operational plans for an armed conflict in . “It was understood that the intention was to reach a casualty ratio that would demonstrate which side was stronger,” testified Major-General (ret.) Giora Eiland, then head of the IDF Operations Directorate (Eiland : ). As the balance of the exchange had been violated, the military was pushed to defend its status. The perception that the political leadership was harming the military gave CoS Mofaz the motivation to adopt contrarian behavior. This motivation intersected with the ability to stretch the boundaries of the permissible in the formal framework that institutionalizes the military’s subordination to political authority. The CoS recognized that this was a situation in which the political echelon was dependent on the military, and that the military and diplomatic moves were being guided by a government that had lost its parliamentary majority—a government that would later become transitional. Against this background, Mofaz and other military commanders criticized the government’s policy of restraint and containment in dealing with Palestinian hostilities, stating that it would not calm the situation (Peri : –). Gradually, the military publicly framed the hostilities as a war (Barnea : –), while the government was simultaneously attempting to promote the diplomatic channel by discussing US president Bill Clinton’s parameters for an agreement with the Palestinians. The government accepted the parameters, but CoS Mofaz declared that they constituted an existential danger. The foreign minister at the time, Shlomo Ben-Ami, viewed this comment as being almost tantamount to a military coup (Ben-Ami : ). The military’s independence was not only demonstrated in words. Field commanders were given a great deal of freedom in conducting the policy of aggressively suppressing Palestinian uprisings, frequently deviating from government decisions that could have de-escalated the hostilities (Drucker and Shelah ). Overaggressiveness resulted in a fatality ratio of : (ten Israelis to a hundred Palestinians) in October , the first and most crucial month of the clashes (B’Tselem n.d.[a]). At times, this

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created a sense that the government, and, in particular, Prime Minister and Defense Minister Barak, had lost control of the military (Caspit ; Peri : –). Former CoS Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who served as a minister in the Barak government, gave voice to Barak’s weakness in restraining the military, saying: “Barak knew it could be publicized in the media that he gave the military guidelines that were not to the military’s liking. He was very concerned about that. I have no doubt that he feared that such leaks could undermine legitimacy” (Michael, personal communication, ). So, from the civilian perspective, the IDF provided legitimation services not by legitimizing the declining peace process but by refraining from further undermining the legitimacy of the government. Under such conditions, the politicians avoided punishing the military for its deviations. To summarize, a combination of an unbalanced exchange and the legitimation services the IDF supplied to elected civilians provided the military with greater freedom to resist government policies. The exchange relations became much more balanced in  when the government of Major-General (ret.) Ariel Sharon replaced that of Barak. The transition to a more aggressive policy toward the Palestinian Authority, which reached its peak in Operation Defensive Shield (), during which Israel partly reoccupied the West Bank, allowed the military to rehabilitate its status. Sharon’s approach was that the military should be allowed to win (Weissglass : –), thereby reducing the military’s motivation to behave in a contrarian fashion toward the government. Furthermore, a right-wing government, and in particular one led by a renowned military figure like Ariel Sharon, was less exposed to the pressures of using military force than a left-center government would have been and was better able to deal with such pressures. Consequently, politicians’ need for the military’s legitimation services was reduced, and so too the military’s ability to adopt contrarianism. These factors led to less friction between the military command and the prime minister and minister of defense (Levy : ).

Mid-Level Contrarianism: The Disengagement The relatively balanced exchange was again undermined in the years that followed. During the first few years of the intifada, the military’s operations had broad public support, which rehabilitated its status. However, problems began to develop, mainly after : conscientious objection grew, the released conscripts’ organization Breaking the Silence formed and documented abuse of Palestinians, and criticism was voiced regarding the harm caused to Palestinian noncombatants as a result of targeted killings; there was also criticism of the IDF’s presence on the Philadelphi

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Corridor (separating the Gaza Strip from Egypt), which led to many IDF casualties. The erosion of legitimacy at home, coupled with fear of the erosion of international legitimacy for IDF operations, gave rise to the Disengagement Plan, the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, with the sensitive evacuation of about eight thousand Jewish settlers residing there. This plan was greatly influenced by the domestic process, according to Dov Weissglass, then head of the prime minister’s bureau and one of the plan’s architects (Shavit ). CoS Moshe Yaalon read the Disengagement Plan as a security threat. Along with this basic view, he objected to the fact that the political decision was taken, in his view, without the military (Knesset, State Comptroller Committee ). Having the military participate in decision-making processes was one of the assets granted by the government in exchange for the military’s subordination to political authority, which Yoram Peri () calls the “partnership model” between the military and the politicians. From the perspective of the military, a political move like the disengagement that involved risk had the potential to expose the military to criticism over its inability to provide security if the risk were to materialize in the future. From another standpoint, appointing Shaul Mofaz to the position of defense minister only a few months after he had retired as CoS had the potential to create tension between the military and the politicians. Minister Mofaz’s intervention in allocating troops for the Disengagement Plan (Weissglass : –), along with allegations about direct dialogue between the prime minister’s bureau and military officers, exacerbated the tension between the sides, to the point that Yaalon considered resigning (Yaalon : –). In this case, the violation of the exchange by undermining the military’s status, restricting its autonomy, and disregarding its professional outlook paved the way for contrarian conduct by the CoS. In this instance, contrarianism took the form of Yaalon’s resounding statement against the Disengagement Plan in March , in which he said it “would give a tail-wind to terrorism” (Halfon ). Right-wing politicians used this opinion to criticize the disengagement. However, room for opposition by the CoS was limited: the move was led by a right-wing government headed by renowned military figures, such as Sharon and Mofaz, and had relatively broad public support. It is indicative that about two months before the withdrawal,  percent of the Jewish population supported it (Yaar and Hermann ). Politicians’ dependence on the military is generally weaker when a political process has broad legitimacy, although in this case this dependence increased slightly as the government moved from conventional fighting against the Palestinians to a withdrawal. Furthermore, the military establishment was divided, as the Disengagement Plan was initially developed by the IDF’s Strategic Planning

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Division (Caspit ). Under these circumstances, the IDF could not oppose the plan in a unified manner. The CoS’s restraint, therefore, was effective. In the first stage, Yaalon prepared the military for the move despite his own objections, and in the second stage, a year later, the defense minister decided not to extend Yaalon’s term for a fourth year. In one sense, this was tantamount to dismissing the CoS, and the task of leading the disengagement was handed to Yaalon’s successor, Dan Halutz. The plan was implemented smoothly in summer . To summarize, the combination of an unbalanced exchange but with limited legitimation services restrained the military command’s ability to resist. In circumstances such as these, the military can be restrained even without an exchange in the form of a partnership in decision-making. It is reasonable to assume that had a center-left government led this process, the politicians’ dependence on the military would have been much greater, given the powerful opposition of the right, which the military could have leveraged to strengthen its position in the decision-making process.

Low-Level Contrarianism: The Lone Intifada and Iran From October  to December , some young Palestinians carried out “lone-wolf ” style attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers, resulting in about thirty Israeli casualties (B’Tselem, n.d.[b]). Israeli security forces responded with force, carrying out hundreds of arrest operations per month in the West Bank, and killing about two hundred Palestinians (B’Tselem, n.d.[c]). At the same time, the army tightened the rules of engagement to reduce the number of Palestinian fatalities, as “funerals [had] become a demonstration of public identification,” in the words of the Chief of Central Command, Major-General Roni Numa (Numa and Liraz : ). The logic was to prevent a third intifada. Right-wing politicians, however, wanted to escalate the response and pressed the IDF to loosen the rules of engagement further and use greater force against suspected attackers (Mualem ). The IDF’s leaders resisted the pressure and, what is more, they publicly called for greater moderation on the part of their soldiers. CoS Gadi Eisenkot, for example, declared in February  that he did not “want a soldier to empty a magazine on a girl with scissors”—a reference to shootings of scissors-wielding Palestinian teenagers by Israeli security forces in an exchange of violence that some right-wing Israelis saw as justified (Cohen ). A year later, Eisenkot even publicly but subtly criticized the politicians, saying that a third intifada had not developed thanks to the perfor-

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mance of force that distinguished between the general population and the terrorists, and the “wise policy that rejected calls for closures and barring people from working as a punitive measure” (Cohen ). The IDF and the right-wing camp clashed in March  when Elor Azaria, an Israeli conscript combatant, was filmed killing an immobilized Palestinian attacker (Abd al-Fattah Yusri al–Sharif ) in the West Bank city of Hebron. The decision by the IDF to try Azaria for manslaughter instead of pardoning him provoked unprecedented right-wing protests against the IDF. A few months earlier, polls showed that  percent of Jewish interviewees agreed with the statement that “any Palestinian who has perpetrated a terror attack against Jews should be killed on the spot, even if he has been apprehended and no longer poses a threat” (Yaar and Hermann ). This statement stood at odds with Israeli law. No wonder that following the affair, in July , polls showed that among the “hard right,” about half saw no concordance between the IDF senior command’s values and those of the general public (Yaar and Hermann ). At the same time, in a speech delivered on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day in May , IDF deputy CoS Major-General Yair Golan echoed the Azaria affair and compared the racism and xenophobia roiling Israel to the ills of Weimar Germany. Golan’s comments were an implicit criticism of Israel’s rightist civilian leadership, and they sparked a right-wing backlash against the military. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuked the general and demanded that he retract his statement, but defense minister and former CoS Moshe Yaalon supported Golan (Efraim and Azoulay ). With mounting violence in the West Bank, the IDF was concerned about becoming embroiled in military conflicts it could not win decisively. The command jealously guarded its own organizational interests, the most important of which was to preserve its reputation, access to state funding, and ability to control its troops (which the Azaria case had challenged). Indeed, since the s, asymmetric clashes with non-state actors such as Hezbollah and Hamas had harmed the IDF’s reputation (Levy ). For example, the IDF ended Operation Protective Edge (in the summer of ) against the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip with a sense of failure. This operation exposed the IDF as being unprepared to deal with the tunnels Hamas had built in order to infiltrate Israeli territory. Israel lost sixtyfive soldiers in this operation, mainly during the ground invasion aimed at destroying the tunnel system (Harel ). With its completion, about  percent of Jewish responders believed that the operation had not affected Israel’s security or made it worse (Yaar and Hermann ). Importantly, the operation resulted from an escalation that had a life of its own, even though the interests of the sides did not support reinitiating such a

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large-scale conflict, as the IDF itself testified to the Israel State Comptroller. Furthermore, the military was unwillingly dragged into the costly ground operation to remove the threat of tunnels, which the IDF did not see as justification for the operation (Israel State Comptroller : –). A similar logic guided the generals with regard to Iran. In , CoS Gabi Ashkenazi allied with other security agencies to thwart the intention of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to attack the nuclear installations in Iran. However, the IDF’s objection became public only later (Michael and Even : –). In January , Prime Minister Netanyahu led a campaign to convince US president Donald Trump to exit the deal with Iran (signed in  between Iran, the United States, European powers, Russia, and China) that imposed tight restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. However, CoS Eisenkot publicly defended the deal and presented what could be seen as “the most direct public challenge yet posed by Israel’s security services to the repeated claim by Netanyahu that the Iran nuclear agreement threatens Israel’s survival” (Goldberg ). For the IDF, breaking the deal could yield risky frictions with the Iranians and their proxies (as it indeed transpired later). At the same time, the IDF’s room for maneuver vis-à-vis the politicians was expanded because its legitimation services were needed. Such services had been required by the rightist governments, headed by Netanyahu since , for supporting hardline policies (mainly toward the Palestinians) in the face of opposition from the center-left. Such potential opposition is especially vociferous when it is not simply motivated by ideology but also by reluctance to sacrifice both life and money, as has been characteristic of Israeli society since the s, especially in light of declining existential threats. Under such conditions, the rightist leadership needs legitimation services to silence the center-left, as the IDF has always been the stronghold of the secular middle class, in particular the upper echelon associated with the center-left. This group established the military and occupied its senior positions until at least the s. Nonetheless, the s and s saw this group split away from the IDF, not only in terms of losing its standing to other groups but also in liberating itself from the shackles of military thought and the interests of the military organization. Ironically, however, the more the IDF was attacked by rightist groups, for example during the Azaria affair, the more the center-left was pushed to protect the military again. The IDF was even absurdly portrayed as one of the “fortresses of democracy,” which the right, allegedly, threatened to dismantle. (See, for example, the  speech of centrist Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog, in the shadow of the Azaria affair; Knesset .) Little wonder that the IDF garnered the highest level of trust among the left: as of , . percent of Israelis trust IDF

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senior commanders’ professionalism, but with higher rates among the left (. percent), relative to about  percent among the center and the right (Israel Democracy Institute ). Absurdly, the IDF is trusted most by the political camp that should suspect it most. The IDF provided legitimation services for the government to legitimize policies vis-à-vis the center-left and, therefore, could also use this group’s support to act with more freedom. Still, rightist governments are less dependent than leftist ones on the legitimation services of the military, especially when legitimation is required for passive acceptance of the government’s routine policies rather than for active support in war or peace. Hence, the IDF’s freedom of action was not entirely unlimited. Furthermore, its motivation was not unlimited either, as the issue was not one of actual policies forced on the military, as in the case of the second intifada and the disengagement, but rather pressures accompanied by hawkish rhetoric. No less important was the fact that one of Eisenkot’s main achievements was the government’s decision to finance the IDF’s multiyear plan (Gideon), the first of its kind since , of which Eisenkot was very proud (Eisenkot ) and therefore not eager to risk by clashing with the elected civilians. Against this background, the IDF command refrained from publicly challenging policies or attempting to thwart the civilians’ formal will. With limited ability and motivation to adopt contrarian behavior toward the politicians, contrarianism was channeled into a subtler, indirect means of opposition. In this spirit, Eisenkot summed up the relations with the politicians after his retirement thus: “It happened to me as chief of staff, and not once, that a political actor called me and said: ‘You have to go to war here, to war there.’ It was removed from the table” (Fishman : ).

Conclusion Even if the principle that the military is subordinated to civilian control goes unquestioned in general, and in particular in Israel, tensions between generals and politicians have the potential to weaken political authority. This can happen when officers demonstrate various forms of opposition to politicians they feel are harming or could harm the military. From the officers’ point of view, this is a violation of the exchange relationship that establishes civilian control over the military. Generals are thus dragged into military politics. Military commanders have a repertoire of means to challenge the decisions of politicians without risking a flagrant violation of the principle of political authority over the military. The choice of which means to use

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derives from the intersection between two factors. The first is the perceived intensity of the violation—the greater the violation, the greater the motivation to demonstrate contrarianism. The second factor is the balance of power between the military and the politicians—the military’s ability to demonstrate independence from politicians, or even attempt to thwart their will, increases as the politicians’ need for the military’s legitimation services grows. This theoretical assumption was tested by analyzing three cases, which demonstrated three levels of contrarianism. It was direct and high when the IDF command, headed by CoS Mofaz, leveraged the legitimation services it afforded the Barak government with the outbreak of the second intifada to protect against policies that could further harm the IDF’s already damaged reputation. In the case of the disengagement, with more limited legitimation services provided to the Sharon government, coupled with an intra-military dispute about the extent to which the plan risked the IDF, CoS Yaalon was more restrained and thus able to demonstrate midlevel contrarianism. The conditions under which CoS Eisenkot performed resulted in less room for resistance. In his case, he provided Netanyahu’s hawkish government with legitimation services that were needed mainly to allay the center-left’s fears of military adventurism, though rightist civilian dependence on the military was not so high. At the same time, the potential harm to the military posed by the government’s policies was also not so high as long as the government did not turn rhetoric into clear directives. Consequently, the level of contrarianism was low. It follows that the interplay between the variables may explain different levels of contrarianism. Figure . summarizes the argument. This chapter tried to partially close a gap in the CMR literature. If this literature tries to explain, rather than just map, forms of contrarianism (see, for example, Brooks ), it focuses too much on the black box of dialogue between officers and politicians, neglecting the antecedent power relations between the sides that shape this dialogue. By considering the relations between the sides in terms of an exchange, we can factor in the context for the bargaining between the military and the state institutions. Crucial is the capacity of state institutions to allocate resources to the military, such as legitimacy, recruitment, budget, and autonomous space, in exchange for its full obedience. The state’s deficiencies may limit its ability to support the military and thereby create tensions between sides. At the same time, even an unbalanced exchange from the military point of view will not disrupt the relations between the sides if the politicians can mobilize legitimacy for diplomatic and military moves. The greater this ability is, the less dependent the politicians are on the military’s legitimation services, and the greater their ability to impose discipline even if the military

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Figure .. Scope of contrarianism. © Yagil Levy.

feels that its interests are being harmed. Thus, a focus on exchange also makes the military’s readiness to accept civilian control more understandable. Its dependence on civilian institutions demarcates its room for maneuver. Rather than a situation in which the military command is coerced, the sides exchange assets—both simultaneously gaining and forgoing material and symbolic assets alike. While, for example, Feaver’s () theory focuses on the strategic interaction between civilians and officers, the theory proposed here illustrates the conditions under which this interaction takes place. Thus, it expands the scope of resources each player brings to monitor, punish, shirk, or obey. Chiara Ruffa and I recently demonstrated the explanatory power of this hypothesis (Ruffa and Levy ). We analyzed the open letter signed by a thousand retired French servicepeople, in which they warned of political intervention by the military if President Emmanuel Macron failed to halt the “disintegration” of France. We explained this political act in terms of a ruptured trade-off between the military and the president in areas such as budget and the military’s deployment in domestic policing. A fruitful avenue for future research would be to test additional cases to provide further validation of the theory.

Yagil Levy is a professor of political sociology and public policy at the Open University of Israel. His main research interest is in the theoretical and em-

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pirical aspects of civil–military relations, particularly casualty sensitivity, civilian control, military–religious relations, and the social makeup of the armed forces. He has published seven books, three of them in English, in addition to a coauthored book, a textbook, and three edited volumes, and has authored over eighty academic articles, chapters, and papers in leading journals. Between  and  Levy served as president of the European Research Group on Military and Society (ERGOMAS). He also serves on the board of editors of Armed Forces and Society and publishes op-ed articles regularly in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

References Avant, Deborah D. . “Are the Reluctant Warriors Out of Control? Why the U.S. Military Is Averse to Responding to Post–Cold War Low-Level Threats.” Security Studies (): –. B’Tselem, n.d.(a). “Fatalities: Before Operation ‘Cast Lead.’” https://www.btselem.org/ statistics/fatalities/before-cast-lead/by-date-of-event/. ———. n.d.(b). “Fatalities: Since Cast Lead.” https://statistics.btselem.org/en/stats/ since-cast-lead/by-date-of-incident?section=overallandtab=overview. ———. n.d.(c). “Palestinians Killed by Israeli Security Forces in the West Bank, Since Operation Cast Lead.” https://www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/after-castlead/by-date-of-event/westbank/palestinians-killed-by-israeli-security-forces/bymonth. Barnea, N. . “Just Not Kafr Qana.” Yediot Aharonot (Supplement).  October , –. [Hebrew]. Ben-Ami, Shlomo. . Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli–Arab Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ben-Eliezer, Uri. . “Rethinking the Civil–Military Relations Paradigm: The Inverse Relation Between Militarism and Praetorianism Through the Example of Israel.” Comparative Political Studies (): –. Brooks, Risa A. . “Militaries and Political Activity in Democracies.” In American Civil–Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era, eds. Suzanne C. Nielsen and Don M. Snider, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Caspit, Ben. . “Rosh Hashanah : Two Years of Intifada.” Ma’ariv NRG.  September . http://www.nrg.co.il/online/archive/art//.html. [Hebrew]. ———. . “This Is How the Disengagement Plan Was Born.” Ma’ariv NRG.  July . https://www.makorrishon.co.il/nrg/online//art//.html. [Hebrew]. Cohen, Gili. . “Israeli Army Chief: I Don’t Want Soldiers Emptying Magazines on Girls with Scissors.” Haaretz.  February . https://www.haaretz.com/Is rael-news/idf-chief-i-dont-want-soldiers-emptying-agazines-on-girls-with-sciss ors-.. ———. . “IDF Chief on Hebron Shooter’s Trial: Treating a Soldier Like a ‘Confused Little Boy’ Demeans the Army.” Haaretz.  January . https://www .haaretz.com/israel-news/idf-chief-treating-shooter-like-a-confused-little-boy-de means-army-..

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Cohen, Stuart A. . “Changing Civil–Military Relations in Israel: Towards an Over– Subordinate IDF?” Israel Affairs (): –. Coletta, D., and Thomas Crosbie. . “The Virtues of Military Politics.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Cook, Martin L. . “Revolt of the Generals: A Case Study in Professional Ethics.” Parameters : –. Desch, Michael C. . Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. . “Bush and the Generals.” Foreign Affairs (): –. Drucker, Raviv, and Ofer Shelah. . Boomerang: The Failure of Leadership in the Second Intifada. Keter Books. http://drucker.net/?page_id=. [Hebrew]. Efraim, Omri, and Moran Azoulay. . “Netanyahu Criticizes IDF Deputy Chief of Staff.” Ynet.  June . https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/,,l- ,.html. Eiland, Giora. . “The IDF in the Second Intifada.” Strategic Assessment (): –. Eisenkot, Gadi. . “Multi–Year ‘Gideon’: ‘Gideon’—Why and How?” Maarachot.  May , , –. [Hebrew]. Feaver, Peter D. . Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. . “The Right to Be Right: Civil–Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision.” International Security (): –. Finer, Samuel E. . The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics. New York: Transaction Publishers. Fishman, Alex. . “Interview with Former Chief of General Staff.” Yediot Aharonot (Supplement).  September . [Hebrew]. Goldberg, J. J. . “Israel’s Top General Praises Iran Deal as ‘Strategic Turning Point’ in Slap at Bibi.” Forward.  January . https://forward.com/opinion// israels-top-general-praises-iran-deal-as-strategic-turning-point-in-slap-at/. Halfon, Artzi. . “Chief of Staff : Evacuation Under Fire Won’t Solve the Problem.” Ynet.  March . http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/,,l-,.html. [Hebrew]. Harel, Amos. . “This Lawmaker Won’t Let the Gaza War Be Pushed Under the Rug.” Haaretz.  April . https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-this-mk-won-tlet-the-gaza-war-be-pushed-under-the-rug-.. Hooker, Richard D. –. “Soldiers of the State: Reconsidering American Civil– Military Relations.” Parameters (): –. Huntington, Samuel P. . The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil– Military Relations. New York: Vintage Books. Israel Democracy Institute. . “Large Majority Think IDF Should Manage Coronavirus Crisis.” [Special Survey, November ]. https://en.idi.org.il/articles/. Israel State Comptroller. . “Operation Protective Edge.” Mevaker. http://www.me vaker.gov.il/he/reports/pages/.aspx. [Hebrew]. Knesset. . “News of the Knesset.” Ha’Knesset.  October . https://main.knes set.gov.il/news/pressreleases/pages/press-.aspx. [Hebrew]. Knesset, State Comptroller Committee. . “Protocol No. .” Ha’Knesset.  June . https://main.knesset.gov.il/activity/committees/statecontrol/pages/commit teeprotocols.aspx. [Hebrew].

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Kohn, Richard H. . “Always Salute, Never Resign: How Resignation Threatens Military Professionalism and National Security.” Foreign Affairs.  November . http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles//richard-h-kohn/always-salu te-never-resign. Levy, Yagil. . “A Revised Model of Civilian Control of the Military: The Interaction Between the Republican Exchange and the Control Exchange.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. ———. . “Military Contrarianism in Israel: Room for Opposition by the Chief of Staff to Politicians.” Military and Strategic Affairs (): –. ———. . “The Real Reasons for the IDF’s Break with Netanyahu.” Foreign Affairs.  June . https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/--/ real-reasons-idf-s-break-netanyahu. ———. . “The Dynamics of Civil–Military Relations and the Complexity of Israel’s Security Policies.” In Routledge Handbook on Israeli Security, eds. Stuart A. Cohen and Aharon Klieman, –. Abingdon: Routledge. Levy Yagil, and Kobi Michael. . “Conceptualizing Extra-Institutional Control of the Military: Israel as a Case Study.” Res Militaris: European Journal of Military Service (). Michael, K., and Shmuel Even. . “Principles of the Israeli Political–Military Discourse Based on the Recent IDF Strategy Document.” Military and Strategic Affairs (): –. Mills, C. Wright. . The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Mualem, Mazal. . “Right Wing Declares Open Season on IDF Chief of Staff.” Al-Monitor.  February . https://www.al-monitor.com/originals///ga di-eizenkot-high-school-netanyahu-dan-shomron-yaalon.html#ixzzeondxq. Numa, R., and R. Liraz. . “To Win and Stay Human”: The Challenges of the Central Command in the ‘Enormity of the Hour’ Campaign.” Ben Haktavim, , . [Hebrew]. Peri, Yoram. . Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. . Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israeli Policy. Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press. Ruffa Chiara, and Yagil Levy. . “The Shifting State of French Civil–Military Relations.” Political Violence at a Glance.  June . https://politicalviolenceata glance.org////the-shifting-state-of-french-civil-military-relations/. Shavit, Ari. . “The Big Freeze.” Haaretz.  October . http://www.haaretz.com/ the-big-freeze-.. Tilly, Charles. . Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD –. New York: Basil Blackwell. Weissglass, Dov. . Arik Sharon, Prime Minister: A Personal View. Tel Aviv: Yediot Books. [Hebrew]. Yaalon, Moshe. . The Long Short Road. Tel Aviv: Yediot Books. [Hebrew]. Yaar, Ephraim, and Tamar Hermann. . The Peace Index. May . https://www .idi.org.il/dataisrael/_peace_index_eng.pdf. ———. . The Peace Index. June . https://www.idi.org.il/dataisrael/_peace _index_eng.pdf.

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———. . The Peace Index. September . https://www.idi.org.il/dataisrael/_ peace_index_eng.pdf. ———. . The Peace Index. October . https://www.idi.org.il/dataisrael/_ peace_index_eng.pdf. ———. . The Peace Index. July . https://www.idi.org.il/dataisrael/_peace_ index_ eng.pdf.

chapter 4

Embedded in Politics The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Its Chairman, and the Structure of US Civil-Military Relations Sharon K. Weiner

+ Introduction In the United States, the two most significant attempts to structure the relationship between civilians and the military are the National Security Act of  and the  Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act. Both were attempts to provide civilians with the information and authority necessary to evaluate advice from the military services, prioritize service budget requests, and organize the national security apparatus to better serve US goals. Both acts failed in important ways. The National Security Act created a secretary of defense but failed to give that office the necessary political and organizational clout to achieve the intended cooperation between the Army, Air Force, and Navy. The Goldwater-Nichols Act, instead, tried to empower the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to fulfill this role. But, as I argue here, the chairman’s ability to exercise power remains significantly dependent on his respect for the preferences of the JCS. These preferences, in turn, are biased heavily in favor of unanimity, which itself is based on a relative equality among the services. In other words, instead of a chairman that is able to make choices among the services or prioritize their preferences, his power is maximized if he supports the opposite: collusion and equity. Even more consequentially, I argue that the  act made the chairman a more effective advocate for military preferences. The president relies on the chairman to not only offer advice but persuade the service chiefs either to support the president’s policy goals or at least temper their criticism. Therefore, any president who needs the support of the chairman to achieve his policy goals also needs to defer to JCS preferences. This argument is based on an analysis of three contentious budget-related battles:

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downsizing after the Cold War, an attempt under George W. Bush to shift force structure from traditional platforms to a more high-tech military, and efforts to cope with the repeatedly disruptive budget processes that occurred during the Obama administration. I focus on the budget because resources are foundational to choices about force structure, strategy, and military operations. Moreover, budgets are where the prerogatives and preferences of Congress are more likely to contradict those of the White House. Certainly, all budgets require cooperation between the two. But often the interests of these quite distinct “civilians,” and the institutional foundations of their influence over budgets, make for a particularly interesting civil-military dynamic. I begin with a brief summary of the often-conflicting incentives different types of civilians have in their policy engagement with the military. Next is a discussion of the structural conditions that underlay JCS power and why Congress has consistently acted to support these institutional arrangements, even when they come at the expense of national security. This is followed by a description and analysis of the source of my conclusions: three different budget battles that collectively involve four presidents, six secretaries of defense, and five JCS chairmen.

What Civilians Want Officially, civilians want the services to offer their best advice about budgets, force structure, and military options, and to collectively come to some agreement about the trade-offs necessary between the positions of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and, more recently, the Marine Corps and the combatant commanders. The goal is for policy outcomes to reflect national security goals, as negotiated by elected civilians, rather than a summation of the individual preferences of the services. Moreover, the intent is to base national security decisions on the advice of experts. But civilians also want military advice that furthers their political aspirations and provides leverage for other policy battles, some of them largely unrelated to the military. In other words, military advice has never been sought for purely apolitical reasons. Another complication is that not all civilians want the same thing. Certainly, there are political and personal differences between desired national security goals. But, more importantly, civilians have different stakes in their relationship to the military, and different sources of power for pursuing their goals or disrupting the pursuit of goals by other civilians (Huntington ). For the president and the president’s Defense Department team, military leadership provides several functions beyond simply expertise—including

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political cover. No president wants to go against the advice of senior military leaders, especially if the end result is something that can be classified as a failure (Beliakova ). Being wrong is politically safer if the collective wisdom of the JCS was also wrong. Even in situations where there are credible alternative sources of expertise, the president is still loath to act contrary to military advice. The president also wants the services to coordinate when they offer advice. Ideally, conflicting sources of expertise should enable any leader to better understand the pitfalls and shortcomings of adopting a recommendation. (For this notion applied to budgets, see Enke ; Kanter .) For example, early in the nuclear age, the Air Force pointed out problems with basing nuclear weapons on submarines, and the Navy was more than happy to return the favor by identifying problems with nuclear-capable bombers. But over time the services learned that when they argue with each other, they invite civilian leaders to make choices between them (Korb ; Fuller ; Huntington ). Rather than fall victim to a game of prisoner’s dilemma, the services learned to adjudicate their disputes in private, presenting only unified opinions to their civilian overseers. Since that time, JCS advice has usually been unanimous, or at least void of open contradictions, among the service chiefs. Presidents and their defense secretaries could have tried to encourage more competition among the services. But this would likely come at a political cost if members of Congress also use contending military advice to pick holes in the president’s policy choices (Fuller : –, –). The fear of the consequences of picking the wrong alternative, combined with the political benefits of unified military advice, have meant that most administrations have done little to encourage the services to compete over budgets, missions, or military operations. Implementation is yet another mission the chief executive has for the military leadership and, in particular, the JCS chairman. As explained in more detail in the following section, presidents and secretaries of defense have come to rely on the JCS chairman to coordinate advice from the service chiefs and combatant commanders and to help ensure that presidential choices are implemented as intended—ideally with a minimum of complaints. What Congress wants from its relationship with the military is different. Some members are interested in leveraging military expertise in order to pursue their own policy goals or to assist in implementing the president’s agenda. Sometimes members work together to maximize or preserve the power of their institution vis-à-vis the executive. But all members of Congress are also interested in the military for parochial reasons. Some make their political reputations on the basis of consistent support for a particular service—for example, Georgia representative Carl Vinson was nicknamed

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“the admiral” due to his stalwart support for the Navy. Others benefit from supporting military preferences that lead to increased jobs in their districts either from the construction of new military installations, funding to defense contractors, or support for existing military bases. Combined, these often-conflicting civilian preferences have led to a persistent tug-of-war with respect to the organization of the US Department of Defense. Congress has consistently been the winner in that struggle.

It’s All about the Structure One reality has a preponderant influence on US civil-military relations: the military services are independent organizations. Although various attempts have been made to force them to cooperate and integration their advice, such efforts have always been undermined by congressional action. Congress has consistently acted to preserve access to the independent service advice that is useful for overseeing and altering executive policy. More importantly, however, Congress also wanted to preserve the parochial benefits of more direct access to each service. The seeming exception is the  Goldwater-Nichols Act where Congress lobbied for more executive control in the name of increased coordination. But this action was also in the best interest of some parts of Congress. Prior to World War II, members of Congress enjoyed close and beneficial relationships with the quasi-independent bureaus that composed the Army and Navy. The head of each bureau communicated their preferences and priorities directly to the Military or Naval Affairs Committees in Congress and with little oversight by the service chiefs or civilian secretaries (Hewes Jr. : ). Reforms championed by secretary of war Elihu Root during the first decade of the twentieth century subordinated the bureaus to the Army’s leadership and improved coordination between those focused on warfare and those on the research, development, and procurement of weapons. The Navy would follow suit, but not until after World War II. The National Security Act of  was intended to further increase coordination between the Army, Navy, the newly independent Air Force, and other national security agencies. The failure of the act to do so is well documented (for examples, Rearden ). Although it created a “National Military Establishment” that put the services together under one department, it left them as largely independent organizations. The service chiefs, now collectively called the JCS, had few incentives to coordinate or integrate their preferences or advice, more staff and authority than the secretary of defense, and they retained the ability to appeal decisions to the president,

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Bureau of the Budget, and members of Congress. Although Truman had backed an Army plan that would have given the defense secretary more authorities, Congress sided with the Navy, mostly by refusing to endorse the compromises put forward by the Army. In refusing to force more coordination or integration on the services, Congress paved the way for a Defense Department characterized by poor military advice, insufficient leadership, redundancy, and a neglect of activities that fell outside the boundaries of established service missions. Truman attempted a correction in  as did Eisenhower in  and again in . But each time Congress intervened to water down any increased authority for the secretary of defense or JCS chairman. But in , Congress seemingly did an about-face with the GoldwaterNichols Act. Not only did Congress agree to some of the changes it had previously rejected; it also legislated significant structural revisions aimed at channeling and managing the priorities of the services. Previous worries that a more powerful chairman might threaten civilian control, create a powerful General Staff, or abolish the services were subordinated to concerns about the seeming inability of the services to work together or integrate their advice and operations. The response was to make the chairman the principal military adviser to the White House in place of the collective service chiefs, give control of the Joint Staff from the services to the chairman, and change the structure of military education and promotion practices such that officers were encouraged to focus on national security needs rather than those of their own service (Reorganization Act ). Almost immediately, the chairman became the public face and spokesperson for the military, eclipsing the individual service chiefs (Weiner : –). The conventional wisdom is that a string of military failures, culminating in a  attack on US Marines in Beirut, pushed Congress to legislate reforms (Lederman ; Locher III : ). Adding to these operational problems were a series of procurement scandals as well as scathing criticism from sitting JCS chairman David Jones (Jones ). But Jones was not the first senior military officer to criticize the JCS, and the basic structure of what would become the Goldwater-Nichols Act had already been drafted prior to Jones’s public comments as well as the attack on the Marines. Moreover, the act was never intended to address procurement. While these military problems may have increased congressional attention to the topic of reform, they were amplified by changes that were taking place in Congress itself. In the s, Congress had taken steps to democratize its own processes, including reducing the influence of seniority, giving subcommittees more autonomy to hold hearings, and increasing the ability of junior member to propose legislation (Dodd and Oppenheimer ; Davidson ; Sundquist ). Combined with an increase

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in activism in response to Vietnam as well as the Nixon administration, the result was an explosion of interest in defense policy. The length and number of hearings on defense spending increased threefold, programs were reviewed in more detail by more members, and more committees sought to influence defense policy. As James Lindsay explains in his work on Congress and defense, defense was an insider’s game in the s; by the s, it belonged to outsiders (Lindsay : ). Of particular significance were the Military Reform Caucus and the nuclear freeze movement, both of which served to upset the policy choices of the Armed Services Committees. The leadership of the committees was frustrated by these challenges from outside its membership and felt that the activism resulted in micromanagement and parochialism, not improved analysis or policy. Particularly problematic was relations with the service chiefs. Traditionally, the service chiefs had colluded with members of Congress in response to presidential budget reductions, executive branch choices that involved significant trade-offs, and other circumstances that were perceived to work against service interests. This time, however, the members of Congress were more numerous, with little defense expertise, and fewer incentives to pay attention to overall defense spending. Further, the defense committees had lost their ability to limit parochial benefits to their own members or to control this process. The defense secretary found it difficult to manage the department because more members of Congress were reaching out to the services in attempts to build alliances. The reverse was also true: the services sought more congressional allies to achieve their funding goals. In short, internal changes to Congress had complicated the job of the secretary, made management of defense policy more difficult, but also decreased the ability of the Armed Services Committee to control policy oversight as well as the parochial benefits of connections to the service chiefs. Perhaps the logical solution was to empower the secretary of defense, as had been proposed numerous times since the  National Security Act. But if the goal was to improve defense policy even when Congress and the president are from opposing parties, the JCS chairman would be a better choice. But, in giving power to the chairman, the Goldwater-Nichols Act neglected the impact of an important structural change that dates from twenty years prior, and which came in response to Robert McNamara. Throughout the s, the service chiefs and especially the Navy and Air Force had openly argued for budget shares and, in the process, pointed out problems with each other’s advice and proposals. But it was President Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who first used this public bickering to routinely make choices that reduced military spending

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as well as the role of the JCS in decisions and recommendations about defense policy. After two years of allowing McNamara to manipulate split JCS recommendations in order to maximize his own influence, the service chiefs began to collude. By , the chiefs were routinely offering unanimous recommendations and virtually nothing else by  (Drea : ; Kanter : ). The result was military advice that too often added together service preferences rather than make choices between them. This was precisely the problem that the Goldwater-Nichols Act was supposed to solve. But, as the cases in the next section illustrate, although some chairmen supported civilians and others actively contradicted them, the one constant is respect for JCS unanimity and the conditions that foster it. These cases show that the chairman is most successful at leading the service chiefs when the resulting policy preserves the balance between them.

Fighting for Dollars Since the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, there have been three particularly contentious debates over defense budgets and the allocation of resources among the services. The first, which focused on downsizing the military due to the end of the Cold War, led to budget reductions but largely preserved the established preferences of each service. This debate over what came to be called the Base Force raised both hopes and concerns. The aggressive activism from the JCS chairman, and his ability to impose an outcome on the service chiefs, led some to conclude that the  act had improved military advice. Others argued that it went too far and created a chairman who threatened civilian control. The second debate revolved around the degree to which new technologies could transform the military into a lighter and more flexible force focused on insurgencies and defeating terrorists. George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, made two attempts to force such transformation, each time meeting stiff resistance from the services. Eventually, the services adopted the language of transformation, but used it to justify and retain most of their preferred weapons. This case illustrates how difficult it is for the Pentagon’s civilian leadership to impose changes without the support of the chairman. It also shows how the chairman’s power is severely limited if he tries to side with the defense secretary against the service chiefs. In the third case, widespread political discord over how to avoid deficit spending during the Obama years resulted in repeated cuts to the defense budget. This case shows the power of the chairman to work with civilian

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leaders and the service chiefs to make painful choices as long as the chiefs believe those choices are fairly shared among the services.

The Base Force The final years of the Soviet Union and its eventual collapse raised expectations of significant reductions in force structure, a likely redistribution of service roles and missions, and certainly a peace dividend (Cain ; Krepinevich ; Bacevich : ). This was compounded by passage of the Budget Enforcement Act, which set limits on defense and domestic discretionary spending for the first half of the s. Adjusted for inflation, US defense spending fell by about one-third during the s but began to rebound in , eventually recovering to Cold War levels with the post wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But despite dollar reductions, the Cold War force structure that the services preferred remained largely intact, and there was no significant change in the distribution of roles and missions. The main reason for the lack of more significant change was JCS chairman Colin Powell. Not only is he largely responsible for the force structure option that was eventually implemented; he also engaged in a public lobbying campaign that put him squarely in the middle of partisan political battles. His actions were instrumental in preventing two very different presidential administrations from achieving clearly stated political goals— so much so that some began to question whether the Goldwater-Nichols Act had shifted the civil-military balance too far in favor of the latter (Kohn : –). The White House began to consider significant cuts to the defense budget during the second year of the George H. W. Bush administration. But the Joint Staff had started earlier. In  when Powell became chairman, the Joint Staff directorates responsible for strategy (J-) and resources (J-) were considering how to adapt strategy under different budget scenarios. Powell directed them to focus on the impact of a  percent budget reduction (Jaffee : –). The resulting force structure was known as the Base Force. The results were presented to the service chiefs and combatant commanders in February . Predictably, the chiefs were not happy. Individually, they lobbied Powell for changes, but by the end of the summer, it was clear that deeper cuts were possible (Jaffee : –). The chiefs endorsed the Base Force, largely out of fear that inaction would allow Congress to fill the void with even more radical changes. Powell’s advocacy of the Base Force through speeches, interviews, and editorials was not only quite public but at times openly contradicted the preferences of the White House. When Cheney was calling for a  percent reduction in military spending and openly questioning whether the Soviet

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reforms were real, Powell argued for a  percent reduction and a changed reality. At times Cheney directly challenged Powell on his seeming lack of support for the president’s agenda. While the Bush administration was arguing about the Base Force, a small continent of Democratic members of Congress thought additional reductions were necessary. Led by Les Aspin (D-WI), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, this group favored deeper spending cuts. Using the  Gulf War as a guide, Aspin offered three options for additional reductions. Powell called the analysis “overly simplistic” and “fundamentally flawed” (Correll ). Aspin endorsed an option that would have reduced the Base Force budget by an additional . percent, but, more importantly, it would have spread all of the cuts unevenly among the services (Correll ). The pressure on the Base Force increased dramatically when Bill Clinton was elected president in  and appointed Les Aspin as his secretary of defense. Aspin quickly announced a “bottom-up review” of defense force structure and budgets that closely resembled the work he had led in Congress. But Powell had already asked the Joint Staff to develop what was essentially Base Force II. Recognizing that defense cuts would likely go deeper than the Base Force, the new plan cut the budget by an additional  percent, and personnel by another  percent (Larson, Orletsky, and Leuschner ). In terms of dollars, the version of Base Force II that was eventually endorsed by the Clinton administration was halfway between the original Base Force and the option that Aspin favored. But Powell won the debate to preserve the Cold War force structure. Congressional Democrats had pushed for a shift in strategy and procurement that Aspin tried to implement as secretary of defense. The new plan de-emphasized war with major competitors in favor of an increased emphasis on peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and “military operations other than war.” It also used promoted threat-based planning—that is, sizing force structure on the basis of external threats and the experience of Operation Desert Storm. Combined, the plan had the potential to radically alter the missions of the services and significantly reduce spending on traditional weapon systems. Powell, instead, argued for the forces necessary for two major regional wars and planning based on the capabilities needed to achieve objectives (capabilities-based planning). Critics argued that Powell’s strategy was a justification for maintaining favorite Cold War forces, but he prevailed (Cain ; Krepinevich ; Bacevich : ). Neither Base Force option was the initial priority of a president. Under Bush, the Base Force was strongly opposed by secretary of defense Dick Cheney, who continued to believe that the changes in the Soviet Union were only temporary. Under Clinton, Aspin had favored steeper cuts in

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both personnel and budgets. Clinton also favored a peace dividend that was larger than even Base Force II could provide. Both Cheney and Aspin were interested in a more flexible force structure that responded to the emerging threats of the post–Cold War era (Cheney ; Aspin ). Yet both the Base Force and Base Force II were seen as preserving the favorite weapons of each service. Powell was able to prevail over the preferences of each administration for two main reasons. First, he respected the established priorities of the service chiefs. Although both Base Force options were developed with little input from the services, and they complained about being excluded from the process, it quickly became clear that Powell’s efforts were aimed at protecting them from externally imposed changes that would likely have altered missions, canceled favorite weapon systems, or cut one service significantly more than the others (Jaffee : , –; Snider : , footnote ). In an article focused on Powell’s political prowess, the Washington Monthly explained that Powell’s efforts were focused on “preserving the largest base force he [Powell] could get away with to satisfy, on the one hand, calls in Congress for a peace dividend and, on the other, the chief ’s reluctance to cut anything” (Meacham : ). The second reason for Powell’s success stems from the political vulnerabilities of the Bush and Clinton administrations. Had the service chiefs appealed to Congress for their own individual priorities, it is likely that congressional Democrats would have used this to argue for steeper budget cuts. If Bush wanted to control that process, he needed Powell to keep the chiefs in line. Additionally, Bush needed Powell’s popularity to help compensate for the increasing criticism the president faced about his handling of the Gulf War and the crisis in the Balkans. Claims that Clinton had unfairly dodged the Vietnam War draft meant he had political vulnerability on military issues when he assumed office. This problem increased when he immediately began efforts to change long-standing military policies preventing gay men and lesbians from serving openly. Aspin’s seeming arrogance and the opacity with which his office considered major decisions significantly contributed to the problem (Auster ). As with Bush, Clinton needed Powell’s support to keep the service chiefs from appealing to Congress. Additionally, throughout his tenure as chairman, Powell enjoyed strong public support, at times surpassing that of other key White House figures and Clinton himself (Novak ).

Transformation Donald Rumsfeld thought the services were too wedded to traditional weapons choices and that new technologies could transform them into

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the less expensive but also more flexible forces needed to respond to insurgencies, terrorism, and similar threats. When he became secretary of defense in , he had the full backing of President George W. Bush for this change. But the service chiefs resisted, and JCS chairman Hugh Shelton refused to help Rumsfeld in his efforts. When Rumsfeld tried again from  to , he had the active support of Shelton’s replacement, Richard Myers. But Myers lacked the support of the service chiefs, who still opposed transformation and resented Myers for allying himself with the secretary of defense and in opposition to their preferences. In other words, transformation failed twice. The case of transformation shows how the chairman is necessary for managing the service chiefs but is still beholden to their wishes. Soon after entering office, Rumsfeld asked the Office of the Secretary of Defense to recommend changes in both strategy and force structure. These working groups largely excluded the military, partially because the Bush Pentagon felt senior military leaders had accrued too much power under Clinton and partially to stop the service chiefs from leaking information to Congress (Kreisler and Gordon ; Stevenson : ). The result, released in March , recommended cancellation of some cherished service programs: the Zumwalt-class destroyer; the Navy’s next generation aircraft carrier; the Crusader artillery system; Comanche attack helicopter; and the F-, F-, B-, and B-, among others (Bowman : A; Graham : –). Subsequent recommendations would reduce the number of personnel in each service and transfer that spending to the purchase of precision-guided munitions, special operations forces, space assets, and unmanned platforms (Department of Defense ). The services resisted. Sometimes they instructed their staffs not to cooperate, or to do so only partially or after long delays (Adams : ). Some reached out to members of Congress, who objected to cuts to their favorite weapons systems, planned cuts in military spending, the exclusion of Congress from the process, and sometimes all three (Defense Daily ; Boyer ; Loeb and Ricks : A). Besides opposition to the recommended changes, the chiefs objected to being asked to endorse recommendations they had been excluded from creating and because the process had put decisions about force structure ahead of considerations of strategy (Ricks : A). Although Rumsfeld pronounced the Joint Staff “essentially useless” and worried that the chiefs would leak his plans to Congress, he felt he had to include them more in the ongoing review process (Woodward : ; Graham : ). The chiefs felt they were invited to “participate” in decisions that had already been made and were quite vocal in their dislike for Rumsfeld and his methods (Graham : ). By the summer of ,

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civil-military discord over transformation was a significant contributor to the prevailing view that Rumsfeld was about to be fired (Woodward ). JCS chairman Hugh Shelton essentially sidelined himself throughout this process. Besides a strong personal dislike for Rumsfeld, Shelton understood that the service chiefs were opposed to transformation and did little to help Rumsfeld convince or command them (Shelton, Levinson, and McConnell : , –, , ). Shelton did not discourage the service chiefs from appealing to Congress, nor did he attempt to convince them to compromise in support of at least part of Rumsfeld’s agenda. It isn’t that Shelton ignored or lacked an understanding of his power as chairman. In fact, he bragged about his abilities to lobby for military preferences during the Clinton administration. Instead, it appears he simply chose not to help. As a consequence, the services officially embraced transformation in the  Quadrennial Defense Review but refused to make the changes that would enable it. Thomas K. Adams explains that “the major visible effect was the sudden inclusion of the magic word ‘transformation’ in hundreds of Pentagon planning and procurement documents. Weapons and other systems that had been planned and programmed for years were suddenly portrayed as ‘transformational’” (: ). The terrorist attacks of / brought funding increases to the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld used these and the war in Afghanistan to again argue for transformation (Rumsfeld : –). In October  he set up the Office of Force Transformation, which issued guidance to the services in April  (Department of Defense : –). But instead of duplicating Rumsfeld’s early transformation priorities, the document had been repeatedly delayed and eventually diluted due to objections from the services. The result was a disjointed “roadmap” that continued the practice not of transformation but of calling established service priorities “transformational” (Czelusta : ). Two years later, the  Quadrennial Defense Review tried again to leverage the now two ongoing wars to force the services to shift focus. This time, the Army saw the review process, current operations, and the emphasis on transformation as an opportunity to argue for personnel and budget increases. The Navy and Air Force worried they would be hurt as a result (Ignatius ). To avoid open disputes between the services, the review punted. It endorsed both transformation and traditional force structure priorities (Meachum ). “Doing both” became the path forward, and was largely enabled by post-/ budget increases. Some of Rumsfeld’s favorite transformation efforts moved forward. For example, funding for special forces increased by  percent and the Army canceled its Comanche helicopter and Crusader vehicle programs. But most of the service priorities that predate the Bush

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administration continued. The service chiefs continued to get their preferences funded through the regular budget process, with wartime supplementals funding transformation as well as additional “unfunded priorities” that the services wanted but that weren’t covered by the regular budget process. Once again, Rumsfeld had failed to get the services to embrace transformation. But in contrast to his earlier efforts, this time he had strong support from JCS chairman Richard Myers. Myers endorsed the transformation agenda and publicly chastised the services for not embracing change (Garamone ). But in allying himself with the secretary and in opposition to all of the service chiefs, Myers lost his ability to persuade or manage them. Throughout his tenure as chairman, Myers was a frequent target of criticism from the service chiefs. The chiefs felt Myers was an inadequate spokesperson for their interests and also did not sufficiently keep them informed of Rumsfeld’s plans (Loeb and Ricks : A; Graham : ). He also lost respect for not standing up to Rumsfeld’s often open disdain for senior military leaders and appearing as a “sycophant” and “an abused puppy” (Cockburn : ). Because Myers was not seen as a strong advocate, the service chiefs more frequently reached out to Congress, which in turn significantly expanded the opposition to Rumsfeld’s agenda and leadership. The case of transformation illustrates two different limits of civilian control. Rumsfeld tried to implement transformation through five defense budgets and two Quadrennial Defense Reviews. In the end, his biggest allies were the wartime supplemental spending measures that provided funding for both transformation and the preferences of the service chiefs. Even strong support from the president and an assertive secretary of defense were not enough to force Shelton to assist with something the service chiefs opposed. Although Myers tried to help Rumsfeld manage the service chiefs, civilian control still suffered because the chairman was not seen as an advocate for service interests.

Sequestration Throughout the Obama administration, a series of budget caps, plus partisan political battles over social spending and deficits, made it necessary to repeatedly cut Pentagon spending. The process involved three different secretaries of defense, two JCS chairmen, and consistent support from the service chiefs, even though there were numerous opportunities for them to object by allying with members of Congress. The seemingly persistent budget crises during these years were the result of the Budget Control Act of , which sought to reduce deficits by capping appropriations on defense

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and nondefense discretionary spending. By requiring parity between these spending categories, the law required any increase in social spending to be offset by decreases in defense budgets and vice versa. Parity also threatened the services with a zero-sum dilemma—any increase in spending for one service meant decreases in spending for another. Initially, the Budget Control Act meant a $ trillion reduction in defense spending over a ten-year period. But because ongoing military operations were politically difficult to shortchange, and the Obama administration exempted personnel and personnel-related expenses, most cuts would have to be absorbed in the research, development, and procurement of weapons. Although Congress repeatedly postponed enforcement of the caps or raised them, the biggest threat to the defense budget was sequestration—across-the-board cuts to all programs that would automatically take place if Congress failed to agree to a budget that met the caps. If sequestration kicked in, the defense budget would be further reduced by . percent the first year, increasing to . percent in the outyears (McGarry : ). When the congressional committee tasked with coming up with a budget agreement failed, sequestration took effect on March , . One month later, the defense budget for FY  was submitted, but because the Pentagon had not incorporated the cuts imposed by sequestration, it had to quickly make reductions. Another problem that added to the sense of fiscal crisis was continuing resolutions. Unable to agree on a budget, Congress passed a series of continuing resolutions that allowed government agencies to function, but usually within the spending limits from the most recently approved appropriation. As a result, programs that were expected to grow remained static and new programs that were planned got put on hold. The budget uncertainty made it difficult to plan, coordinate program schedules, and address new problems. These resolutions, plus the threat of more draconian cuts through sequestration, meant the Pentagon repeatedly scrambled to reduce service budgets. Three different defense secretaries led the Pentagon through these reviews. The first was Robert Gates, who had also served in the same position under George W. Bush. When Gates agreed to stay on, he thought Obama had promised him there would be no significant reductions in defense spending (Gates : –). But, in a process tightly controlled by the White House, Gates was told first to pare down the FY  defense budget by  percent, then, a year later, to reduce FY  by . percent. Initially, the White House called for a . percent reduction for FY , but pressure from Gates led them to agree to no additional cuts (Gates : –, –). Although Gates dutifully lead the Pentagon to meet White House budget goals that he played little role in setting, as his

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retirement approached, he became increasingly public in arguing that such cuts would have a devastating impact on national security (Gates, speech, May , ). Initially Gates tried to stop cuts to major procurement programs by looking for “efficiencies,” arguing that a “river of money” ran through the Pentagon in the form of waste and duplication (Department of Defense ; Gates Knopf : ). In other words, in spite of the chairman’s increased power and mandate to improve cooperation and coordination between the services, significant overlap, redundancies, and a tolerance for inefficiency not only persisted but were ubiquitous. But Gates’s efforts were not sufficient to meet budget targets, and when Leon Panetta succeeded him on July , , he continued the ongoing strategic review started by Gates. Panetta endorsed defense budget cuts from day one and also staunchly supported the White House argument that sequestration would be devastating, calling it a “doomsday mechanism” for the Pentagon (Department of Defense ; Panetta : –). The cuts required when sequestration kicked in fell to Chuck Hagel, who took over as secretary in February . Going even further than previous efforts, Hagel ordered the Strategic Choices and Management Review, which moved beyond cuts around the edges to focus on potential changes in strategy (Whitlock ; Castelli ). The service chiefs were actively involved in each of these efforts (Gates: –; Wilson and Jaffee : A; Castelli ). Perhaps more interesting, they were not so collaborative with members of Congress, some of whom applied significant pressure to exempt defense from budget cuts. Before sequestration, key Republican senators threatened to walk away from budget negotiations if military spending was not exempted. As important deadlines loomed, Senator John McCain continued to argue for exempting defense. Moreover, the administration worried that the services would appeal to Congress either to be excluded from sequestration or parity under budget caps, or to overturn specific budget cuts (Gates : ; Panetta : ; Shanker : A). Where was the chairman throughout all of this? Mike Mullen, who was also chairman under Bush, had a difficult relationship with the White House and sometimes contradicted Gates. When Gates was arguing with the White House for budget increases, Mullen was among the first to openly advocate for cutting defense budgets as a necessary component of deficit reduction (CNN Wire Staff ). Mullen did not offer a strong endorsement of Gate’s various budget-cutting efforts, and he left the details of such negotiations to the vice chairman, James Cartwright. Martin Dempsey, who became chairman in October , was the opposite: he opposed cuts to the defense budget but actively worked with the secretary and chiefs to make reductions (U.S. Senate ).

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One reason neither chairman tried to broker a better deal for the services was the politics of budgets in Congress. Since the Reagan administration, the military has found strong support for budget increases from the Republican Party, in addition to the traditional support from specific members of Congress with bases or large contractors in their districts. Although Republicans held the House after the  midterm elections, a significant minority of their membership was from the Tea Party—a largely grassroots movement that prioritized deficit reduction and that proved willing to sacrifice both defense and Republican incumbents to get it (Skocpol and Williamson : –). The Tea Party created a split within the Republican Party, which in turn made it highly risky to assume that any effort to get relief from budget cuts would not have the precisely opposite effect. Further amplifying this risk was the fact that some Democrats thought defense cuts were not going far enough. These members actively trolled for candidates for additional reductions. But the other important element is strategy. Obama had campaigned on ending the “bad” war in Iraq and prevailing in the “necessary” war in Afghanistan, while also advocating for a shift from counterinsurgency and stability operations to countering China. But implementing this shift meant cutting some of the services’ favorite weapons, and they objected strongly and often. Gates grew frustrated with their unwillingness to shift, explaining that this battle “went to the heart of every other fight with the Pentagon” and put him in opposition to the service chiefs and the chairman (Gates : ). But the  Quadrennial Defense Review eventually came to reflect a shift to counterinsurgency operations and a focus on technology and flexibility that was reminiscent of Rumsfeld’s transformation goals. But throughout this time period, Obama was also laying the groundwork for a new strategy: the “Pivot to Asia” (Department of Defense, as quoted in Dale and Towell : ). The shift, strongly supported by the chiefs, de-emphasized counterinsurgency, nation building, and efforts to increase state capacity in places such as Afghanistan in favor of preparing for great power war and power projection in the Pacific. The consequences were significant for the land forces. In  Gates began the process by canceling the Army’s Future Combat System and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, while also saying he would support personnel cuts to both services (Ewing ). Then, on January , , Obama went to the Pentagon to announce new strategic guidance that called for both a peace dividend but also planned for traditional war and power projection against China (Department of Defense, as quoted in Dale and Towell : ). The new guidance meant that the Army and Marine Corps would absorb more than their fair share of budget cuts in order to prioritize Navy

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carriers, attack submarines, and Air Force aircraft modernization. Both the March  Quadrennial Defense Review and the FY  budget incorporated this shift (Department of Defense ). The twin contexts of budget reductions and this shift in strategy help illustrate why two different chairmen were able to help keep the service chiefs from opposing what they saw as significant budget cuts. This context also explains why Army and Marine Corps leadership were not more vocal in pushing back when their services were asked to absorb a preponderant share of the burden. Certainly, the Army and Marine Corps would have had a difficult time pushing back against cuts endorsed by the White House, defense secretary, JCS chairman, and in a context where both liberal Democrats and Tea Party Republicans were looking for angles they could use to make additional cuts in the defense budget. But the Pivot to Asia meant that even in a context of budget cuts, each services’ share of the budget would begin to resemble the traditional consensus definition of “fair share.” Over time, the defense budget has shown a consistent tendency to not only stable shares of the budget between the services, but a more or less equal percentage over time. But over a decade of war after / had shifted that in favor of the Army and Marine Corps. The Pivot to Asia promised to counteract this trend by emphasizing the priorities of the Navy and Air Force. This return to normalcy gave the Navy and Air Force a relatively larger share of the budget, in spite of the cuts that were being made. Both Mullen and Dempsey supported the shift in strategy and its budgetary implications. During this time of repeated budget drills, the Obama administration’s focus was on social spending priorities, some of which came at the expense of the defense budget. Yet the service chiefs consistently cooperated to reduce their own funding and without the need for the defense secretary to try and strong-arm them either directly or through the chairman. Even when Obama’s decision-making process about the Afghanistan War created political liabilities, the chiefs and chairman did not seek to exploit them for budgetary gain (Woodward ). Instead, this case shows the degree to which the chiefs can be team players, as long as civilians respect their right to prioritize equity and when external congressional allies are dangerous to embrace.

Conclusion Despite the intentions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, these case studies show that the deference in favor of service preferences that Congress

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helped enshrine in the National Security Act of  is still firmly in place today. Rather than creating a JCS chairman who could pick winners and losers among the services—or at least force them to prioritize their preferences—the chairman remains fundamentally beholden to what the chiefs want. Additionally, attempts to downsize the military after the Cold War, transform it through new technologies, or cut budgets to avoid sequestration all suggest that the service chiefs still prioritize consensus decisionmaking and equality. This is not to argue that the chairman is powerless or that the  act did not increase his clout. As two of the cases illustrate, the chairman is now able to exploit the political vulnerabilities of a president or defense secretary to either be a policy entrepreneur or refuse to help implement White House preferences. He can also pressure the service chiefs to accept outcomes they would prefer to avoid. But in each case the power of the chairman is significantly dependent upon his respect for service preferences and established practices. None of these cases offer evidence that the Goldwater-Nichols Act empowered the chairman to make choices among the services, force them to prioritize their preferences, or offer military advice that is independent of long-established JCS norms.

Sharon K. Weiner is an associate professor at the School of International Service. Her research, teaching, and policy engagement are at the intersection of organizational politics and US national security. Her current work focuses on the theory, practice, and social construction of deterrence, the politics of US nuclear weapon modernization programs, and larger issues of civil-military relations.

Notes . Although the Marine Corps began as an independent service, it was made part of the Navy in  and remains officially a part of the Department of the Navy. In , the commandant of the Marine Corps became an equal member of the JCS and since that time the Marine Corps has increasingly asserted an independent voice in military matters. The combatant commanders assumed new responsibilities and power with the Goldwater-Nichols Act. . See Alice Hunt Friend and Sharon K. Weiner, “Structure or Agency? Assessing Civilian Control of the Military under Expertise Monopsonies,” draft manuscript. We find that presidents overwhelmingly endorse military advice in situations where the military has a monopoly on information but also in situations where there are contending sources of credible expertise. Even if some of those nonmilitary experts reinforce strongly held White House preferences, the president is still likely to side with the military.

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. For a summary of persistent problems when coordination is lacking, see U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services ( October ); Blechman and Lynn (); Art, Davis, and Huntington (). . For a discussion of the problems that can result from this lack of integration and the civil-military structure that enables it, see Brooks (). . For a discussion of variables that inhibit the ability of the president to monitor and oversee policy implementation, see Feaver () and Donnithorne (). . For a discussion of the various goals of members of Congress, see Fenno Jr. (). . For a discussion of the relationship between organizational design and concern for the future exercise of power by an institution, see Zegart (). . It is this competition for parochial benefit that led to the expanded power of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. See Dawson (). . For a discussion on the Navy’s efforts at internal reform prior to World War II, see Hammond (), chapter . . The Department of Defense was created by the  amendments to the National Security Act. . Congress backed the Navy’s plan largely out of self-interest. See Caraley (): –; and Zegart (), especially chapter . . In  Army chief of staff Maxwell D. Taylor outlined in his book The Uncertain Trumpet () many of the same problems with the JCS that would persist into the s. The structure of what would become the Goldwater-Nichols Act is outlined in Barrett () and based upon studies about defense reform conducted during the Carter administration in –. . In a memo to representative Les Aspin, House Armed Services Committee staff member Archie Barrett () suggests that “to gain popular support, the panel should tie organizational reform (an esoteric, boring subject) to defense problems perceived by the public—resource misallocation, crisis debacles (Iran), exorbitant costs (attributable in part to service overemphasis on operations vice provider responsibilities), etc.” (Barrett ). . The Military Reform Caucus was a bipartisan group that formed in  to address issues of strategy, doctrine, and force structure. They were particularly vocal on the spare parts procurement scandals that began in . See Hart and Lind (). The leadership of both Armed Services Committees generally felt the freeze movement was going too far. See Wirls (: –). . Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga), for example, argued that such micromanagement was “seriously distorting floor debate on defense bills” Nunn (). . Explaining that the JCS either had no recommendation or could not agree on one, McNamara would substitute his own advice and analysis, or that of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. For this dynamic during the Vietnam War, see McMaster (). . For examples of McNamara exploiting split JCS advice, see U.S. Senate (: ) and U.S. House of Representatives (: ). . For a comprehensive description and analysis of this problem, see U.S. Senate (). . Halloran (: ). According to Powell, Cheney called him into his office and in a tense meeting asked the chairman whether or not he backed the president. See Powell and Persico (: ).

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. The Clinton administration never realized the budget cuts that were part of Base Force II. The force structure in that option proved to be $ billion more than the president’s budget request. Rather than make further cuts, the administration endorsed the increase. See Larson, Orletsky, and Leuschner (: , ). . Instead of adopting the services’ preferred “prevail in two wars” strategy, Aspin favored what came to be called “win-hold-win”—prevail in one conflict with a holding action in the second until the first has been concluded. . Critics argued that Bush had ended the Gulf War too soon, allowing Iraqi military forces to survive largely intact and that the administration was too slow to respond to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. . See Defense Daily (). Particularly contention was a very visible feud between Army chief Eric Shinseki and Rumsfeld. Although Shinseki favored many of the Army-related transformation items, he objected to Rumsfeld’s plan to cut four Army divisions. See Boyer (: –) and Loeb and Ricks (: A). . Grove (). In the interview for the article, Shelton explains that “what we accomplished was through operating behind the scenes. It was playing one party off against the other. It was taking advantage of a Democratic president and a Republican-controlled Congress, and weaving in and out to get what you needed for the Department of Defense.” . For example, from FY  to FY , supplement spending measures totaled $ billion, but according to the Defense Department, only $. billion was for ongoing wars. See Walker (a; b: ) and Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (: ). . The defense side of this equation initially included the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and the National Nuclear Security Administration. After FY , it was defined more narrowly as the Defense Department, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and some defense-related missions in the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security. . Mullen was considered a budget hawk, something often attributed to his time in the Navy’s budget office. . In the hearing, Dempsey is reminded that Mullen has argued that “the single biggest threat to our National security is our debt.” When asked for his response, Dempsey disagrees and goes on to explain that military power is equally as important as economic strength and that cutting military spending in the middle of the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is ill-advised. . Because personnel costs are substantial, cutting end-strength in the land forces meant significant budget savings. . In  and  the Army’s leadership was unspecific about what it would cut to stay within its projected budget level, and the chief of staff tried to focus the budget conversation on the Army’s base budget, not the significant additional funding it had received as a result of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Sherman () and Brannen (: ). . Table -, Department of Defense Budget Authority by Military Department, National Defense Budget Estimates for FY , Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), March , provides the data to support the claim that from FY  to FY , service budget shares have tended toward a rough equality where the Army gets  percent, the Navy  percent, and the Air Force  percent

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of the base Defense Department budget. The two exceptions to this division are the s battles between the Navy and Air Force over the nuclear mission and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early s, which shift funding to the Army. Moreover, the years since the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act show the least variation in budget shares. . As Chief of Naval Operations, Mullen had worked on such a shift in strategy for over a decade, and Dempsey voiced no opposition even though it was his own service being cut.

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Sharon K. Weiner

U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services. . Defense Organization: The Need for Change, S. Prt. -, th Cong., st Sess.  October . Washington: Government Printing Office. ———. . Joint Chief Chairman Nomination.  July . Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. Senate, Committee on Appropriations. . Department of Defense Appropriations For Fiscal Year , Hearings, Part , th Cong., nd Sess. Washington: Government Printing Office. Walker, D. M. . DOD Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities. Presentation at the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA.  February . Weiner, Sharon K. . “Military Advice for Political Purpose.” In Mission Creep: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy?, eds. Gordon Adams and Schoon Murray, –. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Whitlock, Craig. . “Budget Cutting Spurs Hagel to Order Pentagon Review of YearOld Strategy.” Washington Post.  March . Wilson, Scott, and Greg Jaffee. . “A Strong Defense for Obama.” Washington Post.  January . Wirls, Daniel. . Buildup: The Politics of Defense in the Reagan Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Woodward, B. . “The Rumsfeld Death Watch.” Slate.  August . ———. . State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. . Obama’s Wars. New York: Simon and Schuster. Zegart, Amy. . Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSCK. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

chapter 5

Civil-Military Challenges and the Militia James D. Campbell

+ Introduction The organized militia of the United States, or the National Guard, comprises roughly one-third of the total force structure of the US Army and US Air Force. Since the s, the National Guard has increasingly been used as, and is openly acknowledged by politicians and US military leaders as, the critical operational reserve of the US military. The National Guard has become so central to the daily missions of the broader US military that without it the sustained global operations of the past twenty years would not have been possible (National Guard Bureau ). The National Guard also has a high public profile due to its unique role in responding to domestic emergencies, typically natural disasters. As the frequency, nature, and extent of dangerous storms and wildfires have grown in this century, so has the visibility of the National Guard and its responses to these events. Additionally, due to the restrictions placed by federal law on the use of federal or regular military forces for law enforcement or other purposes inside the United States, the National Guard has the prominent role of providing the primary military support to civil authorities in the event of domestic unrest or other violence (National Guard Bureau ). In  this particular role gained much attention, and, because of several incidents, including during racial justice protests and riot responses, as well as the attempted insurrection at the Capitol building, in January , a perhaps unwelcome level of notoriety. This growing profile, along with progressive integration into the active joint force’s operations, has not happened without conflicts and tensions between the Active Component and the Guard, and between state and federal political and military leaders and institutions. These conflicts are almost inevitable and certainly foreseeable, given the legal and historical constructs forming the foundation of the US military system, in addition

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to the general lack of understanding of these structures and laws governing the Guard—among citizens, the press, and civil and military leaders alike. This chapter will address these civil-military conflicts and tensions, paying particular attention to the stresses they place on Guard leadership, especially the state and territorial Adjutants General. These generally manageable tensions are as old as the nation itself. Nevertheless, due to a persistent and unfortunate lack of knowledge and understanding by both military and civilian leaders, they still at times threaten the readiness, effectiveness, and position of the National Guard as the nation’s primary combat reserve and domestic military response force for protecting the lives and property of its citizens. The ingrained views of the majority of the military profession regarding the proper civil-military sphere for senior officers, heavily influenced by the work of Samuel Huntington, contribute to this lack of understanding and tension. This chapter seeks both to highlight why these tensions exist and to go a small way toward providing a very basic education to alleviate them. An examination of civil-military challenges faced by the National Guard must begin, however, with an overview of the American militia tradition, the constitutional underpinnings of the United States’ dual military system, and the legal frameworks that govern state and federal control and funding of the Guard. Additionally, reviewing some of the history of the oftentimes rancorous relationship between the regular and militia sections of the American military profession will serve to put into context the current state of the relationship.

The Development of the Militia in the United States Federalism, or the distinction in United States’ law that allows for multiple levels of governmental sovereignty between the local, state, and federal levels, is also a part of the structure of the military—the federal or Active Component forces, answer to both the executive and legislative branches of the national government. The civil-military tensions caused by this dual control system at the federal level are well-documented, with the armed forces’ leadership often stuck between the oath promising to obey the orders of the executive, while also understanding the hard facts of congressional oversight, regulation, and fiscal authority. The National Guard— collectively the militia of the fifty individual states, the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and of the District of Columbia—must not only operate in the same political environment as do the Active forces at the federal level; they must also simultaneously function under similar circumstances at the state or territorial level. This functioning requires bal-

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ancing between the state and territorial governors and legislatures, along with Congress, the president, and federal military authorities. It would be an understatement to say that all of these entities have interests, priorities, and positions that don’t always perfectly align. Consequently, most senior-level National Guard officers become, as a matter of simple survival, well-versed in navigating the nuances of constitutional structure and political sensibilities, and even then the Guard often suffers because of these inherent challenges to healthy civil-military relations. The result can be harmful not only to the Guard but to the entire military, manifested in legislative interventions, force structure imbalances, lower readiness levels, unnecessary expenditure, and real or perceived lapses in norms of professional behavior (Campbell ). These tensions also sometimes cause misunderstanding and erroneous claims and statements made in the media and by politicians, which can erode trust between citizens, civil leadership, and the Guard, and which can also complicate the relationship between the Active Component and the Guard. An understanding of these challenges, built into the structure and traditions of the US military system, is of critical importance for the citizens and leaders of the country in order to maintain the healthy civil-military relationships necessary in a successful democratic state. The United States inherited most of its political and military traditions and culture from Britain, and these include a healthy mistrust of large, standing regular forces. This mistrust stems from the seventeenthcentury periods of the English Civil War and Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” of . Oliver Cromwell’s military dictatorship from  to his death in , coupled with the dangerous lack of accountability and drift toward absolutism of James II, which led to that sovereign’s overthrow in , led to a deep-seated view in the British political culture that a large, standing regular military force loyal only to the sovereign constitutes a real or potential threat to liberty (Roy : ; Childs : –; James : –). Therefore, restraints against despotism must include limits to the military force available to the central government. During the parliamentary revolt against the perceived royal absolutism of Charles I, these limits manifested themselves in parliamentary control of military budgets and thus size and capability, as well as the maintenance of a counterbalance to royal forces in the county militia and yeomanry, nominally controlled by the county Lords Lieutenant, not the crown (Harris : –). As the British North American colonies were established and expanded, these traditional methods of maintaining a military there evolved in a similar fashion, generally with each colony having an appointed Adjutant General under the governor, in charge of the organization, training, and command of the colony’s militia (Millett and Maslowski : –).

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The funding for the militia, however, was controlled by the colonial legislature, thereby creating a check on the size, equipment, and activities of these bodies. This bifurcated control of the military system was designed to avoid a situation where a Royal Governor could use the militia to suppress the legislature or the liberties of colonists, much the same as in the operation of the system at home in Britain. These similarities even extended to some colonies organizing their militias by county—again, just as in Britain (Millett and Maslowski : –). During the American Revolution, the debates in the Continental Congress and within the states concerning the raising and funding of military forces centered around the issues of central versus local control—should there be a regular “Continental Army,” controlled by a central government, or should the new country continue to rely for military power on state and locally controlled citizen militias? These debates continued into the period after the Revolution and were a significant feature of the arguments during the Constitutional Convention. Ultimately, the question was never fully decided in favor of either position, giving rise to the dual military structure in place in the United States since . The system outlined in the US Constitution allows for a federal regular army voted on by the Congress every two years but commanded by the president—set up in a continuation of the tradition inherited from Britain. Moreover, the Constitution outlines the maintenance of a citizen militia by the states, under state control (Millett and Maslowski : –). James Madison, one of the principal authors of this construct, argued in Federalist Paper Forty-Six that the reason for this larger state-controlled militia was to ensure that a centrally controlled regular army would never be able to overawe the states and suppress the rights and liberties of their citizens (Madison ). The complexities of maintaining what amounted to several separate and distinct federal, state, and territorial military forces within the United States, each with its own organization, uniforms and equipment, leadership and methods of control, and fiscal maintenance, has led over the past  years to a series of legal and policy adjustments, attempting to rationalize and simplify these institutions. Some of the more significant of these reforms occurred in the period around the turn of the twentieth century. Congressional Acts in , , and  all considerably upgraded the condition of the militia (since  officially called the National Guard) by imposing uniformity in organization, training, equipment, and guaranteed federal funding for training. These reforms can be seen as part of the overall movement to modernize and professionalize the US military in the years leading up to and following World War I, putting the United States in a position to have the capacity to exercise military power on the global stage (Millett and Maslowski : –, –). The funding from

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the federal government has been needed to ensure proper training and equipping of the Guard, but more controversially also acts as a means for federal military authorities to exercise a more direct control over the militia than what was perhaps envisioned by the authors of the Constitution. What these and some later reforms have resulted in is still a dual military system with both federal and state (and territorial) forces and controls, but one with far fewer places where these separate controls can create some of the difficulties experienced in the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century there were several instances of state authorities refusing to allow their militia units to participate in federally directed military activities, and during the War of  and the Spanish-American War in  the question of state militia units deploying for overseas expeditions became a contentious political sticking point. The laws are now clear on these subjects, again with the critical provision of federal funding being the major tool for their resolution.

The Contemporary Militia in the United States Currently, state and territorial National Guard organizations receive all of their equipment and funding for training from the federal Department of Defense. Enlisted and officer promotion standards are dictated by the Army and Air Force and not individual states, and standards for readiness are those outlined and monitored by the respective services. There is an elaborate structure of units and organizations in the Active military created to oversee, inspect, and validate training and evaluate other aspects of Guard readiness, which acts to ensure uniformity of standards across the entire military. Additionally, since the s the militia or National Guard has been subject to emergency presidential call-up or federal mobilization, now formally for use not just inside the United States but also overseas (Millett and Maslowski : –, ). Finally, the post–Vietnam War “Abrams Doctrine” of the early s has put in place a force structure division between the Active, Guard, and federal Reserve forces that invests in the National Guard and Reserve some important military units and capabilities such that the United States military cannot engage in large-scale and protracted military operations without mobilizing the Guard and Reserve. This “Total Force” policy, which although unlikely intended to act like this, functionally serves as a political hurdle to engage popular support, which must be passed in order to prevent a repeat of the Vietnam era civilmilitary problems suffered in the s and early s (Carafano ). All of these adjustments, however, have not eliminated the system of dual state and federal control. State and territorial governments still pro-

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vide funding for National Guard facilities and can still use their National Guard personnel and units for state purposes under the control of the governor and without reference to federal authorities. When this occurs, Guard soldiers and airmen are paid by the state, not the federal government. And finally, the officer commanding each state and territorial National Guard, who has responsibility for the peacetime training, discipline, and readiness of the organization, is still the state or territorial Adjutant General, appointed in accordance with individual state or territorial laws. These officers are not under the routine authority of the federal military, but rather they answer only to the state or territorial government. The critical position of the state and territorial Adjutants General, the general officers commanding each of the fifty-four separate National Guard organizations within the United States, has been since the colonial period an essential role within the broader American governmental system, and yet remains little understood or appreciated. One of the oldest continually operating governmental roles in North America (Millett and Maslowski : ), the Adjutant General is in the center of the competing interests and priorities created by the bifurcated militia construct in the United States. As the organized militia of the fifty-four states and territories, the National Guard is governed primarily under Title  United States Code, except when activated during a federal mobilization, when it then comes under the authority of Title  United States Code—the law code governing the Active or federal military. This requirement, to exist under two separate federal legal codes on top of state laws, greatly exacerbates the civil-military complications the National Guard must navigate. The Adjutants General therefore must deal with the legal, political, and other considerations of the federal government, simultaneously with those of the state or territorial governments, while also responding to and complying with direction and oversight from the active Army and Air Force. And within each of those areas, they face the same tensions between the need to obey the orders of the president and/or the governor, while still having the requirement to deal with the fiscal and regulatory powers of the state legislature, as well as the United States Congress.

The Militia and American Military Politics Samuel Huntington, in his seminal work on civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State, characterizes the National Guard as an “empire within an empire,” a force that because of these requirements for responding to the different levels of government is inherently political and therefore, in his view, unprofessional: “a semi-military force which can never be completely

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subordinated to military discipline nor completely removed from political entanglements” (: ). Huntington’s book is in some ways both a vehicle for and the foundation of many of the serious disagreements and tensions that have existed between the Active military and National Guard in the post–World War II period. Often citing elements of Huntington’s analysis, critics of the National Guard have accused leaders of the National Guard who are trying to negotiate the maze of the civil-military structure they inhabit of behaviors that violate military professional ethics and damage the Army and Air Force through their recourse to state and congressional leaders (Petrarca ). Most often these criticisms are leveled at the Adjutants General, who detractors see as being inherently unprofessional in the Huntingtonian sense, because they serve as appointed state government officials and yet exercise military authorities. The Adjutants General are all General Officers and can be from either the Army or the Air Force. Virtually every state and territory now requires that in order to serve in the position, these officers must meet the promotion standards for General Officers set by either of the two services and must gain federal recognition for his or her rank. In the past, this was not necessarily the case, and historical examples abound of people selected and appointed to the position of Adjutant General who were not militarily qualified and who served as the result of purely political considerations. It is this prior history that some refer to when they assert that because the National Guard is run by “political appointees,” it can never be truly “professional” in the way Huntington () defined that term. That may have been the case in some places in  when Huntington wrote his book, but it is certainly not the case now. At present, in general terms, there is little that separates the Adjutants General from their counterpart General Officers in the Active Army or Air Force, and in all but one state the procedure for appointing these officers is very similar to that used to appoint the federal military service chiefs: nomination by the executive (the state or territorial governors), and confirmation by the legislature (for example, the Adjutant General of Vermont is elected as a state constitutional officer by the state legislature). The Commanding General of the District of Columbia National Guard is appointed in exactly the same way as his or her counterparts in the Active military: nominated by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate. In the end, this debate based on Huntington’s specific set of definitions of “professionalism”—which may or may not be entirely accurate or historically useful—is beside the point. The constitutional structure of the United States military and the National Guard is complex, potentially politically fraught, and exists in this way for historical cultural and political reasons. It is not within the scope of this chapter to debate these reasons—only to

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acknowledge that the existing structure produces numerous opportunities for civil-military tension, and to advocate for better understanding of and education concerning these opportunities so as to mitigate or reduce tension within the existing structure. The Adjutants General serve in a complex set of conditions. As local government appointees, they are employees of the states or territories and draw their regular salaries from those governments when in their daily working or “state” status. Many hold cabinet-level appointments in their governments, some with additional roles concerning Emergency Management, Homeland Security, or Veterans Affairs. But they all are also commissioned officers in the Army or Air National Guard, and so they serve in a “federal” status for training or other specifically military activities, under Title  United States Code. When in a federal status, they must respond to orders and directives from federal authorities and must adhere to and uphold the policies and regulations of the active services. When in state status, however, they answer only to the respective state or territorial governors, and do not necessarily have to follow the directives of the federal services. When the orders, directives, or policies of these different entities conflict, the Adjutants General can find themselves in a difficult position— one that, again, sometimes results in what may seem to the Active services or others as violations of the military professional ethic. For example, during the period between roughly  and , as a result of federal budget freezes, the Army and the Air Force underwent a series of painful force structure cuts. There was an often-rancorous debate over these cuts between the services and the National Guard, as to how these proposed cuts would be distributed among the Active, federal Reserve, and Guard components of the Army and Air Force (Rumbaugh ; Watson ). Adjutants General, as the officers responsible to their respective state and territorial governors for their local military forces, were at the forefront of these arguments. They consequently incurred the not insignificant ire of Active senior service leadership by toggling between their “state” and “federal” status to engage with both state and federal political leaders, in Congress and the executive, to ensure that their positions were heard. Accusations of unprofessional behavior were made in private and even in public, which resulted in some embarrassment to the public image of the Guard and to the military as a whole (Bowman ; Freedberg Jr. ). However, the Adjutants General, in performing their function within the dual military construct, were in fact only adhering to the requirements of their bifurcated duties in leveraging their roles to support their various states’ positions. The various local imperatives and nuances of this role were not then, and still may not be, well understood by many Active senior military leaders, as most of them have had little to no signif-

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icant personal experience or knowledge of the Guard during their careers. This lack of Active component experience, knowledge, understanding, and acceptance of the complexities of the National Guard remains a potential flash point within the country’s military structure, and again is exacerbated by the entrenched Huntingtonian view of the profession that senior officers must have no crossover into the realm of policy. A more recent and evolving example of this tension between the state and federal roles of the Adjutants General is the increasing use of the Guard by governors to make political statements either in support of or against national policies. Republican governors sending National Guard units and personnel to police the border with Mexico, with or without a federal request, is one example of this kind of overt “political” use of the militia (Ridler ). A more potentially dangerous use of the Guard for political posturing is the governor of Oklahoma in November  firing his Adjutant General over his active support and leadership in executing the Defense Department’s COVID- vaccination mandate, opposition to which the governor had made into a political plank. The governor appointed another, more compliant officer who immediately announced, at the governor’s direction and against the orders of the secretary of defense, that Oklahoma National Guard personnel would not be required to be vaccinated against COVID- (Fenwick ). The governor and his new Adjutant General remained silent about the myriad other vaccination and medical readiness mandates his soldiers and airmen must still apparently meet. The secretary of defense has reiterated the vaccine requirement while publicly reminding the governor that Oklahoma Guard personnel must meet all federal readiness standards or they would face loss of pay or even discharge (Fenwick ). Officers in the state may also face the loss of federal recognition for their rank, should they remain in defiance of the mandate. As this situation of conflict between the dual, state-federal control over the militia develops, it once again puts the Guard into the precarious position of losing credibility and justly having questions raised over its adherence to the professional military ethic, all because of the unique constitutional structure of the militia, with its built-in tensions over command-and-control authorities. Adjutants General are also responsible for simultaneous oversight and management of both state and federal budgets and civilian employees, some of whom may have portions of their salaries funded by both levels of government, under the complex federal-state cost-sharing formulas that govern the maintenance of Guard equipment, facilities, and other real property. When there is tension between state fiscal priorities and federal guidelines and regulations, Adjutants General can be caught in the middle. Examples of this kind of complexity are common during the once-rare fed-

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eral government “shutdowns” that have now seemingly become a recurring feature of Washington politics. If a shutdown mandates that certain categories of federal employees must be placed on furlough, how will that mandate affect a state employee of the National Guard whose salary is partially federally supported? If a state governor insists that state employees will not be furloughed, how is the Adjutant General to avoid violating federal fiscal law by keeping an employee at work when the federal portion of her salary is not being funded by Congress? By adhering to federal law, the Adjutant General may risk acting counter to the governor’s directives. Moreover, if a governor or the state legislature, who are required by state law to balance their budget, does not understand the nuances of this state-federal fiscal arrangement, or has a political conflict with the federal position, the Adjutant General risks the trust and confidence of the governor or state government. Even in the seemingly apolitical area of force structure, when Adjutants General and other senior Guard officers work to support the strictly military priorities of the Army and Air Force, they can be cast into a position where they aggravate political sensibilities of both local and national political leadership. Debates around force structure—such as types and locations of units, numbers, and types of aircraft—have become increasingly fraught as the services seek to modernize and adapt to changing technologies and the requirements of the competitive global security environment. For example, the Air Force has tried with little success over the past twenty years to reduce or eliminate legacy aircraft from its inventory, such as the A- Thunderbolt, which it sees as either redundant or too expensive to maintain in the face of budget pressure or the priority fielding of more modern planes like the F-. Additionally, the change of some former manned aircraft squadrons to unmanned systems has been wrenching for some units and bases. These moves have engendered resistance from civilian political officials who have vested interests against change in their constituencies, thereby putting service leadership in a position of having to make difficult decisions based on budgeting restraints, and then having those decisions resisted or overridden by those responsible for imposing the very fiscal conditions that drive them (Pawlyk ). The National Guard is, once again, in the center of many of these civil-military tensions. As professional senior military leaders, Adjutants General understand and, in most cases, agree with service leadership about modernization and other force structure priorities. But local considerations place them in sometimes untenable positions with state and other local political leadership. An instance of this situation: Many Air National Guard bases are located on local municipal or regional civil airports. In many of these places, which often operate on a very thin budget margin, cost-sharing agreements

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between the resident Guard units and civil airport authorities exist to take fiscal pressure off both entities. These kinds of arrangements have at times resulted in situations where critical airport operating and maintenance activities are partially or even entirely taken over by the Guard, and others by the civil authorities. For example, since by federal law the Guard must maintain formal base and aircraft firefighting capabilities in order to operate manned flying units, on many civil/Guard facilities the firefighters are entirely paid for by the military, and the civil authorities either reimburse the Guard for the service or provide another in-kind reciprocal service, such as additional ramp space or de-icing. When a Guard flying unit is programmed to transition from a manned flying unit to either a non-flying unit or an unmanned aircraft unit, it will lose its firefighters, thereby threatening the municipal or regional airport’s ability to function (Schmidt ). It is easy to see here how the political ramifications of what might otherwise seem like a relatively simple and necessary force structure modification can produce some especially fraught political tensions for Guard leaders. Since these kinds of decisions are routinely made and executed in the Active military with little or no resistance or public fanfare, Active military leaders can be nonplussed and even angered by Adjutants General who strongly resist these changes to units in their states. And when these organizations (generally Army) are some of the oldest and most decorated units in either the state or even the nation, local sensibilities can go beyond the serious economic and infrastructure concerns related to the Guard, and touch on the often major historical and cultural significance held by local military organizations. (The oldest military units in the United States, dating from December , are the st Infantry, the nd Infantry, the st Field Artillery, and the st Engineer Battalion, and are all in the Massachusetts Army National Guard.) Adjutants General can then end up torn between the complexities of conflicting professional service loyalties and military judgment, local and state/territorial economic and social concerns, and state/territorial versus federal fiscal demands. One final discussion is useful here of how the dual military structure of the United States almost guarantees civil-military tensions, with the National Guard in the center. The Guard’s role in the racial justice protests around the United States in the spring and summer of  brings some of these civil-military tensions into sharp relief, particularly in the incidents in Washington, DC, which culminated in the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff making a public apology for his perceived role in the potential politicization of the military (Lamothe ). While it is generally true that most American military leaders and organizations seek to remain uninvolved in domestic civil unrest—these events

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are messy and can result in the military’s image being tarnished—the National Guard of the states and territories has support to civil authorities in these circumstances as one of its primary missions. In the summer of , the widespread protests over the police killings of Black citizens at times became riots, with arson, looting, and other violence against people and property. During these protests the National Guard was brought in numerous times by governors to assist law enforcement agencies in maintaining order, and in a few widely publicized instances units were involved in controversy as a result. Kentucky National Guard personnel shot and killed a man named David McAtee at a protest in Louisville, and the District of Columbia Guard, along with units from several neighboring states, were notoriously embroiled in violence against peaceful protesters in Washington, DC (Lamothe ). Ten of the eleven Guard units sent to Washington in response to these protests came from states with Republican governors, with Democratic-led states keeping their units home—another example of the ways in which governors can use the Guard to make political statements (Vladeck ). In each of these cases, Guard members were legally cleared of wrongdoing, but the fallout from these events has brought out further questions about the politicization of the military, and generated fears and perceptions about the military being used to suppress popular dissent or worse (Vladeck ). These perceptions could only have been exacerbated when former president Donald Trump made a number of uninformed and frankly incorrect statements about “sending the Guard” to various locations that summer; the president has no authority or ability to do any such thing absent a formal federal mobilization of the National Guard and a declaration under the Insurrection Act (Bauer and Woodward ). But the mere mention of doing these things can threaten the delicate balance maintained by Guard leaders between their state and federal roles, to say nothing of the potential damage done to the apolitical image of the military. The fact that rarely was there any correction or contradiction of these statements by political or military leaders, or in the media, reinforces the necessity for broader education on the rules governing the National Guard. These fears are at least some of the reasons why Defense Department civilian and military leaders made several public statements leading up to and even after the November  elections reassuring the public that the military would stay out of the political process. It was also these fears and perceptions that led the Defense Department and District of Columbia National Guard to put restraints and delays on the deployment of the Guard to support the police during the violence at the United States Capitol on  January  (Sonne, Zapotosky, and Barrett ). As these events are still under investigation and the full truth is not entirely clear about how the use

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of the Guard unfolded that day, it is sufficient here to say that the National Guard’s mission to support civil authorities in domestic emergencies can have ramifications for civil-military relations that extend far beyond reputational and morale costs for the militia. Citizens and politicians often do not and cannot make a distinction between Guard personnel and Active forces, and so the entire United States military can be adversely affected when these kinds of domestic responses go awry. The inherent political tensions of the United States’ dual military construct are nowhere more clearly on display when National Guard personnel are wearing riot gear on the streets—it is imperative in these situations that civilian and military leaders understand these tensions and carefully work through them to avoid damage to the delicate military-civilian compact that lies at the heart of the National Guard.

Conclusion The study of American military politics tends to focus largely on the federal, regular forces and their interaction with society and the different branches of the government. As I have argued, the National Guard cannot be left out of this discussion, and a broader understanding is needed of the ways in which the dual military system set up in the United States Constitution is designed to create balance between state and national governments to ensure the smooth functioning of that system. The National Guard, as the organized militia of the states and territories, occupies a central place in both the culture and the history of the United States military, and yet the details of its structure, functioning, and the laws governing it remain little understood not only by the broader public but by civilian and military leadership as well. It must be hoped that such an integral part of the military will warrant a more nuanced and comprehensive examination than what is contained in most literature on civil-military relations. As the events of the last three years demonstrate, such an examination is required perhaps now more than ever before. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the US government.

James D. Campbell is the chair of the Joint Warfighting Department at the Air Command and Staff College. A retired US Army brigadier general, Dr. Campbell served as an infantryman and strategic plans and policy officer

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for thirty years, with assignments at all levels of command and staff, in both the Regular Army and the National Guard.

References Bauer, Scott, and Calvin Woodward. . “AP Fact Check: Trump Tweets Distort Truth on National Guard.” AP News.  September . https://apnews.com/arti cle/ap-top-news-or-state-wire-politics-wi-state-wire-eaaccfbaae cee. Bowman, Tom. . “Army vs. National Guard: Who Gets Those Apache Helicopters?” National Public Radio.  April . www.npr.org///// army-vs-national-guard-who-gets-those-apache-helicopters. Campbell, James D. . “The National Guard as a Strategic Hedge.” Parameters (): –. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol/iss/. Carafano, James Jay. . “Total Force Policy and the Abrams Doctrine: Unfulfilled Promise, Uncertain Future.” Foreign Policy Research Institute.  February . www.fpri.org/article///total-force-policy-and-the-abrams-doctrine-unful filled-promise-uncertain-future/. Childs, John. . “The Restoration Army -.” In The Oxford History of the British Army, eds. David G. Chandler and Ian Beckett, –. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fenwick, Ben. . “Oklahoma’s Governor Puts an Opponent of Vaccine Mandates in Charge of the National Guard.” New York Times.  November . https://www .nytimes////world/americas/oklahoma-kevin-stitt-vaccine-mandate-nati onal-guard.html. Freedberg Jr., Sydney. . “Budgets & ‘Betrayal’: National Guard Fights to Keep Apache Gunships.” Breaking Defense.  January . www.breakingdefense .com///budgets-betrayal-national-guard-fights-to-keep-apache-gunships. Harris, Tim. . Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society –. Harlow: Longman. Horton, Alex, and Dan Lamothe. . “Oklahoma National Guard Rejects Pentagon’s Coronavirus Vaccine Mandate.” Washington Post.  November . https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security////oklahoma-natio nal-guard-vaccine-mandate/. Huntington, Samuel P. . The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. James, Lawrence. . Warrior Race: A History of the British at War. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lamothe, Dan. . “Pentagon’s Top General Apologizes for Appearing Alongside Trump in Lafayette Square.” Washington Post.  June . www.washingtonpost .com/national-security////pentagon’s-top-general-apologizes-for-appea ring-alongside-trump-in-lafayette-square/. ———. . “As a Divisive Election Arrives, the National Guard Prepares for Unrest and Wrestles with How to Respond.” Washington Post.  October . https:// www.washingtonpost.com/national-security////national-guard-electi on-unrest/.

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Madison, James. . The Federalist Papers: No. . The Influence of the State and Federal Governments Compared. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School.  January . www.avalon.yale.edu/_century/fed.asp. Millett, Allan R., and Peter Maslowski. . For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America. New York: The Free Press. National Guard Bureau. .  National Guard Bureau Posture Statement. www .nationalguard.mil/portals//Documents/PostureStatements/ percentNGB p ercentPosture percentStatement.pdf?ver=BajGYoe_XLctlkGuzQ percent d. Pawlyk, Oriana. . “Lawmakers Move Once Again to Rescue A- Warthog from Retirement.” Military.com.  June . www.military.com/daily-news/// /lawmakers-move-once-again-to-rescue-a--warthog-from-retirement.html. Petrarca Jr., Charles E. . Politics and the National Guard. Unpublished Strategy Research Project, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA. Ridler, Keith. . “Idaho Governor, Lieutenant Spar over National Guard Deployment to US-Mexico Border.” Associated Press/Military Times.  October . www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military////idaho-governor-lieuten ant-spar-over-national-guard-deployment-to-us-mexico-border/. Roy, Ian. . “Towards the Standing Army –.” In The Oxford History of the British Army, eds. David G. Chandler and Ian Beckett, –. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rumbaugh, Russell. . “The Battle between the Air Force and the Air National Guard.” Defense One.  August . www.defenseone.com/ideas///battle-betw een-air-force-and-air-national-guard//. Schmidt, Helmut. . “Fargo Airport Creates Own Fire Force: Air Guard Loss Means Loss of Firefighters.” The Dickinson Press.  June . www.thedickinsonpress .com/-fargo-airport-creates-own-fire-force-air-guard-loss-means-lossfirefighters. Sonne, Paul, Matt Zapotosky, and Devlin Barrett. . “D.C. Guard Chief Says ‘Unusual’ Restrictions Slowed Deployment of Backup During Capitol Riot.” Washington Post.  March . www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitolriot-hearing////aa-h-eb-cd-bfac_story.html. Steinhauer, Jennifer. . “The Defense Department Says Oklahoma National Guard Must Get Vaccinated.” New York Times.  November . https://www.nytimes .com////us/politics/oklahoma-national-guard-vaccine.html. Vladeck, Steve. . “Why Were Out-of-State National Guard Units in Washington, D.C.? The Justice Department’s Troubling Explanation.” Lawfare Blog.  June . www.lawfare.com/why-were-out-of-state-national-guard-units-in-washingtondc-justice-department’s-troubling-explanation/. Watson, Ben. . “Army, National Guard Fight Over Apache Helicopters.” Defense One.  April . www.defenseone.com/policy///army-national-guardfight-over-apache-helicopters//.

chapter 6

Strategic Civil-Military Relations Tomorrow’s Generals’ Views on Dissent, Disobedience, and Principled Resignation Steven Lee Katz

+ As a soldier, he owes obedience; as a man, he owes disobedience. For the officer, this comes down to a choice between his own conscience on the one hand, and the good of the state, plus the professional virtue of obedience, upon the other. (Huntington : ) Given the state of national politics, we are concerned about being identified in a study on military officer dissent and disobedience due to fears of politically motivated reprisals against our institution. (Anonymous US war college dean, personal communications, October )

Introduction America’s top-serving military officer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley considered resigning after President Trump requested that he accompany him on a controversial walk-through of Lafayette Square to visit St. John’s Episcopal Church in June  (hereafter the “Lafayette incident”) (Cooper ). Law enforcement had just tear-gassed and cleared peaceful protestors exercising their First Amendment rights. Milley later apologized and publicly clarified that he should not have been there with the president. Milley recognized his participation in this politically charged event, which led many observers to question the military’s nonpartisan ethic due to the perception that Milley played a role in suppressing a domestic protest. The contentious topic of military dissent, disobedience, and resignation in protest since the  US presidential election and culminating with the  January  insurrection has been increasingly contemplated and vociferously debated among scholars, those in uniform, military veterans, and civil society (Shields ; Brooks, Golby, and Urben ; Nagl and

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Yingling ; Schake and Golby ). To inform the ongoing normative debate, this chapter, founded on a survey of elite military officers, portends that a significant portion of tomorrow’s strategic military officers are inclined to go beyond traditional advisory and advocacy roles to acts of insistence to compel civilian policymakers to adopt their military views. In some circumstances, as presented in my survey, senior officers will refuse to obey civilian-directed, lawful orders that are perceived to be immoral. According to my research, over  percent of the surveyed officers agreed that General Milley’s  tactical guidance (Lopez ) to the armed forces—namely that a subordinate has the freedom and is empowered to disobey a specific order, a specified task, in order to accomplish a higher purpose—should also be applied to the strategic level of civilmilitary relations. The sample group of future US generals and admirals who participated in my research believe that under certain circumstances, strategic military officers, using their professional judgment, can disobey an immoral but lawful civilian-directed order or policy yet still be loyal to a higher societal good. This activist preference, among elite military officers, to contest certain civilian policies was first revealed in the  Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) survey (Feaver and Kohn ; Kohn ). My study of elite military officers builds on the TISS findings and identifies civil-military scenarios that have the potential to create friction and potential breaking points in the strategic military officer and civilian leader decision-making process. The military has a long-standing professional ethic of adherence to the principle of civilian control of the military. In fact, there is no modern precedent of strategic military officers publicly resigning in protest to immoral orders. In the American military tradition, orders are assumed to be legal and should be followed unless they are determined unlawful by executive branch lawyers, or if the order or policy is “manifestly illegal,” as was the case during the My Lai Massacre (Reeves and Wallace ). However, there are plentiful American cases of morally reprehensible civilian-directed orders that were deemed lawful at the time of execution. Examples include the Army’s detention of thousands of US citizens of Japanese descent during World War II and the Bush administration’s torture-resembling techniques used on suspected terrorists. How senior military officers respond to legally ambiguous, ethical dilemmas is principally dependent on their views of civil-military relations (see figure .). According to Peter Feaver, senior officers generally identify with one of two tribes: professional supremacists or civilian supremacists (: –). Each tribe ascribes to a contrasting theory of the appropriate normative relationship and responsibilities between the strategic military officer and the senior civilian decision-maker in a democratic society. Fig-

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Figure .. Response options and anticipated impact on civil-military relations. © Steven Lee Katz.

ure . depicts Feaver’s officership dichotomy. Feaver and Richard Kohn () are permissive of senior officers providing dissenting views to civilians through advice and advocacy, so as long as these discussions remain confidential and internal and are conducted in good faith (Feaver and Kohn ; Feaver ; Kohn ). Senior officer advice or advocacy must not be purposed to box in the civilian decision-maker or short-circuit the internal deliberative process. Additionally, Feaver is permissive of senior generals sharing dissenting concerns with Congress when the body is exercising its constitutional oversight responsibilities. However, civilian supremacists assert that acts of senior officer insistence (figure .) are coercive by nature and directly challenge civilian control and therefore are normatively forbidden (Feaver ; Kohn ). In a civil-military context, Feaver defines insistence as “senior [officer] dramatic action to ensure that the military voice is heard and heeded” (: ). And Kohn states that the purpose of insisting is to “compel acceptance of the military’s recommendation” (: ). Examples of senior officer actions indicating varying degrees of insistence include resigning in protest; circumventing the civilian chain of command; leaking information to Congress; and more severe actions such as public insubordination and taking active measures to sabotage the implementation of the order or policy. In general, since acts of insistence are coercive, they also are more detrimental to military-executive branch ci-

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vilian leadership relations. The subsequent sections examine the theory and practice of strategic military officer dissent and disobedience, viewed through Feaver’s civil-military relations framework, as depicted in figure ..

Professional Supremacism In his ground-breaking civil-military treatise The Soldier and the State (), Samuel Huntington proposes that obedience to the state is the military’s supreme virtue. He writes, “For the profession to perform its function, each level within it must be able to command the instantaneous and loyal obedience of subordinate levels” (: ). However, Huntington also acknowledges that there are limits to obedience to the state. Huntington goes on to say, “Except in the most extreme instances, it is reasonable to expect that he will adhere to the professional ethic and obey. Only rarely will the military man be justified in following the dictates of private conscience against the dual demand of military obedience and state welfare” (). Huntington believed that military disobedience to civilian-directed orders is only justified when the orders affect the domain of military action, have no political implications, clearly violate standards of professional military competence, and have weighty consequences. Huntington and his followers carve out an exception to the rule of military obedience in what is known today as the “normal theory,” which is the dominant civil-military relations theory in the United States and is synonymous with Huntington’s venerated “objective control.” In principle, objective control is a balancing act to ensure civilian control of the military (Social Imperative) while enabling the ability of the uniformed military to provide effective security for the state (Functional Imperative). Huntington’s solution to the inherent civil-military tension is for the state to create a professional and apolitical military establishment that can operate with autonomy inside the military sphere yet still remain obedient to its elected leaders. The bedrock of objective control is military professionalism. Don M. Snider, a leading Huntingtonian, claims that there are five features of a profession: () it provides a vital service to society; () it applies expert knowledge; () it has an ethical code and earns societal trust; and () it self-regulates to ensure ethical standards are maintained (: ). Snider’s fifth premise is that if a profession, like the military, embodies these aforementioned characteristics and societal values, it is granted significant autonomy in its practice as a social trustee (). Followers of the Huntington school, called “professional supremacists” by Feaver (: ), believe civilian meddling in the military sphere undermines military professionalism, objective control, and subsequently the

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military’s combat effectiveness and ability to perform its Functional Imperative. Professional supremacists believe Huntington’s notion of obedience cannot be interpreted to mean in every lawful case the military must yield to civilian judgment—otherwise, military conduct would resemble a bureaucracy and not a profession. Similar to a medical doctor refusing to perform a procedure that is not medically indicated, so too can members of the military profession dissent or disobey through their own highly developed internal sense of the proper application of the professional knowledge (Cook, as cited in Snider : ; Cohen : ). Morris Janowitz () agrees with Huntington that expertise, responsibility, and corporateness form the foundation of military professionalism. However, Janowitz differs from the Huntingtonian notion of separate civilian and military spheres, arguing that in democratic states, soldiers should reflect the values and norms of the greater civilian society. Janowitz advocates for civilianizing the military as the primary means to ensure the military remains subordinate to civilian control. In Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier (), he details the blurring of civilian and military responsibilities in what he describes as the nation’s “constabulary” force (: ). Janowitz shares overlapping views with civilian supremacists as he also believes civilian leaders would be expected to get into the details of military organization, doctrine, leader development and selection, and even ongoing military operations. However, in sum, Janowitz is more representative of professional supremacism because he argues that military leaders, similarly, could be expected to contribute to the political sphere, both in the national debate before the commitment of US forces and thereafter in critiquing the effectiveness of ongoing operations (Gibson : ). Janowitz naturally disagrees with Huntington’s apolitical military officer. Rather, Janowitz suggests that the proper role of senior military leaders can be expanded to include participation in political and administrative planning and schemes. Thus, from a Janowitzian perspective, military involvement in the pursuit of political goals is appropriate and indeed necessary as long as it is aligned with the values and interests of society. Therefore, Janowitz recognizes that political sensitivity is a necessary tool of the military professional and senior officers. Although not explicitly addressed by Janowitz, acts of senior officer dissent or even disobedience, when confronted with an immoral order, could be interpreted as permissible so as long as the overarching goal is consistent with societal norms and the national interest, and is mindful of civilian control. Professional supremacists submit that there exists a slice of moral discretionary space: when military advice is being disregarded and the consequences of the decision are extreme. In these situations, strategic military

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officers can insist (including publicly resigning and through acts of disobedience) that civilians adopt their position, without being disloyal to the nation (see figure .). For example, Chairman Milley made perfunctory Huntingtonian statements such as “The U.S. military is an apolitical institution. We were then, we are now” (Shinkman ). Along with such claims of political neutrality, Milley’s actions indicate he was willing to interfere with executing potentially disastrous civilian-directed orders. According to reports, shortly after the  January insurrection, “Milley called a meeting of top military commanders to forestall any hasty nuclear strike order by then-President Donald Trump” (Greenberg and Jacobson ), undermining the mercurial but democratically elected leader’s ability to use military force. However, even among professional supremacists, there are differences in opinion on the range of types of permissible military interference. For example, Snider asserts that retiring early or resigning quietly is not an appropriate means of dissent since it fails to influence the civilian decisionmaker during a period of national crisis. Ethicist William Felice () explains that resignation in silence for private reasons is the least ethically defensible course because it gives the public a false signal that nothing is wrong, since the fundamental policy agreement is kept under wraps. Felice maintains that even after resignation, the officer has a moral responsibility to speak publicly and bring attention to ethical concerns. Ethicist and retired Army general James Dubik () has proposed a more constrained approach to military interference. Dubik believes that the act of resigning is an important recuperative mechanism for the state to avoid catastrophic outcomes; however, he judges that a principled resignation must be a quiet affair, between the officer and the civilian decision-maker, not a challenge to civilian control of the military. Dubik has also stated that resignation should only be used as a last resort after military “voice” and the civil-military dialogue have been exhausted. Dubik posits that members of the military, including strategic military officers, remain moral agents (: ). For this reason, he opposes an absolute prohibition of officer resignation because it denies the individual moral agency. Dubik’s allowance for a principled resignation reflects the military’s prescribed norm. The Armed Forces Officer manual (Swain and Pierce ) states that professionals should first provide expert candid advice but are bound by oath to execute legal civilian decisions as effectively as possible— even those with which they fundamentally disagree—or they must request relief from their duties, or leave the service entirely, either by resignation or retirement. The military manual explains that the officer must find his own moral guidance, citing A Man for All Seasons: “there’s a little . . . little, area . . . where I must rule myself ” (National Defense University : ).

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The most extreme practice of professional supremacism is branded McMasterism (Feaver ). According to Feaver, McMasterism is based on a flawed interpretation of H. R. McMaster’s tome Dereliction of Duty () and the author’s belief that Vietnam-era strategic military officers should have been more active in their dissent of the misguided war effort. McMasterists blame the US failures in Vietnam and Iraq on timid senior generals, because they claim these leaders went along with disastrous civilian policies rather than blocking them. McMasterists argue that () civilian leaders are actively trying to suppress military opinion; () military judgment is superior to that of civilians; and () the military should ensure not only that its voices are heard but also that its views are heeded (Feaver : ). Adherents of McMasterism, like retired military officers Andrew Milburn, Paul Yingling, and John Nagl, permit the most contentious forms of military intervention in the military-civilian decision-making process. McMasterists opine that traditional military affairs and beyond are fair game for contention, even though the latter is expressly forbidden in Huntington’s writings. Milburn argues that “there are circumstances under which a military officer is not only justified but also obligated to disobey a legal order” (). Milburn declares that the civil-military dialogue is inherently equal and that military leaders are right to “challenge their civilian masters if the policy appears to be unconstitutional, immoral, or otherwise detrimental to the institution.” And, according to Nagl and Yingling (), it is the strategic military officer’s responsibility not only to support and defend the Constitution but also to interpret it. In a preelection article, Nagl and Yingling () contend that if the  election were determined by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to be a fair election and President Trump loses but does not concede by Inauguration Day, then it is the chairman’s military duty to give orders directing US forces to support the constitutional transfer of power to president-elect Biden or else be complicit in a coup d’état.

Civilian Supremacism Civilian supremacists’ beliefs are grounded in the Clausewitzian principle that war is a direct extension of national policy. In Supreme Command (), Eliot Cohen revives the Clausewitzian view of civil-military relations. Proponents of civilian supremacism, like Cohen, stress that Huntington’s objective control or “normal” theory is incompatible with the Clausewitzian perspective, since statesmen are right to “interject themselves in any aspect of war-making” (Cohen : ). They believe there

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is no field of military affairs that might be outside the province of political leaders. Civilian supremacists insist that even if civilian orders are imprudent, unwise, or immoral, democratic theory gives civilian leaders the authority to be wrong or right and the choice to disregard military advice. Cohen introduces the concept of an “unequal dialogue,” between the strategic military officer and civilian decision-maker: in essence, both sides express their professional views bluntly, sometimes offensively, and repeatedly if necessary, but the final decision-making authority resides, unambiguously, with the civilian leader (Cohen : ). And once the dialogue ends and a decision made, then the military is expected to follow, faithfully. The civilian supremacists view strategic military officers in a special class because their actions have the potential to significantly poison civil-military relations. They believe that strategic military officers should not sabotage the formalized policymaking process through acts like leaking information, resigning in protest, or shirking duties. However, civilian supremacists (Feaver and Kohn ) propose and even encourage, when appropriate, limited forms of military dissent (advise and advocacy) in the civil-military decision-making process (see figure .). First, they (Feaver ; Kohn ) posit that the military should not stand silently when policy matters are being debated, but just that strategic officers participate only within the chain of command, speaking to civilian superiors candidly and privately without leaking to the public. Second, because Congress has a constitutional oversight role, civilian supremacists affirm that military officers must respond truthfully and candidly to congressional queries. However, an act of insistence, such as reporting or leaking predecisional information, like the president’s troop surge or invasion plans, to Congress to influence or box in the civilian decision-maker, is what Feaver () terms “shirking”; it violates civil-military trust and the goodwill required to maintain a healthy policymaking process. Strategic military officers’ dissent in front of Congress is also bounded by an officer’s professional knowledge and competency. There is disagreement between some civilian supremacists on the permissibility of retiring early and resigning quietly (Feaver ; Kohn ). However, resigning quietly (see figure .) is generally the bounds of dissent (crossing from advocacy to insistence) that distinguishes civilian supremacists from professional supremacists. All civilian supremacists affirm that a public resignation exceeds the boundaries of acceptable dissent and in almost all but the most extreme cases is disproportionate and incompatible with democratic norms. Civilian supremacists and civil-military experts Kori Schake and Jim Golby () provide a contrasting position to the Nagl and Yingling () article. Schake and Golby exemplify the purist view of the sacrosanct na-

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ture of civilian control and its position above all other societal goods. They call any military intervention in the presidential transfer of power a type of military coup. Conversely, Nagl and Yingling term inaction on Milley’s part as condoning of a Trump coup. Schake and Golby state that such a role for the military to resolve political disputes is unconstitutional, removes the military from civilian oversight, and will inevitably destroy American trust in the institution.

On Ethical Limits Since the Lafayette incident, even fervent civilian supremacists have expressed some acknowledgment that under supreme emergency-like conditions—when the threat to the liberal democratic order itself is at stake— traditional norms, including aspects of civilian control, can be temporarily abrogated to preserve other democratic features of the state. For example, as Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol building on  January , President Trump was noticeably absent for several hours in calling off his supporters. DoD civilian leadership was also deliberately slow in directing more military forces to the Capitol as this constitutionally mandated postelection process was halted (Goodman, Dugas, and Tonckens ; Swan and McGraw ). If one accepts that  January approached a supreme emergency condition, then Milley could have been justified (although not authorized) in taking on a more active role in addressing the insurrection in order to uphold a constitutional process. Cohen () alluded to this normative exception shortly after the Lafayette incident. “In the face of an unprincipled and brutal commander in chief,” Cohen said, “a different kind of bravery” and “considerable courage” for dismissal is needed by senior generals. Another critic of professional supremacism, and more specifically McMasterism, Jonathan Stevenson (), made an about-face after the Lafayette incident and reluctantly said, “We may be close to the moment at which active-duty service members need to consider disciplined disobedience” (Stevenson : para. ) due to President Trump’s attempt to abuse the military to subvert the democracy it is meant to uphold. The perception that President Trump was using the military for illiberal partisan purposes was for Cohen and others a redline that should not have been crossed—nor tolerated by senior generals. In the United States, the military officer’s professional ethical and moral underpinning is founded on the just war tradition and democratic theory principles. In my research, I presented to senior officers notional scenarios that intentionally pushed these boundaries in order to determine ethical redlines. I provided all sce-

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narios with the caveat that they were nominally lawful; however, some appeared more legally dubious than others.

Research Methodology From August  to May , I conducted an anonymous online survey of  US military officers from three of the five war college programs (Army War College, Naval War College, Air War College, Marine Corps War College, and the National War College). As depicted in figure ., the survey was presented to war college students during a distinctly tumultuous and politicized time in American civil-military relations (–). Therefore, the war college student views and survey responses should be evaluated within this context since the respondents were likely influenced by these unprecedented incidents. In addition, due to the sensitive nature of this research topic, one of the war college deans requested that the author not mention the school’s name as a participant in the report out of fear of reprisal from Trump administration officials; therefore, the specific war colleges that participated remain anonymous. The  survey responses represent . percent of war college students from three participating institutions, which together total approximately twelve hundred US officers enrolled. The surveyed officers were all of the rank of lieutenant colonel or colonel (and equivalent Navy ranks) with approximately twenty years of service. Roughly  percent of the survey respondents were Army officers; therefore, the results are more applicable to future Army generals. However, I found no appreciable difference in responses between the Army and other military services, active duty versus reserves/National Guard, or occupational specialty. All these students were sent electronic copies of the anonymous survey. The results are presumed to be indicative of three of the five war colleges. (The data might not necessarily be characteristic of the remaining two war colleges, roughly three hundred fifty additional officers, which did not allow for officer participation in the survey.) The author did not examine differences in responses associated with underlying demographics such as race, sex, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, or political party affiliation, due to the war colleges’ concerns over protecting the privacy of respondents. The participating war colleges stipulated that they would only participate in the survey if the research did not include an analysis of underlying demographics associated with specific views on dissent, disobedience, and resignation. However, all of these factors and others could have influenced the respondents’ views, to varying degrees. Most senior generals and admirals are graduates of the US war

Figure .. Civil-military incident timeline. © Steven Lee Katz.

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colleges. Therefore, the sample is intended to be indicative of a portion of future strategic officers and their views on dissent, disobedience, and resignation. The survey sample demographics can be found in the appendix. The first section of the research survey probes the officers’ broad views on dissent, disobedience, and resignation to determine whether they exhibit a military or civilian supremacism preference. The second section of the survey tests notional scenarios that are nominally lawful, many based on historical events, to determine circumstances that might lead to strategic officer interference in the decision-making process. To reduce response bias, the specifics of the historical events, such as country names Table .. Survey sample demographics. © Steven Lee Katz. Descriptive Item

N

Percent

O5s

164

75 percent

O6s

56

25 percent

TOTAL

220

100 percent

US Army Officers

165

74 percent

6

3 percent

US Marine Corps Officers US Navy Officers

8

4 percent

US Air Force Officers

42

19 percent

US Coast Guard Officers

0

0 percent

TOTAL

221

100 percent

Active Duty

135

52 percent

Reserves

37

17 percent

National Guard

45

21 percent

TOTAL

217

100 percent

Combat Service Support

78

35 percent

Combat Support

49

22 percent

Combat Arms

93

43 percent

TOTAL

220

100 percent

Men

190

88 percent

Women

26

12 percent

TOTAL

216

100 percent

White

152

83 percent

Non-White

31

17 percent

TOTAL

183

100 percent

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and classes of people, were omitted from the survey questions. The final section of the survey builds on the notional scenarios to determine how officers might respond to civilian-directed immoral orders.

Officer Views on Dissent and Disobedience I surveyed these officers on hypothetical scenarios that were presented as nominally lawful yet also strained the military professional ethic. The scenarios also demonstrate a civilian decision-maker who is unreceptive to the officers’ contravening best military advice. Many of these examples were drawn from contemporary or historic examples of morally questionable or objectionable orders, such as the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, targeting terrorists’ immediate family members, employing techniques that resemble torture on detainees, attempting to use the military to suppress a peaceful domestic protest, and initiating a war without a just cause. The survey results indicate that most of the sampled officers are in the Huntingtonian and to a lesser degree the McMasterism camps of professional supremacism. These officers expressed an inclination to respond and even interfere with civilian orders that are egregious violations of professional standards pertaining to initiating, waging, or ending wars, and certain democratic principles. The officers largely believed that they have the professional independence and moral discretion to respond to the civilian decision-maker on their terms. Approximately  percent of officers agreed they broadly have a moral obligation to disobey and publicly resign when confronted with a legal but immoral order, while  percent of officers believed they should quietly resign in protest (without the reasons being shared with the public). Only  percent of officers rejected any form of resignation in protest due to the belief that such an act threatens democratic norms and undermines civil-military relations. The surveyed officers are also confident that they are typically correct in their understanding of the situation. Nearly  percent of the officers believed they are usually or always equipped with the necessary information and certainty of the situation to make a wise decision. Nearly  percent of officers agreed that strategic military officers have a professional responsibility to use their position to privately advocate against the civilian leader from choosing a perceived immoral and potentially disastrous policies (figure .). The surveyed officers judged their impact to civil-military relations as a secondary concern to the efficacy of their act of dissent or disobedience. Sixty percent of officers felt that changing the policymaker’s decision is of primary importance to the potential

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negative effects on civil-military relations. Increased and outward partisanship in the military has been extensively documented and analyzed by civilmilitary experts; however, buttressing the nonpartisan ethic inculcated in the military profession,  percent of the officers surveyed believed that the political or ideological affiliation of a president would have no impact or would not change their views on the appropriateness of military officer dissent and disobedience. At least, nominally, these military officers recognize that partisanship should not influence their military advice and decision-making; however, in practice it is less clear whether officers are able to remove partisan bias from their respective roles.

Jus ad Bellum Norms The moral burden of the decision to go to war (jus ad bellum), in pursuit of protecting some national interest, falls primarily on elected leaders. There are six commonly accepted jus ad bellum criteria necessary to initiate a just war: a just cause—an act of self-defense or a response to aggression; competent authority—only proper civil authorities may order the initiation of war; right intention—those initiating war must not have an concealed motive; proportionality—weighing of the contemplated actions with the justification for taking action; and military action as a last resort—war should be undertaken only if nonviolent means to resolve the issue have failed or are unlikely to succeed; and probability of success—there is a good basis to believe that the desired outcome can be achieved (Swain and Pierce : –). Civilian supremacists assert that jus ad bellum concerns are largely outside the purview of the military and are inherently political. However, they do believe the military has a critical advisory role in counseling political leaders on the feasibility to execute a war strategy that informs the sixth jus ad bellum criterion, probability of success, and the related costs and risks. Conversely, some professional supremacists claim that all jus ad bellum concerns are within the strategic military officer’s purview. For example, Snider () includes jus ad bellum as an integral part of the Army professional ethical and moral foundation. Snider proposes that the following situations would warrant acts of military officer dissent or disobedience: ) civilian leaders direct the planning of a war of aggression, and ) civilian leaders direct the planning of a war that is clearly not going to achieve strategic purposes, wasting the lives of military and civilians alike. The officers surveyed affirmed that strategic military officers should take part in the political decision-making process to go to war; they also believe in resigning in protest if certain jus ad bellum principles are violated (see figure .). Officers were asked to estimate their likelihood to resign

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Figure .. Response to jus ad bellum hypotheticals. © Steven Lee Katz.

under different go-to-war scenarios. They were also asked their opinion on entering into a war that is unnecessary and costly with a low probability of overall success. The first scenario, depicted in figure ., lacks a just cause and roughly captures the  Iraq War characteristics (although Iraq is not specifically mentioned): . percent of officers were likely or very likely to resign in protest, and . percent said there was an even chance they would resign if, contrary to their best military advice, national leadership decided to wage an unnecessary and elective war with unachievable aims. A separate scenario asked officers how they might approach a circumstance where their best military advice or any military view is excluded from the decision-making process to use significant military force or initiate a conflict with another unnamed country. This scenario is borne from public concerns that President Trump would consider giving the military a frenzied order to strike Iran without a just cause or consultation with Pentagon leaders ahead of the presidential transition on  January . In response to this proposed scenario, . percent of officers stated they were either likely or very likely to resign, and another . percent stated there was an even chance they would resign. Officers were asked, in a third scenario, whether they would consider resigning if civilian leadership ordered a massive retaliation against a country for perpetrating a cyberattack on the American homeland that resulted in physical damage but no deaths. In this scenario, the ordered military response is disproportionate to the cyberattack; the retaliation will likely lead

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to a conventional war with many unnecessary deaths. In response,  percent of officers said they were likely or very likely to resign, and . percent said there was an even chance they would resign if the United States responded disproportionately to the cyberattack. The final scenario introduced the decision to go to war to protect a vital national interest. The war is assumed to be extremely costly and hundreds of thousands of service members and civilians will die, without the objectives of the war achieved. In response to this scenario, . percent of officers said they were likely or very likely to resign, and . percent said there was an even chance they would resign. In total, the survey responses indicate that a sizable portion of senior officers believe the jus ad bellum decision-making process is firmly inside the province of the strategic military officer’s professional judgment and advisory role. A range of – percent (see figure .) of future strategic military officers said they would consider interfering with the decision-maker given these scenarios. Civilian leaders should anticipate that future war plans that do not sufficiently include a military voice, lack a just cause, are costly, or have a low probability of success will receive varying degrees of strategic officer interference.

Jus in Bello Norms Civilian and professional supremacists generally agree that the moral burden during the conduct of warfare (jus in bello) falls primarily on the uniformed military. However, civilians are not entirely free of responsibility since they approve the various military means that can be employed and the rules of engagement. Professional supremacists assert that strategic military officers have the most moral discretion to interfere with civilian decision-makers within the war-fighting domain, since jus in bello principles are foundational to the military ethic and enshrined in law, policy, and professional norms. According to the just war tradition and described in the Armed Forces Officer manual (Swain and Pierce, ), for a war to be waged justly, it must meet two basic criteria: civilian distinction and proportionality. First, the soldier may not intend to kill or harm noncombatants, defined as civilians not participating in combat, enemy soldiers wounded or surrendered, and civilian objects. Second, the unintended harm (e.g., civilian deaths, damage to civilian objects) due to the military operation must not outweigh the military benefit. In addition, the Department of Defense includes the following war-fighting principles of military necessity, honor, and humanity in its authoritative law of war manual (). The survey tested the principles of civilian distinction, proportionality, and humanity.

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As anticipated, the surveyed officers displayed strong reactions to the presented norm-violating jus in bello scenarios (see figure .). Specifically, more than two-thirds of the officers surveyed considered resigning in response to scenarios that described the abuse of the war-fighting principles: civilian distinction and humanity. Proposed as a deterrent, senior civilians in the Trump administration briefly considered targeting civilian family members of suspected terrorists (Taylor ). The surveyed officers were given a related scenario in which civilian leadership, against military advice, adopts an expansive interpretation of the definition of a “combatant” and is ordering the lethal targeting of suspected terrorists’ families in theaters of armed conflict. The survey prompt states that such a policy will erode the long-standing international norm of civilian immunity. In response, . percent of officers surveyed said they were likely or very likely to resign, and . percent of officers said there was an even chance they would resign in protest. Although the previous scenario did not come to pass, this next scenario reflects the Bush administration’s interrogation program used on suspected terrorists. At the time, in  and , the Department of Justice and White House counsel determined these interrogation techniques were lawful (Yoo ). In the survey, officers were asked their likelihood to resign if national leadership, against military advice, adopts nominally lawful interrogation techniques that resemble torture and are ordering members of the military to enable host-nation forces to use these inhumane techniques on suspected terrorists. The stated consequences are that

Figure .. Response to jus in bello hypotheticals. © Steven Lee Katz.

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many innocent people will be detained and tortured due to this policy, with minimal information of value gleaned. In response, . percent of officers surveyed said they were likely or very likely to resign, and . percent of officers said there was an even chance they would resign in protest. The third scenario introduces a strained civil-military dialogue during the development of the war-fighting strategy and plans. Officers made only a small distinction between the role of the military in the decision to initiate war and in this jus in bello scenario: . percent of officers surveyed were likely or very likely to resign, and another  percent said there was an even chance of resignation if civilian decision-makers decide not to include their best military advice or any military view in the decision-making process to develop the war-fighting strategy, methods, and rules of engagement. Officers had less objection to winning a war sooner by way of fighting disproportionately. The final war waging scenario describes the use of weapons against military objectives that would cause massive collateral damage to civil society but also lead to an expedited military victory. Officers were asked their likelihood to resign if national leadership decides to employ disproportionate military means that would likely lead to a quick victory with fewer US military casualties; however, as a result, hundreds of thousands of civilians will die. In response, . percent of officers surveyed were likely or very likely to resign, and  percent said there was an even chance of resignation.

Jus post Bellum and Peacetime Norms Although not part of the traditional just war canon, the emergent principle of justice after war (jus post bellum) has gained some traction with military ethicists and elite officers, likely due to America’s failings to secure the peace in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the object of war is a better state of peace, neglecting to regulate war termination often prolongs the fighting as America has difficultly learned. Brian Orend (), the most prominent jus post bellum theorist, has said that winners of wars, like the United States over Saddam in , should never find themselves in a position where they have initially won the war but do not know what to do to secure their gains and construct ill-conceived postwar policy on the fly (Orend : ). Orend believes that such state conduct is immoral as it wastes the lives and livelihoods of both the winners and vanquished through unnecessary conflict. Officers were asked their likelihood to resign if they were “in the senior position to advise civilian decision-makers and the [senior civilian] decided to not include [their] best military advice or any military voice in the decisionmaking process on how to end a conflict the US is currently engaged in.”

Figure .. Response to jus post bellum hypotheticals. © Steven Lee Katz.

 Steven Lee Katz

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Almost  percent of officers were likely or very likely to resign, and . percent expressed an even chance of resigning—smaller than the percentages of officers willing to resign under the similar jus ad bellum and jus in bello scenarios. Former marine general and secretary of defense James Mattis was serving as a civilian when he resigned in protest to President Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw US forces from Syria. Mattis’s principled resignation was due to grave concerns and objection to abandoning a key US ally, the Kurds (Miller and Baldor ). The survey introduced a similar scenario in which national leadership decides to haphazardly end a US military engagement in a decades-long stalemate against military advice. The prompt states that the disengagement will likely lead to ethnic cleansing and the resurgence of terrorism and political and economic instability in a strategically important region of the world. In response to the scenario, . percent of officers said they were likely or very likely to resign, and . percent expressed an even chance of resigning. The final jus post bellum scenario characterizes a situation in which the necessary planning and resources to stabilize an adversary that is occupied by the US military is neglected or disregarded. The surveyed officers were presented with characteristics resembling the Iraq War post-invasion plan; “civilians [have] decided to not commit the resources required to fully stabilize a country the US military is currently occupying.” Given the Iraq War debacle, a surprisingly low proportion, only  percent of officers, said they were likely or very likely to resign, and . percent of officers said there was an even chance they would resign if America was on a path to repeat its mistakes in the Iraq War. Subsequent research should be conducted to determine the degree of adoption of jus post bellum principles in the military professional ethic.

Domestic Peacetime Norms Officers care about preserving a professional military institution that is both nonpartisan and a social trustee of American values and principles. Civilian use of the military for manifestly partisan purposes or the detention of US citizens with certain demographics were the most fraught scenarios (see figure .). Most officers showed a strong preference to interfere with civilian directives under these circumstances. After President Trump appeared to use the National Guard for partisan purposes in suppressing protests near the White House in June  (the Lafayette incident), the officers surveyed were asked how they would react to a similar scenario in which they are issued orders to politicize the military, positioning it to support one faction of the US population, during

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a period of divisive civil unrest in the country. Officers were steadfastly opposed to such a norm-violating directive, even if nominally lawful. Out of all the scenarios in the survey, this scenario animated the most respondents to take action. Almost  percent of officers said they were likely or very likely to resign if they were serving a civilian attempting to use the military in a highly partisan and dangerous manner. Another . percent of officers gave an even chance of resigning. In response to the perceived threat of Japanese American subversion during World War II, President Roosevelt issued an executive order that resulted in the internment of over a hundred thousand Japanese citizens. The presidential order authorized the secretary of war and military commanders to evacuate all persons deemed a threat from the West Coast to internment camps further inland (National Archives and Records Administration ). In addition, the Supreme Court determined that the exclusion order as applied to Americans of Japanese descent was lawful. The survey posed a similar, present-day scenario in which national leadership decides that the military will detain and intern all American citizens originally from high-threat countries for the sake of national security. In addition, the Supreme Court has ruled that such an action is lawful; however, the order is ineffective at mitigating the national security threat and will create a dangerous civil-military rift in society. In response to the survey scenario, . percent said they were likely or very likely to resign in protest, and . percent said there was an even chance they would resign. President Trump pardoned and granted clemency to a series of service members and contractors convicted of grave war crimes such as intentionally targeting civilians and killing combatants who were in US custody. Many veterans and members of the military were alarmed that Trump’s actions tolerating egregious law-of-war violations would impact good order and discipline in the military, erode the rule of law, and provide terrorists a rallying cry to attack America (VanLandingham and Corn ). In fact, Rear Admiral Collin Green made headlines when he and Navy secretary Richard Spencer reportedly vowed to resign or be fired rather than follow Trump’s controversial instructions to honor a high-profile war criminal (Roza ). Officers surveyed were asked their likelihood to resign if, against their best military advice, the pardoning of convicted war criminals led to the erosion of long-standing military norms, a decline in readiness, and an uptick in future war crimes. Given such a scenario, . percent of officers said they were likely or very likely to resign in protest, and . percent said they had an even chance of resigning. In April  Brett Crozier, the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, was relieved of duty for circumventing his chain of command and reporting to senior Navy civilian leadership and

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others that his crew was at serious health risk due to a COVID- outbreak on his vessel (Seligman and O’Brien ). Subsequently, the Navy investigated Crozier’s actions and upheld his firing. However, according to the House Armed Services Committee chairman, representative Adam Smith, Navy civilian leadership was also to blame for not expeditiously responding to this dire situation “as quickly as they should have, to adequately address the outbreak.” The survey presented the officers with a related scenario; in response, . percent said they were either likely or very likely to resign, and . percent expressed an even chance of resigning. Similar to the partisan use of the military scenario, the Trump administration, in its final year, faced significant civil unrest across the country, including a failed insurrection at the Capitol on  January . In response, the White House and Pentagon leadership deployed the National Guard to support law enforcement during several high-profile events that included the Black Lives Matter protests in Lafayette Square and securing the  presidential inauguration from right-wing insurrectionists. Before the National Guard deploys in support of a national emergency, important civil-military discussions should occur on the scope of the mission and the rules of the use of force. In response to the survey, approximately . percent of the officers said they were likely or very likely to resign in protest, and . percent expressed an even chance of resigning if the senior civilian decision-makers decided to not include their best military advice or any military views in the decision-making process on a vitally important and risky national security decision during a domestic emergency that required military assistance (i.e., hurricane, pandemic, civil unrest and riots, earthquake).

How Might Officers Resign in Protest? After responding to these scenarios, the officers were asked how they would resign given the aforementioned jus ad bellum, jus in bello, jus post bellum, and peacetime concerns. The most popular response option was also the least likely to negatively impact civil-military relations. The most agreed upon preference was to “write a private letter to the senior civilian decision-maker detailing your reasons for resigning and then resign, keeping your actions private even after leaving the military.” Approximately  percent of the respondents were either likely or very likely to pursue this quiet option. Officers surveyed were generally less supportive of more overt, public acts of interference. However, a significant portion of the officers still supported more drastic intervening measures that would likely harm civilian trust in the military. Roughly  percent of officers were likely or very likely to “write a public letter to the senior civilian decision-maker detailing

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[their] reasons for resigning and then resign.” A slightly smaller portion,  percent, of officers were likely or very likely to “disobey the immoral order, then either publicly resign in protest or wait to be fired.” More specifically, in response to the scenarios presented,  percent of respondents supported circumventing the chain of command, and roughly the same number supported reporting the concern directly to Congress or an inspector general to influence the civilian decision-maker and outcome (see figure .). Both responses exceed civilian supremacists’ normative bounds of dissent yet remain relatively low-impact to damaging civil-military relations. On the higher end of the dissent-disobedience continuum (see figure .),  percent of surveyed officers supported slow-rolling immoral policies from within their organizations. And  percent of officers said they would take active measures against implementing the immoral policy. A smaller portion of the officers,  percent, approved of making a public pronouncement that they would not carry out the policy, and a small fraction,  percent, supported leaking information to the press and public in order to stymie the policy.

Officers Are a Reflection of American Society A significant portion of the surveyed officers judge that under certain circumstances they can dissent, resign, and even disobey disastrous or immoral civilian-directed orders. But the military, rightly so, to a degree, reflects societal norms and values. Therefore, it is not surprising that this Huntingtonian anchor is also entrenched within the American people. According to a recent report, “if senior U.S. military officers object to a proposed military mission,”  percent of Americans thought the president should reject the mission even if he or she “thinks the mission is worthwhile” (Krebs and Ralston ). Americans have turned Cohen’s unequal dialogue upside down. In addition, most American respondents believe that senior officers should publicly advocate for military operations and policies the military favors because these officers know better than political leaders, even though this violates democratic principles. And relatedly, a large portion, in some cases a majority, does not accept the democratic precept that elected representatives should reign supreme over military policy (Krebs and Ralston ).

Recommendations It is evident that many senior officers believe that strategic decisions—such as when to go to war, how to fight wars, how to end them, as well as how to

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deploy the military in a domestic context—can challenge the professional military ethic. In these instances, the surveyed officers displayed a sense of moral fortitude and activism to adhere to the just war principles even when given a nominally lawful order to do otherwise. Future military leaders will need to better understand that these vexing decisions will often involve balancing bedrock principles tied to higher societal interests with the democratic principle of civilian over military control. If civilian supremacists are concerned by these rooted Huntingtonian beliefs, then additional investment should be made in reimagining professional military education. There is no level of military education at which ethics education is more important than at the war colleges, due to the influential positions these officers will likely hold. However, only six to nine hours of leadership ethics are taught on average at the war colleges (Asencio, Byrne, and Mujkic ). The war colleges curricula do present senior officers with a cursory review of the literature, but in many cases these courses fail to imagine and introduce ethical dilemmas that future strategic officers might be forced to confront. And many officers surveyed conceded that this is a personal blind spot. Nearly one-third of the officers surveyed said they had not received professional military education on the ethical frameworks required to navigate the morally vexing space of lawful but awful (and potentially catastrophic) orders. Almost  percent of military officers surveyed agreed that the military should do more to teach senior officers differing viewpoints on civil-military relations and ethical reasoning, including specifically that senior military officer education should introduce future generals to morally and legally ambiguous scenarios and provide a more comprehensive view of civil-military relations frameworks. Senior officers require a more fulsome tool kit to conduct rigorous analysis of ethical dilemmas than simply resorting to the default “I will not follow an illegal order” and “I will support and defend the Constitution.” These aphorisms are insufficient heuristics to tackle the real-world moral ambiguity facing strategic military leaders. Senior military officers require and desire the requisite skills to fulfill their vital role in service to the government and the American people.

Military Politics as the Virtuous Mean Civilian and military leaders should work collaboratively to update officers’ professional competencies. Specifically, professional military education should include the Aristotelian concept of political prudence (practical wisdom) as described in a civil-military context by Carsten F. Roennfeldt () and Damon Coletta and Thomas Crosbie (). According to Coletta and Crosbie, political prudence endows the officer with a “literary sensibility as to their political situation” and “a sense of where they fit in

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the grand political drama directed by Constitution” (: ). On a practical level, officers who have gained a mastery in political prudence can “act boldly outside the rules, when and only when a leader’s individual transgression would benefit the state” (Coletta and Crosbie : ). At the strategic level, the Military Politics framework provides the acumen necessary for officers to recognize circumstances that might require singular acts of norm-breaking in order to uphold other higher societal goods. Let us consider, again, the Nagl and Yingling () presidential transfer of power hypothetical. If the transfer of presidential power was halted, Chairman Milley would have required a keen political awareness and pulse on societal values and the national interest to determine whether violating one norm (military involvement in determining the fate of an election and civilian control) to preserve a higher democratic good (the continuation of a democratic republic) was in the best interest of the military, the civilian government, and society. In this instance, civilian supremacists Schake and Golby () repudiated Nagl and Yingling’s () position, stating that the military is the wrong political appendage for this political task. Also, it is unclear whether professional supremacists would have uniformly recommended that the military take any interfering action due to the concern of not appearing apolitical. Therefore, in this challenging situation, neither of the dominant frameworks are entirely satisfying. The presidential election hypothetical illustrates that there is no escape from political life for the strategic-level military officer. Accepting that the military is a mere political appendage (see figure .) will mean these generals and the institution can be paraded about at dictate for the political gains of the party in power and employed in ways that violate military professionalism. On the other hand, an apolitical and semi-independent military (see figure .) can hijack policy, cripple American grand strategy, and diminish trust in democratic institutions. Between these two extremes

Figure .. Military politics among the dominant CMR frameworks. © Steven Lee Katz.

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lies the virtuous mean of Military Politics (neo-Janowitz), which acknowledges the reality that strategic-level officers are fully engaged by the political environment. Elsewhere in this volume, chapters by Carrie A. Lee, Lena Trabucco, and Carsten Roennfeldt delve into the complexities of how this virtuous mean can play out in practice. The question remains, how should the inherent political nature of strategic officership in the American system of government be addressed? Janowitz (: ) believed “the officer must be given a candid and realistic education about political matters,” but he was still skeptical to the extent to which military education might address “the democratic political process.” Risa Brooks () has illuminated this civil-military relations gap in military education, saying, “Officers are now taught to inhabit the identity of an austere type of depoliticized professional.” Brooks () goes on to reinforce the importance of political prudence, stating that “officers need to be politically aware, so that they can distinguish negative and partisan behaviors that are contrary to civilian control from those that are essential to achieving strategic success and ensuring a healthy civilmilitary relationship.” The point here is not to banish Huntington or minimize the importance of Clausewitz in civil-military relations education; rather, the point is to identify the two theories’ inherent weaknesses and allow for certain Janowitzian tenets (e.g., political prudence and nonmilitary factors) to fill in the critical gaps. The military politics framework is the balance that reconciles these two extreme approaches to addressing nominally lawful but immoral or catastrophic civilian-directed orders and actions. Therefore, instilling political prudence in rising generals will provide the cognitive framework necessary to navigate civil-military crises that might require military acts of dissent, disobedience, and resignation (figure .).

Conclusion Some readers of my research might interpret the results as heartening that the surveyed officers would dissent (including resign in protest) and in some cases disobey before carrying out nominally lawful, civilian-directed orders that violate the just war principles and military professional ethics. However, such a permissive norm could also create space for  generals to respond to a host of other perceived constitutional concerns, such as questioning and interfering with the legitimacy of elections, the transfer of presidential power after an election, or even the Department of Defense’s  initiative  to counter domestic extremism in the ranks due to the perception that it unfairly targets a certain political class and infringes upon civil liberties.

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There are strong prospects that these future strategic military officers might be forced to consider a response to nominally legal but abominable orders. And it is not clear, even at a rudimentary level, that senior officers have a common understanding of what it means to “support and defend the Constitution.” As an example of this constitutional confusion, regarding the  January Capitol insurrection, the CEO of the Air Force Academy Foundation (), retired Lt. General Michael Gould, said that there was significant disagreement among members of his board (composed of predominantly retired senior officers) on whether to “pick sides” and comment. In this instance, these retired Air Force officers believed their professional duty to the Constitution was to remain “apolitical” and silent even after the duly elected government was attacked. Nagl and Yingling () hold a contrasting view of constitutional norms. They avow that the “U.S. military will be the only institution capable of upholding our Constitutional order” and Chairman Milley “would be betraying [his] constitutional oath” if President Trump refuses to transfer power after  January  and Milley takes no intervening action. Therefore, according to Nagl and Yingling’s () interpretation of the Constitution, in this extraordinary instance, it demands that military leadership not remain passive but “pick sides.” In sum, there are numerous ways that officers could consider undermining civilian decisions, well below the threshold of disobedience, which can still weaken civilian control. Critics might retort that Trump pushed the moral boundaries and yet there were no high-profile military resignations. But what is past is not necessarily prologue. My research suggests we anticipate that many of these future generals, who are Xennials (between Generation Xers and millennials) and comfortable questioning authority, will more assertively respond to morally objectionable civilian orders, particularly those perceived to violate professional military standards and propriety. The military profession must adjust to societal norms and values and prepare future strategic officers with the political prudence to effectively navigate an increasingly contentious and partisan politico-military environment. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the US government.

Steven Lee Katz has been widely published on civil-military relations, just war theory, and military ethics. He holds a bachelor of arts from Georgetown University, a master of public policy from Harvard University, a mas-

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ter of business administration from Georgetown University, and a master of strategic studies from the US Army War College.

Notes . A strategic military officer is a senior general or admiral. As used in this study, they are combatant commanders and deputies, service chiefs and deputies, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and deputy. . The term “elite military officer” was introduced by Peter Feaver and Richard H. Kohn in Soldiers and Civilians () to describe military members attending the war colleges and other senior military education programs. In my study, elite military officers are war college students: they have roughly eighteen to twenty-two years of service and have arguably the most upward potential in their cohort to become a strategic military officer. The mission of the war colleges is to prepare senior military leaders for strategic-level assignments. . A “supreme emergency,” a term coined by Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars (), allows for temporary normative just war exemptions to principles, such as civilian immunity, due to existential threats to society. . War colleges students were surveyed between August  and May . Totals slightly vary due to nonresponses to certain questions.

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Miller, Zeke, and Lolita Baldor. . “Mattis Resigning as Pentagon Chief after Clashes with Trump.” Associated Press News.  December . https://apnews.com/ article/ebebdccdbbde. Nagl, John, and Paul Yingling. . “‘. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic’: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley.” Defense One.  August . https://www.defenseone.com/ideas///all-enemies-foreign-and-domestic-open-letter-gen-mil ley//. National Archives and Records Administration. . “Japanese-American Incarceration during World War II.” National Archives—Educator Resources.  July . https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/japanese-relocation. National Defense University. . The Armed Forces Officer. https://www.jcs.mil/ Portals//Documents/Doctrine/education/armedforcesofficer.pdf?ver=---. Orend, Brian. . The Morality of War. Peterborough, CAN: Broadview Press. Reeves, Shane, and David Wallace. . “Can US Service Members Disobey an Order to Waterboard a Terrorist?” Lawfare.  April . https://www.lawfareblog.com/ can-us-service-members-disobey-order-waterboard-terrorist. Roennfeldt, Carsten F. . “Wider Officer Competencies: The Importance of Politics and Practical Wisdom.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Roza, David. . “Top SEAL Who Challenged Trump Will Reportedly Resign in September.” Task and Purpose.  February . https://taskandpurpose.com/news/ seal-commander-green-resign-gallagher/. Seligman, Laura, and Connor O’Brien. . “Navy Upholds Firing of Carrier Captain Who Warned of Coronavirus.” POLITICO.  June . https://www.politico.com/ news////navy-fires-brett-crozier-aircraft-carrier-coronavirus-. Schake, Kori, and Jim Golby. . “The Military Won’t Save Us—and You Shouldn’t Want Them To.” DefenseOne.  August . https://www.defenseone.com/ ideas///military-wont-save-us-and-you-shouldnt-want-them//. Shields, Patricia M. . “Introduction to Symposium.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Shinkman, Paul D. . “Top Gen. Mark Milley Tries to Dispel Political Targeting.” U.S. News.  July . https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/-/top-gen-mark-milley-tries-to-dispel-political-fray-of-his-own-making. Snider, Don M. . “Dissent, Resignation, and the Moral Agency of Senior Military Professionals.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Stevenson, J. , June . “Trump Was Wrong to Deploy Troops. Will the Military Push Back?” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com////opinion/ trump-army-insurrection-act.html. Swain, Richard M., and Albert C. Pierce. . The Armed Forces Officer. National Defense University Press. https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals//Documents/Books/ AFO/Armed-Forces-Officer.pdf. Swan, Betsy Woodruff, and Meredith McGraw. . “‘Absolute Liars’: Ex-D.C. Guard Official Says Generals Lied to Congress about Jan. .” Politico.  December . https://www.politico.com/news////jan--generals-lied-ex-dcguard-official-. Taylor, Adam. . “Trump Said He Would ‘Take Out’ the Families of ISIS Fighters. Did an Airstrike in Syria Do Just That?” Washington Post.  April . https://www

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.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp////trump-said-he-wouldtake-out-the-families-of-isis-fighters-did-an-airstrike-in-syria-do-just-that/. VanLandingham, Rachel E., and Geoffrey S. Corn. . “Trump’s Blackwater Pardons Erase the Line between Slaughter and Justified Wartime Violence.” USA Today.  December . https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion//// trump-pardons-american-war-criminals-undermines-rule-law-column/ /. Yoo, John C. . “Memorandum for William J. Haynes II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense.” United States Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel.  March .

Part III

+ Military Politics and Military Operations

chapter 7

Military Politics on the Battlefield Strategy and Effectiveness at War Carrie A. Lee

+ Introduction During the Paris peace negotiations at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, retired Army colonel Harry Summers commented to a Vietnamese colonel about the war. “You know,” Summers stated, “you never defeated us on the battlefield.” His counterpart responded saying, “well that may be so Colonel, but it was also irrelevant” (Summers : ). The quote (while contested in its authenticity) is best-known for identifying the discrepancy in military strategies between American and North Vietnamese forces and the limits of battlefield dominance in achieving some political objectives in war. Perhaps the most well-known example of a general who mixed political and the military is Napoleon. The epitome of the political general, Napoleon used every aspect of power to accomplish his objectives across Europe— from the granting of political favors to elites to different economic policies based on territory to shaping the narrative across conquered lands. His writings reveal an individual who was not just a brilliant military tactician but also a complex and deep thinker with studied opinion on the politics of the day, philosophy, economics, and the science and study of law. Apart from his genius on the battlefield, Napoleon marshaled the nationalist passions of the masses to create the world’s first citizen-army, waging a fundamentally new type of war across the European continent. His conquests inspired two of today’s most renowned strategists that still form the basis of strategic thought and debate today. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz’s concept of the trinity in his treatise On War (first published in ) is explicitly derived from the lessons of the Napoleonic Wars that saw the merging of warfare and political passions.

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By contrast, today’s professional military sees little role for military leaders to whip up public support or engage in political discourse. Such actions would in fact be seen as undermining a core tenant of civilian control, where civilians’ leaders are expected to negotiate the politics of war, and military leaders serve as advisers and executors of civilian intentions. Far from the holistic approach of Napoleon, today’s military leaders are far more likely to follow a Huntingtonian approach and eschew politics and discussions of the political entirely. In her influential article, Risa Brooks identifies the paradoxes associated with this kind of professionalism and the deleterious effects it may have on a number of important outcomes, including but not limited to civilian control of the military, politicization of the force, and battlefield effectiveness. Huntingtonian ways of thinking, Brooks argues, “may be ill-suited to the type of wars and military operations in which the United States has been engaged and may fight in the future. These involve combating terrorist organizations and insurgencies, as well as confronting peer competitors employing gray zone tactics, in which nonmilitary measures combine with unconventional tactics in ‘the space between routine statecraft and open warfare’” (Brooks : ). This chapter argues that far from being a concern of modern warfare, the Huntingtonian conventions of civil-military relations—where civilian leaders are responsible for setting strategic objectives in war and the military then responsible for the development and execution of military operations to meet those goals—have always been a problematic way of organizing civil-military relations. Indeed, without military generals aware of and actively responsive to the political environment during war—both domestic and international—military operations in war are less effective and more likely to result in strategic failure. This goes beyond the so-called modern problems of insurgency and “gray-zone tactics.” Using a historical case study approach, I show that even during World War II, a conflict traditionally thought of as the archetype of Huntingtonian execution, the most effective military leaders were those who not only understood the political environment but actively adopted their military strategies to respond to it. This chapter investigates the military advice and strategy adopted during the North Africa invasion, more commonly known as Operation Torch. It concludes that the strategies offered by Marshall and other American generals in the early  period, ignorant of domestic political factors and international alliance politics, would have failed catastrophically. Instead, it was British strategies, supported by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, that resulted in both operational and strategic victory. Overall, Huntington appears to have taken the wrong lessons from the World War II era in which he based his theory. Far from being an example of the military’s

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“apolitical” success, military strategy was deeply influenced by both domestic and international political realities that contributed to successful wartime strategy.

A Modern Problem? The field of civil-military relations has long been dominated by a single volume, Samuel P. Huntington’s Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (). Dealing with the rise of a standing army for the first time in US history, Huntington struggles with the problem that such a powerful force creates: how does one keep an army powerful enough to defend the country against a force as large as the Soviet Union, yet subservient enough to respect civilian control? He offers a solution that is simple in theory but much more complex in practice: military and civilian leaders should have separate spheres of influence, with politics and strategy composing the civilian’s responsibility, and military tactics and operations forming the basis of military professionalism. In the seven decades since the work was published, these prescriptions have formed the basis of Western professional military ethos. By now, however, a considerable body of literature has emerged that challenges Huntington’s stark proposals. Indeed, the notion that civilians should cede influence over any part of the war-fighting process is now largely rejected in a variety of circles. Eliot Cohen explains the logical fallacy well in Supreme Command: The Clausewitzian view is incompatible with the doctrine of professionalism codified by the “normal” theory of civil-military relations. If every facet of military life may have political consequences, if one cannot find a refuge from politics in the levels of war (saying, for example, that “grand strategy” is properly subject to political influence, but “military strategy” is not), civil-military relations are problematic. . . . The Clausewitzian formula for civil-military relations has it that the statesman may legitimately interject himself in any aspect of war-making . . . there can be in Clausewitz’s view no arbitrary line dividing civilian and military responsibility, no neat way of carving off a distinct sphere of military action. (: )

Scholarship has also contested the notion that the military can truly consider themselves as separate from politics. Brooks writes, “Prevailing conceptions of military professionalism . . . are underdeveloped and unable to meeting contemporary challenges to civil-military relations. Particularly concerning are how these norms shape how military leaders engage with civilians in strategic assessment, assure civilian control of military activity, and respond to challenges to the military’s apolitical ethos.” She fur-

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ther argues that “the time has come to reconsider whether the approach represents a sound basis for military professionalism in the contemporary era . . . these weaknesses have become increasingly consequential in recent years” (: ). This emphasis on the current and modern era has merit in some important areas of civil-military relations. In particular, changes in the electorate, political polarization, and trust in the military have undermined civilian control in important ways. As many have already pointed out, public attitudes about civilian control, and the degree to which civilian leaders should defer to military advice, are largely conditioned by which political party is in power. Recent research also shows that the public increasingly identifies the military with a political party—undermining the military’s independence as an actor and opening it up to being used as a political cudgel in partisan disputes. High public confidence in the military, a phenomenon that only appeared in the s, has resulted in increased civilian deference to military advice and lower levels of oversight over military systems, strategic plans, and even education. These changes to the electorate are, in fact, new and cause for alarm about civilian control of the military. Similarly, changes in the way the United States fights wars have important implications for the military’s relationship with society—and in particular its ability to recruit and retain an effective fighting force. As the military prepares for great power competition and gray-zone warfare— conflicts that are characterized not by the number of boots on the ground but by a state’s ability to change the information, economic, and diplomatic environment through proxy war, economic coercion, and psychological operations—traditional measures of effectiveness will decline, particularly applied to physical strength and other traditional markers of masculinity. Military leaders, therefore, find themselves seeking to appeal to a population that is more educated, wealthier, and different demographically than it has relied upon the past. As a result, civil-military relations in recruiting— whether it is in the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, changes to physical appearance regulations, or physical performance standards— will continue to change in response to the requirements of modern war. In the face of changing technologies and needs in gray-zone conflict, Huntington’s “conservative military mind” and ethos should be reexamined. However, many scholars attempt to apply the same logic to effectiveness in war. Brooks states that “Huntington’s model influences civil-military relations in ways inimical to the country’s strategic effectiveness, especially in conflicts where the political, strategic, and tactical levels of military activity cannot be easily divided into the separate spheres on which objective control is premised” (: ). But in the area of strategic effectiveness on the battlefield, a focus on the modern nature of war obscures more than it

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illuminates the flaws in Huntington’s reasoning. Indeed, regardless of the type or character of a war, a focus on purely military matters and ignorance of the broader political environment spells disaster for generals at war.

Politics and Strategy-Making An Assessment What does it mean to be political? At its most general definition, politics is the contest over the management and distribution of power and public goods. Political dynamics can be found everywhere—from competitions for promotions at the office to geopolitics at the United Nations. As a result, senior military leaders are neither completely ignorant of political dynamics nor unskilled in the art of the political. Indeed, in order to get promoted and make the rank of a three- or four-star general, senior military leaders must be practiced in what we might call personnel politics: the ability to successfully navigate the military promotion system at senior levels, cultivating mentors, allies, and a lack of adversaries. Senior military leaders are also often effective at bureaucratic politics, fighting for resources and personnel for their services, units, and favored projects. They employ a wide variety of tactics and tools to represent their command’s interests, whether through negotiations or manipulating the process to ensure favorable outcomes. And policy, at its core, is the product of political negotiations between competing interests—of which the military is often a player. This chapter focuses on the contest over power at the domestic and international level. How can domestic politics—understood not as the partisan debate over domestic policy but instead as the very real constraints that a public and legislature can impose on an executive and his/her military leaders—influence military strategy? How can international politics, and the ways in which ethnic groups interact, allies coordinate, political regimes survive, and regional powers communicate, influence the effectiveness of a military strategy during war? Overall, I argue that military adherence to Huntingtonian norms undermines strategic effectiveness in war in three broad ways that are unrelated to the character of war: strategic assessment, resourcing, and adaptability. Strategic Assessment First, a misplaced adherence to Huntingtonian norms undermines strategic assessment: the ability of the state to assess its capabilities and reconcile its political and military objectives. It may seem trite to suggest, but success in conflict is not just about winning battles against an armed enemy. The political and ideological motivations, resolve, and international support of

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an adversary can in many ways be more important to war outcomes than the operations and tactics of military forces on the battlefield. Armies may crumble but reconstitute as insurgencies, external actors can offer safe havens and arms that prolong a war indefinitely, and domestic political trends may undermine effectiveness abroad. In her defining text on strategic assessment, Brooks maintains that it is influenced by four processes: information sharing, strategic coordination, structural competence, and the authorization process (Brooks, ). Each of these components, she argues, is influenced by the civil-military relationship; implicitly, it therefore is also defined by the domestic and international political environment. Political elites horde information from the military about capabilities, international political support, resolve, and other critical factors when they feel threatened by the military’s political power. Military structural competence—that is, the military’s ability to internally monitor its effectiveness—is susceptible to domestic and international influence. And a clear authorization process can be muddied when the military does not recognize that it is behaving as a political actor with policy preferences in a negotiation, rather than Huntington’s notion of an objective arbiter of “good” versus “bad” advice. What’s more, strategic coordination—defined by Brooks (: ) as “coordinating military activity with political and diplomatic objectives and constraints”—explicitly requires military leaders to integrate political considerations into their military plans. The process involves joint discussion, deliberation, and negotiation between military and civilian counterparts in the strategy-making process; this by definition requires military elite to engage in substantive discussions about prospective international and allied support, domestic constraints, and other considerations that Huntington would suggest are the purview of politicians only. In other words, the ways in which military and civilians measure their ability to reconcile military strategy with political objectives is at the heart of strategic assessment. And military leaders who do not actively incorporate the influence of domestic and international politics into their campaign planning are destined to permanent misalignment. Resourcing Second, maintaining a strict demarcation between politics and military operations results in false assumptions about resourcing, civilian intent, and timelines that negatively impact battlefield performance and decision-making on the ground. Particularly in democratic societies, domestic politics can both constrain and demand action. Military campaign planners who assume long-term support, without a strategy for maintaining that support, risk seeing their strategies collapse halfway through. Domes-

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tic policies around economic production and revenue are often tangled with partisan politics and political ideology—yet are nonetheless central to a government’s ability to finance a war and supply an army. Legislatures play an important role here; parliamentarians may place conditions on the authorization for the use of force, alter the material available for use, and influence personnel policy in ways that either attract or repel potential recruits (Caverley ). The most obvious example of this is Congress’s power of the purse—should military strategies upset members of the legislature, they may choose to limit the amount of money that is spent on any given military venture. Similarly, strategies that require loose rules of engagement or the use of weapons and tactics that upset powerful members of the legislature may result in significant roadblocks for the long-term use of force. This can have significant and deleterious consequences for military effectiveness if the strategy does not match the environment. Indeed, the mismatch between personnel policy, doctrine, and strategic environment is one of the leading explanations for why industrialized countries have a difficult time fighting low-level insurgencies (Caverley /). By refusing to engage in debates that have domestic political implications, military leaders must make assumptions about the amount of financing available for a conflict, and the quantity and quality of materiel and personnel on hand—assumptions that may doom a strategy from the start. Further, public opinion may turn against a war when that war results in high numbers of casualties over an extended period of time, and forces a president to withdraw or end a conflict prematurely (Mueller ). Other research suggests that military strategies that fail to produce battlefield success or expected victory result in reductions in public opinion (Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler ). Leaders, both military and civilian alike, may then design political objectives and troops levels to accommodate domestic political realities (Payne /). Further, military leaders adopt operational strategies and theater campaigns that casualties do not ebb domestic political support (Lee ). Military strategies that rely on assumptions about the length of the war, absent an understanding of how public opinion may turn against such a conflict in the face of significant of casualties, invite a public and/or executive response that terminates a conflict before the military strategy proposed is expected to reap rewards. And yet, none of these factors are permanent, but rather a function of domestic policy decisions around taxes, conscription, and government intervention in the economy. What’s more, they are the product of international policy decisions about alliances and strategic partnerships, and the resources that they might bring to bear. When military leaders make assumptions about domestic and international policies, they place artificial constraints on civilian decision-makers, and force them to accept strategies

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and timelines that otherwise might be more flexible and successful in the long term. Adaptation Third, a Huntingtonian ethos prevents military leaders from learning the right lessons from strategic failures due to a lack of accountability. When military leaders are unable to consider political factors as legitimate considerations when developing strategy, they are forced to then reduce transparency and mislead the public when things go wrong. Take, for example, the deliberations revealed by the Afghanistan Papers published by the Washington Post in December  (Whitlock and Washington Post ). They reveal that senior military leaders (along with civilian government officials) saw public support for the war as a significant liability in their military strategy, and consistently misled the public about gains in Afghanistan, emphasizing that US forces were just “turning a corner” when in reality the conflict more closely resembled a circular room. Concern that a decrease in public support would lead to calls for withdrawal, military leaders pushed to ensure that “every data point was altered to present the best picture possible” and that the assessment shop functioned as “more of a PR shop.” Rather than allow the public to make decisions about whether the war was worth fighting, senior leaders felt pressure to mislead and misstate the actual progress being made on the ground (Lee ). Yet without accurate information, there can be no corrective, leaving the United States with a failing strategy, unable to change because of the military’s distrust of the democratic political process.

General Marshall and the North Africa Invasion To explore the importance of military politics, I turn to an unlikely case: the Allied invasion of North Africa in . I choose this case because World War II is conventionally seen as the epitome of a conflict where military decision-making was immune to political pressure. American planners, so the story is told, were given largely free rein by Roosevelt to pursue the type of military strategy and campaign plan they believed would best serve American interests and Roosevelt’s “Europe-first” grand strategy. This interpretation of the political-military arrangement then informed influential works on civil-military relations—including that of Huntington himself. In reality, the civil-military line during the World War II planning process was anything but distinct, and military considerations far from apolitical. Indeed, Roosevelt was deeply involved in the planning process, and pressured, then ordered, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall to

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alter their initial military plans in favor of an operation that would meet both the domestic and international political needs of Allied countries. The following section therefore shows how politics, both domestic and international, deeply affected even the most conventional military operations in a war largely seen as the quintessential example of a purely military conflict.

The Political Environment The spring and summer of  witnessed significant international and domestic political pressures at work in the Allied coalition. On  May  the White House hosted a weeklong visit from Russian envoy Molotov to request that the western Allies launch a front that would draw at least forty German divisions from the eastern front that year (Roosevelt : ; Sherwood : ). German forces had laid siege to Leningrad and just fifty miles away from Moscow; the Red Army desperately needed the pressure relieved by western forces. Waiting, Molotov argued, would force Stalin to consider making a separate peace with Germany—a decision that would have given Hitler complete control of the continent and allowed him to refocus on an invasion of the British Isles during a time when British forces were in retreat across the globe. The result would have been disastrous for the war effort, requiring more resources, delaying a counteroffensive, and fortifying German defenses to the point of being virtually impenetrable. Without continued Soviet participation as an ally in the war, victory against Germany would be almost impossible, let alone guaranteed. Domestic political concerns were also exerting significant pressure on American leaders in . While the British had suspended elections and formed a unity cabinet at the start of the war, the United States continued to hold regular elections throughout World War II, including the fall  midterms. Faced now with rationing, price controls, and mounting casualties, public opinion had started to turn against Roosevelt and the Democratic Party as months dragged on without a battlefield victory. His program to supply England, Russia, and other Allied forces with munitions and arms, known as Lend-Lease, was still highly controversial within the United States. Far from being the unifying effort that conventional histories suggest, restrictions on travel, gas, and other much-needed war materials were also met by many with significant frustration, corruption, and disdain. Republicans capitalized on the dissatisfaction leading up to the  midterms and campaigned on economic policies that would significantly reduce rationing and mandatory service. They argued that rather than government-imposed price controls and rationing, the free market should be allowed to run its course. While few in the party went as far as to outright question Roosevelt’s wartime leadership, they made it clear that they

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felt a Republican Congress would be needed to check Roosevelt’s decisions in office, particularly those that would end up increasing the scope of government (Blum : –). The challenge from Republicans concerned Democrats, who worried about losing their supermajorities in both the House and the Senate. To them, any repeal or modification of rationing and price controls during the war would significantly hurt the war effort (Blum : ). Senior officials in the executive branch found themselves regularly at odds with Congress over wartime appropriations and restrictions in the summer and fall of ; General George Marshall would recall later, “I couldn’t get Congress to appropriate the money we needed before the election” (Marshall ). Remarked Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, “those fellows just don’t know there’s a war on” (Blum : ). Soon it became clear that without some kind of military victory the Democrats would be in trouble. As the public was increasingly being asked to make sacrifices, US forces were taking significant losses in the Pacific, and Roosevelt’s Europe-first strategy appeared to have stalled due to logistics challenges. The key to winning public support, Democrats felt, was to show that American soldiers were taking the fight to the Germans. Yet military victory seemed farther away than ever by May : losses in Malaya, Thailand, Singapore, Burma, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia revealed that American and British forces were overwhelmed by Japanese naval forces in the Pacific, while Rommel cruised through North Africa and Soviet forces were retreating back to Stalingrad (Blum : ). The situation that spring looked so dire that George B. Wolf, a friend of the president’s and an active player in the Democratic Party, wrote a letter on  April to Roosevelt outlining the trouble that Democrats would be in November should the mood continue. He predicted, “Democrats [will] lose control of Congress at the coming election, barring a military victory by the United States or [Allied] United Nations” (Wolf ). After months of sacrifice, price controls, and rationing, the American public had grown impatient for progress—and appeared willing to show their displeasure at the ballot box.

The Evolution of American Strategy Yet American military strategy in the spring of  resembled little of what the domestic and international political environment suggested it should be. Central to the debate was where and when to launch a second, western front in Europe against the Axis powers. While the British had suggested opening a European front early in the planning process that centered on an invasion of North Africa in the fall of  (initially named “Gymnast”)

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(Joint Paper  ), American military planners under General George Marshall’s leadership were skeptical of such an indirect approach. Marshall and his colleagues felt that a Mediterranean operation was a thinly veiled attempt by the British to protect their colonial holdings in North Africa while avoiding a direct confrontation with the Germans. Even while Gymnast could be executed quickly—within the calendar year—they believed that it did not serve the goals of Roosevelt’s Europe-first strategy. Instead, the Americans preferred a cross-channel invasion known as “Roundup” that involved a long buildup of troops in England before directly assaulting German strongholds in France in the spring of . This move would, in Marshall’s estimation, most directly and impactfully push the Germans back and end the war as quickly as possible. However, British planners were skeptical of the feasibility of such an invasion on the timeline that Marshall was proposing. Concerned about the lack of battle experience with new American troops, and keenly aware of the political realities that both the alliance and Roosevelt faced, British planners continued to push for an approach that could executed in  and targeted a softer initial site than the heavily fortified French coast. The disagreement had a few points of consensus, however. They agreed that should the Russian front collapse in , an emergency operation across the channel would have to be initiated to prevent Stalin from suing for a separate peace. Further, they agreed that it was imperative to execute a second front as quickly as possible—though they were split about which plan would successfully accomplish that goal. By May, Roosevelt had become impatient with his chiefs’ plans for a cross-channel assault that would take a year to prepare for and execute. On  May  Roosevelt sent a secret memo to his military advisers to again advocate for a second front in the fall . He wrote, “I have been disturbed by American and British naval objections to operations in the European Theatre prior to . I regard it as essential that active operations be conducted in . . . . If we decide that the only large scale offensive operation is to be in the European area, the element of speed becomes the first essential.” Yet American planners refused to consider the less resource-intensive Mediterranean option. As momentum for a second front grew over the month, planners for the Joint Chiefs continued to focus on cross-channel operations, viewing operations outside of western Europe as a dangerous distraction and drain on valuable resources. Roosevelt for his part remained largely agnostic regarding the location. The setting of the front did not matter, so long as it took place soon. During Molotov’s May visit to the White House, Roosevelt jumped at the opportunity to jumpstart the planning for a second front and aid an ally; he promised Molotov that the western Allies would open up a second front in

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Europe before the end of  (Sherwood : ). Hopkins and Marshall were both surprised and deeply concerned over Roosevelt’s promise—over the next two days, they would each plead with Roosevelt to walk back his pledge (Jordan : ). However, the president demurred and overrode his top military adviser. On  June Roosevelt wrote to Churchill, “I am more than ever anxious that Bolero [the buildup of American forces in England] proceed to definite action beginning in August and continuing as long as the weather holds.” On  June the White House issued a press release that explicitly outlined Roosevelt’s intention to launch a second front in Europe in  (Sherwood : ). Yet Marshall remained stubbornly committed to a cross-channel invasion. In an effort to keep the focus on a continental assault, over the course of May and June the general and his team continued to plan and fight for a cross-channel assault on the European continent, despite the inexperience of American soldiers, heavy fortifications of the German defense lines in France, and logistic difficulties of moving the number of men required for a frontal assault to England (Jordan : ). In reality, Roundup was an action plan for . But in their desire to deflect Roosevelt’s attention from North Africa, a cross-channel invasion was repeatedly offered as a potentially viable alternative to Gymnast in . On  June Churchill made the trip to Hyde Park, New York, to advocate for Gymnast in person and convey the British chiefs’ serious misgivings about the feasibility of a cross-channel invasion in . That same day, the conservative New York Herald Tribune published an editorial calling the  congressional midterms the most important election since the Civil War. The editorial, which made its way to the president’s desk on  June, stated: Beyond question the House to be elected for two years next November will face responsibilities of the gravest character. In this period the fate of American is likely to be determined for decades to come. The issues are far more vital than those which confronted our national legislators in the course of the First World War. Only the years of the American Revolution and the Civil War can be compared to the present in the solemnity of the task and the long shadow of the threat. (Mebane )

Shortly after, Roosevelt asked Churchill, “Where are the places that can be invaded before mid-September?” Churchill mentioned several potential sites but pushed particularly hard for North Africa. Marshall and King were tasked with finding out and given orders to present the options at the White House the following day (Sherwood : ). The American chiefs were frustrated by Roosevelt’s recurring interest in a Mediterranean operation. Every time it seemed they had dissuaded

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the president from committing to Gymnast, Roosevelt’s “great secret baby” would resurface. And so Marshall and King again worked hard over the following days to present Sledgehammer (a cross-channel invasion) as a credible option for . Feeling as though they had been misled by their British counterparts, the American service chiefs were ruthless in their critiques of Gymnast and argued fiercely against the operation. Unable to see the international and domestic benefits to a  invasion, Marshall continued to view Gymnast as nothing but an attempt by the British to preserve their colonial dominion. After hearing the arguments on both sides, Roosevelt ended the short conference at Hyde Park with a compromise. He and Churchill agreed to pursue Sledgehammer only if it were feasible to do in . If Sledgehammer were to prove too logistically challenging—or be too large an operation to support with such inexperienced forces—then they would explore other sites for a second front that fall, including North Africa (Ismay ; Churchill : ; Matloff and Snell ; Jordan : ). Marshall and Hopkins again walked away from the Hyde Park conference feeling as though they had beat back Gymnast but would quickly find that they had been outmaneuvered by both leaders. When Churchill cabled Roosevelt on  July that the British war chiefs had determined Sledgehammer to be too difficult, both agreed to pursue a North Africa invasion for the fall of . Enraged at Churchill’s announcement, Marshall and King demanded that the United States withdraw from the European theater entirely if the British were unwilling to fight the Germans in France. But Roosevelt was unmoved. Still with his sights set on an engagement that year and skeptical of the seriousness of Marshall’s proposal, he asked for a detailed operational plan of a Pacific-first strategy—to be read and approved that evening. After reviewing the hastily put together and rough outline of a Pacific strategy, Roosevelt was unimpressed and disapproved the plan, following it up with a telephone message that reiterated, “I am unwilling to continue with Bolero on the full basis unless we are going to do Sledgehammer in . If we cannot, then we must attack at another point.” A week later, Marshall and Hopkins found themselves on their way back to England, ordered by Roosevelt to negotiate with the British over Sledgehammer and Gymnast, but to make sure that an American-led operation was slated to begin that year. After stamping their original (and self-guiding) instruction memo “Not Approved,” Roosevelt was explicit: “I want you to consider the world situation as it exists at this time and determine upon another place for U.S. troops to fight in ,” he ordered, signing the memo, “Commander in Chief.” One historian notes, “Four times in his three-page instruction letter he demanded a major operation in the

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year . . . . He didn’t care where the Allies landed, so long as U.S. soldiers were shooting at Germans before the year’s end” (Jordan : ). While negotiating with the British in London, Marshall began to come around to the idea that a softer target may be necessary given the time-constrained priorities of the president. Writing to Marshall on  July, Roosevelt directed, “If the American objective of putting ground forces into useful action in  is maintained, ROUNDUP as planned must be abandoned as the primary objective at this time.” In response, Marshall drew up plans for a three-pronged invasion of North Africa, with landings in Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers, essentially proposing a modified form of Gymnast to be presented to the British. The following day, the combined chiefs accepted his proposal, and it was sent to Roosevelt, who approved the plan that evening. Gymnast was rechristened Torch, and Marshall went home resigned to opening up a second front in North Africa. When Marshall arrived back in DC and briefed Roosevelt in person on the operational plan for Torch, the president threw up his hands and pleaded, “Please make it before Election Day!” (Marshall a). A defeated Marshall would later reflect, “[The Chiefs] failed to see that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. . . . The people demand action. We couldn’t wait to be completely ready” (Marshall b).

Evaluating Military Politics Lewis Douglas, the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, once described Torch as “the most important decision taken during the war” (Gelb : ). The operation set the stage for the Allied invasion of Italy, provided American troops with much-needed fighting experience, and generated the first British American victories of the war against Germany. The invasion led to the defeat of one of Hitler’s most decorated officers— Erwin Rommel—and preserved supply lines across the Mediterranean and Middle East. Further, the alternative operations being debated were unlikely to succeed and could have even set the Allied forces back years: an invasion of Norway would have been unfeasible until the summer months, and an attempt to conduct Sledgehammer in  would have, in all likelihood, ended in the same fashion as the slaughter at Dieppe, where almost  percent of the Allied troops were killed, wounded, or captured in an attempt to raid German installations along the northern coast of France (Gelb : ). Ultimately, both Roundup and Torch were inherently risky. Most of the military planners on both sides of the Atlantic were quick to predict catastrophic failure in North Africa, or at least acknowledge that significant challenges existed. Patton called the operation “as desperate a venture as

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has ever been undertaken by any force in the world’s history” (Blumenson : ). Marshall remained concerned that the Allies would “pay a stiff price” for what he viewed as a political and dangerous decision (Gelb : ). Even the British recognized that to make Roosevelt’s deadline would require “superhuman efforts” by the logistics and training teams. (Air Ministry ). Yet Torch was the only one of the two plans that met the domestic and international political needs of war leaders, and contributed to strategic success in the conflict. After British losses in Egypt had jeopardized the Allies’ ability to sustain operations on the Eastern front, Torch protected vital supply lines to the Soviet Union into  and . Churchill wrote to Stalin on  July : Your telegram to me of Twentieth June referred to combined operations in the North. The obstacles to sending further convoys at the present time equally prevent our sending land forces and air forces for operations in Northern Norway. . . we are studying how to help on your southern flank. If we can beat back Rommel, we might be able to send powerful air forces in the autumn to operation on the left of your line. The difficulties of maintaining these forces over the trans-Persian route without reducing your supplies will clearly be considerable but I hope to put detailed proposals before you in the near future. We must however, first beat Rommel.

Keeping the Soviet Union in the war was essential to the Allies’ success in the war—had planners waited until l to launch a counteroffensive, it is possible that the Red Army would not have been able to survive Stalingrad and turn the tide as they did in the winter of . The diversion of German and Italian forces away from the Soviet Union’s southern flank to instead defend the western front in North Africa enabled the Red Army to continue fighting and depleting German resources. By the time that the Allies launched the Normandy invasion in June , German strategic depth had been completely exhausted. In theory, Torch would have also met the domestic political needs of Roosevelt during a time that he was trying implement unpopular domestic policies to support the war effort. Yet in war, friction can overcome the best-laid plans and strategy—providing a rare opportunity to examine a counterfactual. At the end of September, after weeks of logistics challenges, Marshall briefed Roosevelt on the final decision regarding D-day: American forces could not assault the North African costs until  November— five days after the midterm elections. By this time, Roosevelt knew that without an invasion his party would lose a significant number of seats in Congress, and was now faced with the decision to override his generals one more time or accept the electoral loss. Rather than force the operation to

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move forward and risk outright failure, Roosevelt decided to accept Marshall’s assessment. Marshall would later recall to his biographer, “We just couldn’t do it before the election. The president was very courageous about that. I said so in my report” (Marshall a). Predictably, the delay meant that Democrats took heavy losses in the midterm elections. One Oregon election postmortem, which crossed Roosevelt’s desk in early December, reported: “Opinions given very generally indicated dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war . . . a great deal of dissatisfaction with rationing, censorship, and other wartime regulations. The main dissatisfaction that I have been able to ascertain from the general public is rationing in ‘a land of plenty,’ and the absolute absurdity of the rubber situation.” It concluded: “had the North Africa campaign opened one week earlier, it might have made a substantial difference in the election.” While Roosevelt was able to continue to supply the war effort over the course of  and , Republican gains in the  elections effectively stalled additional domestic legislation that would have further centralized the war effort. They forced Roosevelt to scale back on rationing and other price control measures and bargain with Congress for additional funding. Yet Roosevelt was ultimately successful, in large part because of the significant boost in public opinion he received after the success of Torch. Despite losses in Congress, his popularity following the North Africa invasion precluded the kind of Congressional deadlock that many Democrats had feared upon losing their supermajorities. While there is a case to be made that this suggests Democratic fears were overblown, it may also be that without a major and successful military operation in the fall, Roosevelt would have been faced with a much more hostile legislature for the remainder of the war. Stated the Oregon postmortem, “Observers, generally, indicate that the post-election war developments have materially strengthened public morale and public confidence in the National Administration.”

Conclusions Ultimately, Huntingtonian notions of the separations of spheres are both theoretically and practically bad for strategy-making during war, and harm military effectiveness. This is not just a function of the character of modern war; rather, it is an enduring feature of wartime decision-making. Strategic and battlefield effectiveness, therefore, require military leaders to engage in discussions about both domestic and international politics—offering options that reflect the domestic and geopolitical environment while also recognizing their own political role in the process. Put more succinctly, battlefield effectiveness requires military planners to anticipate, respond to,

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and ultimately incorporate the domestic and international political needs of civilian leaders. This might be incorporated into the planning process by asking three important questions.

Is the Strategy Sustainable? Domestic and international politics alike influence whether a strategy can be sustained across an entire campaign. Military operations require financing, materiel, logistics support, personnel, increased training, and a host of other activity—any one of which would severely hamper battlefield performance if constrained. Whether it is domestic legislatures, public opinion, or alliance partners, to be effective on the battlefield, military planners must understand and incorporate political influences into their strategic thinking. A strategy that is unsustainable can result in as many victories on the battlefield as a military wants, but will ultimately fail.

Does the Strategy Anticipate the Second- and Third-Order Effects of Military Operations? Military operations do not happen in a vacuum. They are fundamentally political actions with political effects—on the domestic public of warring nations, on regional politics, and on the societies that experience the conflict. Military professionals responsible for advising are negligent in their duties if they develop military strategies without appropriately thinking through the second- and third-order effects that such a strategy may produce. Political leaders who are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of military force may not be equipped to identify the effects of the use of force; it is incumbent on military leaders to articulate the effects and risks associated with their strategies.

Does the Strategy Match Military Capabilities with Civilian Political Constraints? Clausewitz reminds us that war is a political instrument. Civilians may limit and push military operations in ways that reflect their domestic and international political aim: midterm election results may stagnate domestic policies seen as critical to the war effort, alliances might require desperate offensives in order to sustain a coalition, and a negotiated peace may be seen as preferable to an outright victory. It is the military officers’ responsibility to understand these political objectives and adjust the campaign accordingly. In democracies, after all, civilian leaders and their appointees are still the only legitimate arbiter of political aims; military officers, even

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as they engage in political discussion and negotiation, have a professional obligation to develop the most effective strategy within those aims and constraints.

Carrie A. Lee is an associate professor and chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College, where she studies how democratic political institutions affect interstate conflict and foreign policy decision-making. She has also published work on counterinsurgency strategy, humanitarian crises and intervention, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. Her work has appeared in top journals and publications such as Foreign Affairs, Armed Forces and Society, International Politics, Orbis, and the Washington Post.

Notes . Disclaimer: Opinions and conclusions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Army War College, the US Army, or the Department of Defense. . Stiles, L.M. . “Letter to Mother, June , .” LMS Papers, Box , Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . For a discussion of American public opinion leading up to World War II, see chapter  of Berinsky (), and chapters  and  of Kennedy (). . Democrats held  out of  seats in the Senate in  ( percent), and  of  seats in the House ( percent)—a significant advantage over Republicans, who may otherwise have used the filibuster in the Senate. . During their April meeting, Charles Portal expressed concern about the number of casualties that may occur from a September operation, labeling it either “too early or too late.” Portal was concerned that the RAF would be unable to sustain the high number of casualties that would inevitably result from the heavy use of fighters as close air support. He estimated that the RAF could probably not sustain more than two months’ worth of casualties in such a situation. . See also the letter from McClure to MIUD (April , ) and messages between Churchill and Roosevelt dated March to April , in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. a. “Letter to JCS, Hopkins, Stimson, and Know, May , .” PSF Box . Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. b. “Letter to Secretary of War, Chief of Staff, Gen Hap Arnold, Secretary of the Navy, Admiral King, Harry Hopkins, May , .” RG  (NM--)) , Box , File . U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD . Churchill, however, may have had other preferences, closing a summary memo to Roosevelt with the following point. “Five. We must never let [G]ymnast pass from our minds. All other preparations would help if need be towards that.” Churchill, Winston. a. Letter To FDR, May , . Hopkins Files, Winston Churchill Folder #, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library.

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. Usher’s Log. . “May .” Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. c. “Letter to Churchill, June .” Hopkins Files, Churchill Folder #. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Mebane, D. . “Letter to FDR, June , .” OF : Congress Of The U.S. . Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . McCrea, J.L. . “Letter To Marshall and King, June , .” In George C. Marshall: Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue, ed. Larry Bland. Lexington VA: George C. Marshall Foundation. . Stimson, Henry L. . Personal Diary,  June . Yale University Manuscript Collection, New Haven, CT. . Stimson, Henry L. “Letter to FDR, June , .” In Foreign Relations of The United States, Conferences at Washington and Quebec, eds. William Slany and Richardson Dougall. Washington: Government Printing Office. See pages – , –. . The first day of discussion, Churchill received notice of the fall of Tobruk in Egypt. Thought to be a major British stronghold, the rout of British forces in Egypt and their withdrawal to El Alamein was an embarrassment and a shocking surprise. Upon hearing the news, Roosevelt is said to have told Churchill, “What can we do to help?” The result was that three hundred tanks, a hundred mm howitzers, and a few groups of aircraft were redirected from the Pacific and sent to aid the beleaguered British (Jordan : ). . Stimson (). See entry for June , . . Churchill, Winston. b. Letter To FDR, July , . Churchill To Roosevelt Messages, May–July, . Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Marshall, George C., and E.L. King. . “Letter to FDR, July , .” Marshall Papers. George C. Marshall Library. . Marshall would later admit that his response had been a bluff—a final and desperate attempt to force Churchill to accept Sledgehammer instead of Gymnast (Marshall a). See also Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. (N.D.). “Telephone Message to Marshall and King.” Map Room Files, Box . Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. d. “Letter to Marshall, King, and Hopkins: Instructions for London Conference—July , .” PSF Box , Marshall Files April -. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. e. “Letter to Hopkins, Marshall, and King, July , .” Hopkins Files, Book : Hopkins to London, July ‘. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Air Ministry. . Letter to Britman Washington. AIR /.  August . Kew National Archives, Kew Gardens, UK. . Churchill, Winston. c. Letter To FDR, July , . Hopkins Book : Torch. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . The rest of Roosevelt’s staff, however, were less understanding once Torch was underway. The results of the  November election were nothing short of disastrous for the Democratic Party. Democrats not only lost their supermajorities in both chambers but came very close to losing their overall majority in the House of Representatives; Democratic House candidates in fact received just  percent of the votes, while Republicans received almost  percent of all House votes cast. The result was a loss of forty-five House seats, mostly in the Midwest, and just a twelve-

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seat majority in the House. Democrats fared no better in the Senate, where Republicans won eighteen of twenty-four races and picked up nine seats; Democrats lost their supermajority for the first time since the  wave election. When the Torch operation was briefed to the rest of the staff, just hours before the landings were scheduled to occur, Roosevelt’s press secretary Steve Early blamed Marshall, yelling in the White House, “You almost lost us control of Congress by the delay!” (Bland : ). . Josslin, W. . “Letter To Ed Flynn, December , .” OF : DNC Oregon  – . Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. . Josslin ().

References Berinsky, Adam J. . In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bland, Larry, ed. . George C. Marshall: Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue. Lexington, VA: George C. Marshall Foundation. Blum, John Morton. . V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II. San Diego: Mariner Books. Blumenson, Martin. . The Patton Papers. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Brooks, Risa. . Shaping Strategy: The Politics of Strategic Assessment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. . “Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States.” International Security (): –. Caverley, Jonathan D. /. “The Myth of Military Myopia.” International Security (): –. ———. . Democratic Militarism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Churchill, Winston. . The Hinge of Fate. London: Houghton Mifflin. Cohen, Eliot A. . Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. New York: Anchor. Gelb, Norman. . Desperate Venture: The Story of Operation Torch, the Allied Invasion of North Africa. New York: William Morrow. Gelpi, Christopher, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler. . Paying the Human Costs of War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ismay, Hastings Lionel. . “Memorandum. June , .” In Foreign Relations of the United States, Conferences at Washington and Quebec, eds. William Slany and Richardson Dougall. Washington: Government Printing Office. Joint Paper . . “American Plans for Operations in Western Europe.”  April . CAB /, Kew National Archives, Kew Gardens, UK. Jordan, Jonathan W. . American Warlords: How Roosevelt’s High Command Led America to Victory in World War II. New York: Dutton Caliber. Kennedy, David M. . Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, –. New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, Carrie. . “The Politics of Military Operations.” PhD dissertation. Stanford: Stanford University.

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———. . “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Politics of the Afghanistan Papers.” War On the Rocks.  December . https://warontherocks.com/// lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-the-politics-of-the-afghanistan-papers/. Marshall, George C. . “Interview with Forrest Pogue, October , .” George C. Marshall Library. ———. a. “Interview, October , .” In George C. Marshall: Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue, ed. Larry Bland. Lexington, VA: George C. Marshall Foundation. ———. b. “Interview, November , .” In George C. Marshall: Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue, ed. Larry Bland. Lexington, VA: George C. Marshall Foundation. Matloff, Maurice, and Eedwin M Snell. . Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, –. Washington, DC: Center For Military History. Mueller, John. . War, Presidents and Public Opinion. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Payne, Andrew. /. “Presidents, Politics, and Military Strategy: Electoral Constraints During the Iraq War.” International Security (): –. Roosevelt, Eleanor. . The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. New York: Harper and Brothers. Sherwood, Robert E. . Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History. New York: Enigma Books, . Summers, Harry G. . On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. San Francisco: Presidio Press. Whitlock, Craig, and Washington Post. . The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. New York: Simon and Schuster Press.

chapter 8

Begging Permission, Asking Forgiveness Wearing Two Hats in Multilateral Military Operations Stephen M. Saideman

+ There has long been frustration and disgust with alliances and coalitions as they are inherently political dynamics. Napoleon reportedly said he would rather fight a coalition than be in one, while Churchill () said that the only thing worse than fighting alongside allies is fighting without any. Going to war is difficult enough when military leaders only must worry about their national command authority and their own troops, as other contributions to this volume as well as the entire civil-military relations field makes clear. It becomes harder still when one must worry about whether one’s partners will show up on the battlefield, whether they will act predictably when they are present, and whether one’s multinational commanders push in different directions than one’s own commander. Working with allies is inherently political: officers have to bargain, cajole, and sometimes even threaten to get their partners to behave as desired on and near the battlefield while they must also find ways to work with conflicting guidance coming from home. Politics is messy and often seen as dirty, but it is increasingly necessary as few countries can fight alone and fewer still prefer to do so. As Carl von Clausewitz () taught long ago and as Risa Brooks () reminds us, commanding is a political endeavor, so awareness of and engaging in politics is fundamental for success in alliance and coalition efforts. Any commanding officer in the field must worry about two sets of actors simultaneously—their commanders back home and the international players in the field. Trying to balance these two forces is most difficult even if one has clear priority: the national command authority. While much of this volume addresses more controversial questions about when officers can or should push back against civilians, this chapter focuses not on how

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or why officers act politically when perhaps they have other choices, but rather on the inevitable situations where they face competing demands from different civilians. To situate this chapter in this volume, I disagree with the notion that principal-agent theory would reject the premise of a military politics research paradigm, as argued in the introduction. The starting point of principal-agent theory, the approach informing this chapter, is that the agents have agency. In the application to modern military efforts, the idea here is that the actors, officers or enlisted, must make choices, including how to interpret the intent of their superiors. Since the definition of politics is the decision-making among individuals and/or groups on public policy, any possible discretion on the part of commanders makes them political actors. Only in the most centralized of militaries will officers have no room to make decisions and no ability to engage in politics. The Russian performance in Ukraine suggests that while this alternative can exist, it is not a model to be followed in the future, especially by democracies that are the focus of this volume. In this chapter, I use the experience of Afghanistan to illustrate the dilemmas facing commanders as they must politic their way through these different actors. I first identify each relevant set of actors and the challenges they pose for a commander. I then discuss the tactics commanders have used to deal with the conflicting demands. Through this discussion, it will become clear that command in multinational operations is inherently political and often frustratingly so.

Managing the Home Game The primary challenge for any commander in the field is to manage the home office. The national command authority controls not only the officer’s career but also most of the assets one has. While this seems obvious, it cannot be taken for granted. In short, when an officer wears two hats—the multinational responsibility and the national leadership role—one always weighs more heavily than the other. The question for commanders is first how much authority they have from their national command authority. Countries vary quite widely in how much authority is delegated to individuals, with some commanders receiving a great deal of discretion with others having very little. In many cases, the level of discretion is not fixed. Indeed, for many, it may be on a case-by-case basis that one needs to ask permission to act under certain circumstances. For some countries, one might have to ask permission if a new mission is beyond the parameters of previous missions, but all other

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missions can go ahead if they fit the precedents. For others, some efforts require phone calls home and permission for specific changes. This process gets more “political” once one realizes that the commander on the ground can choose whether to call home. In the case of the Netherlands, commanders had to call home if they were planning an operation that might produce contact with the adversary—and if that plan was designed to confront the adversary, the phone call would involve the Dutch Chief of Defence. So, commanding officers in Uruzgan, where the Dutch effort was focused, would have to decide whether to call home. If they felt that they did not have a “good story”—if the details of the specific mission were not compelling—they could just say no to their NATO commander (Dutch officer, interview, January ). Because their careers depend on those higher in the chain of command, these Dutch officers did not want to bother them with requests that those back home would reject, and they did not want to be trying to present a relatively weaker case for doing more in the field. Of course, officers varied in what they viewed as a “good story” to sell back home. This really is where politics enters: the Dutch commanders must figure out the costs and benefits of the mission, of appeasing allies, and of potentially annoying the commanders back home. The allies also have to consider how best to sell the Dutch commanders on the mission. This is not hypothetical, as the need to call home can impede operations. During the first prison break in Kandahar in , an Afghan unit mentored by French forces was sent from their sector to Kandahar. The French commander had to call home to get permission to move his forces out of his designated sector. That phone call took time as it had to go all the way up to President Sarkozy. In the meantime, the unit the French had been mentoring went into combat with some US forces that were available, but the unit broke. The next day, the French mentors were able to move and join the unit they were mentoring, and they then attacked successfully. This example shows that this process of calling home has consequences on the battlefield. The granting of discretion is just the beginning of the story, as commanders can choose to do less or more than they are supposed to do. Whether they exceed their discretion or do less than what they are authorized depends on at least three factors: their views on what they are supposed to be doing, whether their governments engage in oversight, and the penalties if one is caught doing too much or too little. In each mission, someone in each contingent is given the responsibility of saying yes or no to the multinational commander when the latter orders that unit to do something—the so-called red card holder. In an ideal world, leaders would carefully choose for this role a person whose attitudes and inclinations closely

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match their own. That way, the red card holder will act as the leaders back home would. However, this does not always happen. First, the leaders of a country usually delegate the responsibility for choosing the commanding officers (who are usually the red card holders) to either civilians in the Ministry of Defense or to the higher-ranking officers. While delegation makes a great deal of sense—leaders have many responsibilities and limited expertise—any delegation produces some slippage. The more layers of delegation there are, the more likely it is that the person doing the selecting, the more proximate principal, does not share the same attitudes and inclinations as the person at the top. Second, many countries simply do not have large enough militaries to provide a wide enough pool of senior officers to be selective. If a country has only a couple of brigades, there will be a finite number of brigadier generals, for instance. This means that leaders cannot be too choosy as they would exhaust the potential commanders quickly, especially since each would only serve in the field for six months to a year. As a result, to paraphrase then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, countries often go to war with the commanders they have and not the ones they wish they had. Third, those being interviewed for a position will tend to tell the interviewer what they want to hear, the adverse selection problem (Rauchhaus ), making it hard to identify those who truly have the desired attitudes and beliefs. If a country has deployed a commander who does not see the mission entirely the same way as the civilians back home, that officer is more likely to act according to their beliefs if they will not get caught. So, whether a commander exceeds his or her intent or underperforms depends critically on whether there is sufficient oversight. Civilians back home in Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, and Washington, DC, cannot directly observe what is happening far away in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The lack of good metrics for success gives officers even more latitude since their civilian overseers will not have adequate tools to assess their performance. However, one of the differences in these missions is that they had extensive civilian teams present—“whole of government” efforts to provide development and governance assistance. This, along with embedded media, do provide those back home with a sense of how the mission is going and whether the military is either doing too much or too little. Countries do vary significantly in how much their legislators know and what they can do about what they learn (Auerswald, Lagassé, and Saideman ), so that also affects a commander’s willingness to exceed the discretion they have been delegated. Finally, the commander in the field will respond to the incentives they are given, even if they do not see eye to eye with the authorities back home. If commanders are told that they will not get promoted if their contingent

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suffers many or even some casualties, these officers will behave accordingly. Bill Clinton famously told American commanders going into Bosnia that he did not want any casualties (Sciolino ). As a result, for the first years of the Stabilization Mission, the American forces in the NATO effort refrained from the pursuit of war criminals, clearly a lesson from Somalia. On the other hand, despite restrictions not to leave their area of responsibility, Dutch officers reported that they did and faced no consequences. This framework then produces several related questions for any commander in the field: Do the commanders see eye to eye with the civilians back home? If not, do they commanders have sufficient discretion to choose the strategies and tactics that they think work best? Can they exceed their discretion without getting caught? If caught, are the penalties severe? This framework helps identify under what conditions officers in the field have latitude to make decisions when there is more room for politics.

Dealing with the Multilateral Chain of Command While the national command authority is prioritized, contingents are sent to these missions as part of a joint effort, and most officers will want to cooperate with their multinational commanders. Those commanding multinational units have limited means to get contingent commanders to comply since contributions to the mission are entirely voluntary. Once one understands the limits of the multilateral chain of command, it becomes clear that the glue of the multilateral effort really comes from the backgrounds of those sent to command these efforts. Their common sense of professionalism will cause officers to want to follow orders and to lend a hand to other nation’s units in the effort. Of course, this refers not just to instincts and training but also to interests that an officer will be thinking of in the future, when they need help from allies and partners, when they consider whether to assist an ally, and when they must follow the multilateral organization’s campaign plan. Indeed, with the multilateral effort probably more focused on the war effort and the national command authority more concerned with domestic ramifications, there may be a tendency for officers to listen to their multilateral bosses more than their national command chains. The starting point is that contributions to NATO operations are voluntary: members do not have to provide anything to any mission. The effort to get countries to contribute contingents has been called “begging,” with each country providing whatever it feels like ranging from providing as much they possibly can to opting out entirely. Germany, for instance, did not participate in any aspect of the NATO mission in Libya in . NATO’s spreadsheet for the forces it needed in Bosnia in – was

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incomplete as countries chose not to contribute more. Furthermore, the contributions provided to NATO (and other multilateral organizations) are conditional—there are limits to what the units can do. Restrictions or caveats can prevent a unit from being deployed in offensive operations, at night, or in a different sector. At all times, there will be an officer in the chain of command with orders from their country to play the red card when necessary, rejecting orders from the multilateral commander if the orders require the unit to contradict their restrictions and rules of engagement or if the orders are stupid or unnecessarily dangerous. Perhaps the most well-known example involves General Wesley Clark, singer James Blunt, and the start of the Kosovo stabilization mission. When Serbia finally relented to NATO’s demands after three months of bombing, the future peacekeeping forces surged into Kosovo with the Russian troops that had been in Bosnia’s Stabilization Force, rushing to take control of the airfield in Pristina. The idea was that this would give the Russians some leverage over the design of the peacekeeping mission. Clark, who was the military head of NATO at the time, ordered the troops rushing into Kosovo to confront the Russians. Blunt was a captain commanding the British unit that was closest to the airfield, and Blunt was going to refuse this order. Before he could do so, the British commander, Lt. General Mike Jackson, told Clark, “I am not going to start the Third World War for you.” Clark went over Jackson’s head to the British Chief of Defence, who also declined to order Blunt to attack the Russians. Given the importance of the national chain of command, we need to consider the dynamics pushing the other way. First, military officers, especially those in NATO countries, have developed similar views of their own identities as professionals. Most modern militaries in the world’s democracies spend much time and effort on burnishing their identity as professionals. Whether they read Samuel P. Huntington’s work or not (Huntington ), they see themselves as experts of the use of violence and as part of a profession with shared understandings of themselves and their expertise. As a result, when officers deploy on a multilateral military operation, they have a shared set of norms about how one ought to behave. This includes focusing on the mission and seeing the other contingents as worthy of support. “We’ve got to be positively contributing to the effort or don’t be there” was an attitude shared by Australian Lt. General Mark Evans. Second, NATO has been exercising for several generations, and these efforts are supplemented by bilateral military to military training. Before many officers reach the battlefield in Afghanistan or elsewhere, they will have met their opposite numbers in some previous engagement. This familiarity with individuals and units from other countries is designed to build trust on the battlefield to facilitate interoperability. Indeed, with many

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NATO countries having far more exercises and training with other members’ militaries than with their own civilians in foreign ministries or development agencies, officers may be likely to have more trust in their fellow officers from other countries than the civilians from their own countries. Third, officers will want to cooperate with those from other countries because they hope the other contingents reciprocate when needed. While professionalism and previous interactions help foster a sense of teamwork and cooperation, underlying all of this is a sense that one must cooperate to receive support. Being a bad ally is not going to be conducive to getting assistance when one needs it. So, leaders of the contingents will want to cooperate, if only because they know that they are likely to need assistance down the road. One Canadian general remarked that if he had followed the national command chain when it contradicted with the multinational imperatives, it “would have undermined his position and credibility to do his job.” Together, these dynamics foster a pull toward the multilateral effort even as careerist incentives direct one’s attention to the national command authority back home. The chain of command back home may weigh more heavily, but the multilateral partners are on the same battlefield, facing the same challenges. So, the band of brothers and sisters may cause the commanders of each contingent to want to work with each other and to focus on the mission at hand, whereas the national chain may be more focused on the domestic political dynamics at home. In the case of Canada, for instance, it was quite clear that the “whole of government” effort was focused on a set of priorities and projects that were, at best, loosely connected to winning a counterinsurgency fight, and the Canadian Forces in Kandahar were far more focused on what the alliance needed to win that war (Saideman ). Next, I consider how officers handle the political positions into which they are placed.

Choosing Between Two Masters Where Politics Comes In While there is more to military politics than navigating the push and pull of home offices and allies, the focus here is on exactly that. In this section, I consider a variety of behaviors that allied officers used to manage the competing pressures while deployed on a difficult mission. They ranged from generous interpretations of key instructions, building relationships to encourage such interpretations, and much planning to reduce pressures and anticipate contradictions.

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When parliamentarians and others put restrictions on a military mission, they often use terms that are not as specific as they think, or ones that can be interpreted more broadly if officers are willing to do so. Two examples illustrate this dynamic. First, the Dutch Parliament, in its approval of participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission (the Article  letter), said that the Dutch forces in Uruzgan could not cooperate with the units associated with Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). But what is cooperation? Because there were American units in the OEF chain of command operating in the same province, the Dutch commanders had to “de-conflict the battlespace.” That is, they had to at the very least communicate with the American units to make sure neither would target the other. This opens the door to interpreting deconflicting quite broadly, hypothetically such as “Hey, Americans, we are going to be pushing the Taliban units in this general direction, so we are not telling you to establish a blocking position over there, but. . .” Similarly, the Dutch deployed F-s to Afghanistan because they learned from Bosnia not to rely solely on air support from other countries. Again, the Parliament developed a rule that was easily and perhaps even frequently stretched, as the planes were supposed to only respond to assist allies in extremis. In an interview in January , Dutch officers explained, “‘In extremis’ means in contact if we are in the vicinity. When the ground commander asks, that is good enough for us.” The parliamentarians were probably thinking of Srebrenica-like situations where the troops were in danger of being overrun, but to the pilots, any firefight on the ground was sufficiently dire to produce a response. In such situations, the question is not so much the language of the restriction, but the willingness of the relevant officers to interpret the language broadly or narrowly. As officers understood of this possibility, they sought to manage the politics of multilateral military operations by building and enhancing their relationships with the commanders of the various contingents. In many interviews, officers reported that they sought to build trust and deepen relationships, with the idea that better relationships might foster broader interpretations of the rules. To do this, officers first made sure not to ask or demand that contingent commanders do what their orders prohibit them from doing. An example of what not to do was Canadian Brigadier General David Fraser’s behavior during Operation Medusa in . He was frustrated that the Danish reconnaissance unit would not move its vehicle to the front of the assault, with the Danes explaining that this asset was best used on the periphery of the battle. Pushing the Danish commander on this did not lead to the outcome Fraser wanted. This was the opposite of a key rule for building good alliance relationships: “don’t ask when you know we

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will say no.” Other commanders made it easier for allies to work together by finessing the relationship. For instance, Lt. General Peter Leahy, retired chief of the Australian army, said, “The Dutch thought the Australians were under Dutch command, and we let them think that.” When Rick Hillier was a lieutenant general serving as commander of ISAF in –, he tried to build relationships step by step: Approach things incrementally. If you want a country to do kinetic operations [combat], you do not ask them to do that tomorrow. Work people up to that. Build operations, build confidence, build confidence in command and control. I spent a lot of time developing relations with national contingent commanders. My deputy commander spent a lot of time. Discussed the issue together and bilaterally. Always walking through the issues, so no surprises when asking Norway, France, or Canada.

This leads to a natural way for militaries to manage the politics involved in multilateral military operations that plays to the military mindset, by planning and scenario scheming. In numerous interviews with officers who served in Afghanistan, the officers reported that the primary strategy for dealing with the complexities of working with other countries’ contingents was to engage in extensive planning. This fits the general tendency of militaries to engage in extensive preparation; it also improves awareness of the limitations of each contingent and builds relationships so that officers will use whatever latitude they have (and then some). It was most clearly explained by Brigadier General (retired) Jocelyn Lacroix, who commanded the NATO ISAF mission when it was mostly restricted to Kabul. He brought in the commanders of all the contingents, asked them to develop their contributions to three possible scenarios—which may have required calling back to their respective capitals to get clarification—and then had each commander brief the rest on what they could and would do in each hypothetical situation. After that briefing, each commander had a better idea of what everyone else could do, leading not just to clarity about their respective caveats but improved trust. A fundamental requirement for managing alliance politics is communication. This sounds obvious, but when different contingents have varying standard operating procedures in response to the same kind of issue, this can be potentially very problematic. One officer reported that in the early days of NATO’s mission in Bosnia, when East European countries were just starting to join alliance operations in hopes of becoming members, there was a real culture clash that needed to be sorted. When preparing for working together, a British unit was coordinating with an Eastern European unit. The British commander asked, “What do you do if someone throws a Molotov cocktail at your unit?” The unnamed Eastern European

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contingent commander said, “We fire back with lethal force.” This was quite jarring, as British standard procedure, due to much experience in northern Ireland and elsewhere, was to put the fire out and carry on. Learning this ahead of a mission was most important as such widely differing responses during the same event would have created much political trouble for both countries and for NATO itself. More recently, the point of friction has been different liquor regulations. This has become of greater concern now that allied units are integrated at lower levels. The Enhanced Forward Presence missions in the Baltics has platoons and companies operating side by side rather than battalions and battlegroups operating in neighboring provinces. So, commanders now must make sure that the greater fraternization that occurs does not violate some countries’ regulations.

Caveats and Conclusions There is only so much that officers can do to mitigate the pressures facing their colleagues and to work around the restrictions from home. No matter how much the multinational commander tries to set comfortable trusting relationships with the contingent commanders from a variety of countries, the pressures from home will always matter more. Moreover, personalities will vary, and some commanders will be far more risk averse. One commander was worried, for instance, about using sandbags without permission, needing to get permission via a faxed document. Others are more likely to pay more attention to the multinational mission despite getting friction from the home country. When General (ret.) Jon Vance was commanding the Canadian mission in Kandahar, he sought to shift the focus of the Canadian development effort to Dand, where Canadian Forces were concentrated amid the American surge. He wanted to build schools there as part of the effort to demonstrate to Afghans (and to NATO) that Canada could help the Afghan government not just clear but hold and build. But the list of fifty schools on Canada’s whole government plan for Kandahar did not include these new schools, and the civilians back home did not want Vance to support the building of additional schools. He went ahead anyway, so rather than Canada building fifty schools in Kandahar, the country ultimately built more than that because of Vance’s desires to make an impression in that one spot and to serve the NATO mission beyond what civilians wanted. Allied officers will seek to build relationships with the commanders from the various contingents, but the frequent rotation of officers will serve as a major obstacle. Because individual officers vary about how to under-

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stand the orders from their national capital in any multilateral military operation, every time an officer was replaced, those working with that unit would have to restart the process of socialization and persuasion. As Clausewitz said long ago, war is politics by other means. Multilateral military operations intensify the political dynamics as commanders face pressures from multiple chains of command. They may be asked to engage in competing efforts with limited resources and face the choice of supporting the national enterprise. Indeed, one of the dynamics of twenty-first-century multilateral military efforts is for countries to try to economize on who they send to the battlefield, creating even greater dependencies on assistance from allies. Efforts to specialize, required by decreasing defense budgets and/or escalating costs of advanced technology, only increase the stakes of alliance and coalition politics. Efforts to make one’s country less dependent on allies, by bringing one’s own helicopters or fighter-bombers, may not simplify matters at all; other countries may ask for help once they notice those assets are in theater. Cleary, the next generation of officers needs to be more aware of the inherently political nature of operations abroad and the complications that ensue from engaging in multilateral efforts. They need to take seriously what Brooks () has argued: the need to stop thinking that they are apolitical, and to be more attuned to the trade-offs that they will face. Anytime a military officer faces a choice, by definition it is political. More actors on the ground and in the air and at sea mean more choices and more politics. To get others to do as one wants requires political acuity, as those others are not simply billiard balls to be pushed around but also political actors facing conflicting guidance from multiple directions. Future scholarship should address whether national cultures (Ruffa ), international pressures, the types of missions, and other forces make the political dynamics easier or harder to manage. The bet that I have made in previous work is that what matters most are the domestic political institutions (Auerswald and Saideman ; Saideman and Auerswald ). But I must acknowledge that these only present one set of constraints, and we need to consider the others.

Stephen M. Saideman is the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. He is also the director of the Canadian Defence and Security Network and cohosts the Battle Rhythm podcast. Earlier in his career, his work focused on the international relations of ethnic conflict. Currently, Stephen studies civil-military relations among the world’s democracies.

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Notes . These problems are not new, as political battles between allies feature prominently in the histories of World War II (Atkinson , , ). The multilateral military operations both before and after / have spawned a growing discussion on the complexities of these kinds of efforts. See Cappella Zielinski and Grauer (); Fermann and Frost-Nielsen (); Frost-Nielsen (); Gannon and Kent (); Haesebrouck (); Kreps (, ); Massie (); Mello (); Mello and Saideman (); Resnick (); Schmitt (); Trønnes (); von Hlatky (); and Wolford (). . An additional reason why principal-agent theory can coexist with or thrive in a military politics research agenda is that it is principals and agents all the way down. That is, the operational commander (such as the commander of the allied mission in Afghanistan) is an agent of the civilian authorities above but is also a principal to those below. The only agents that are not also principals are the lowest-ranking enlisted personnel. One of the central ironies of modern civil-military relations is that many militaries think that Huntington () applies to their relations with civilians and that principal-agent dynamics apply within the military. That is, the military should be autonomous so that the professionals within it can make sure that the commanders’ intent is followed closely by those below the commander and that with good agent selection, discretion can be designed, oversight can be managed, and incentives can be structured to produce obedient but adaptive subordinates. . This chapter borrows heavily from research I conducted for a book I coauthored with David Auerswald (Auerswald and Saideman ) . All quotations are included with permission of the individual quoted. . Danish senior officers at the edited volume conference in November  admitted that they have to “pick their battles” when deciding whether to assert their advice to civilians more strongly. New Perspectives on Military Politics, – November, Copenhagen, Denmark. . Lt. General M. Lessard, interview,  January ; French Senior Officers, interview, June . . See chapter  of this volume. This is the heart of principal-agency theory—agents will shirk (do more or less) than the principal intends if they have more information about what they are doing than their boss. For the basic theoretical approach, see Calvert, McCubbins, and Weingast (); Moe (). For the application to civilian control of the military, see Avant (); Feaver (, ). . Lieutenant Colonel Van De Molen, interview,  January . . Senior Officer, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, interview,  February . . I observed this directly as I had a fellowship on the US Joint Staff Directorate of Strategic Planning and Policy’s Bosnia desk at this time, and the Combined Joint Statement of Requirements was never filled completely. . For more examples of caveats and explanations for how they vary among countries and over time in NATO operations, see Auerswald and Saideman (). . Clark () presents his side of the story in his memoir, and Blunt presented his perspective on a BBC program, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-,  November .

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. Lt. General M. Evans, interview,  March . . Brigadier General J. LaCroix, interview,  February . . The Article  process was developed after the failure of Dutch troops in the UN mission in Srebrenica in . . This paragraph is drawn from conversations with several Dutch officers who served in Afghanistan in –. . Based on interviews with Major General David Fraser,  January , Edmonton, Canada; a roundtable at the Danish Ministry of Defense including officers in the chain of command for operations in Afghanistan on  August , Copenhagen, Denmark; and Fraser’s memoir (). . This was repeated in a number of interviews in Australia, Canada, Denmark, and elsewhere. . Lt. General P. Leahy, interview,  March . . General R. Hillier, interview,  March . . Brigadier General J. Lacroix, interview,  February . . Brigadier General D. Tabbernor, interview, January . . Lt. Colonel W. Rutland, interview,  September . . Dutch officer, interview, January .  In the jargon of counterinsurgency, the strategy to win was to not just clear a spot of the enemy, but to deploy enough troops to keep that territory—hold—and then help the local government develop capacity—build. . Major General J. Vance, interview,  June .

References Atkinson, Rick. . An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, –. Henry Holt. ———. . The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, –. Henry Holt. ———. . The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, –. Henry Holt. Auerswald, David P., Philippe Lagassé, and Stephen M. Saideman. . “Some Assembly Required: How Democratic Legislatures Vary in Overseeing the Military.” Foreign Policy Analysis , : –. Auerswald, David P., and Stephen M. Saideman. . NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Avant, Deborah D. . Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brooks, Risa. . “Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States.” International Security (): –. Calvert, Randall L., Mathew D. McCubbins, and Barry R. Weingast. . “A Theory of Political Control and Agency Discretion.” American Journal of Political Science (): –. Cappella Zielinski, Rosella, and Ryan Grauer. . “Organizing for Performance: Coalition Effectiveness on the Battlefield.” European Journal of International Relations (): –.

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Clark, Wesley. . A time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Clausewitz, Carl von. . On War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Churchill, Winston. . The Irrepressible Churchill: Stories, Sayings and Impressions of Sir Winston Churchill. London: Robson Books. Feaver, Peter D. . “Crisis as Shirking: An Agency Theory Explanation of the Souring of American Civil-Military Relations.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. ———. . Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fermann, Gunnar, and Per Marius Frost-Nielsen. . “Conceptualizing Caveats for Political Research: Defining and Measuring National Reservations on the Use of Force during Multinational Military Operations.” Contemporary Security Policy (): –. Fraser, David, and Brian Hanington. . Operation Medusa: The Furious Battle That Saved Afghanistan from the Taliban. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Frost-Nielsen, Per Marius. . “Conditional Commitments: Why States Use Caveats to Reserve Their Efforts in Military Coalition Operations.” Contemporary Security Policy (): –. Gannon, J. Andres, and Daniel Kent. . “Keeping Your Friends Close, But Acquaintances Closer: Why Weakly Allied States Make Committed Coalition Partners.” Journal of Conflict Resolution (): –. Haesebrouck, Tim. . “National Behaviour in Multilateral Military Operations.” Political Studies Review (): –. Huntington, Samuel P. . The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kreps, Sarah E. . “Elite Consensus as a Determinant of Alliance Cohesion: Why Public Opinion Hardly Matters for NATO-Led Operations in Afghanistan.” Foreign Policy Analysis (): –. ———. . Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War. Oxford University Press. Massie, Justin. . “Why Democratic Allies Defect Prematurely: Canadian and Dutch Unilateral Pullouts from the War in Afghanistan.” Democracy and Security (): –. Mello, Patrick A. . “National Restrictions in Multinational Military Operations: A Conceptual Framework.” Contemporary Security Policy (): –. Mello, Patrick A., and Stephen M. Saideman. . “The Politics of Multinational Military Operations.” Contemporary Security Policy (): –. Moe, Terry M. . “The New Economics of Organization.” American Journal of Political Science (): –. Rauchhaus, Robert W. . “Principal-Agent Problems in Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazards, Adverse Selection, and the Commitment Dilemma.” International Studies Quarterly (): –. Resnick, Evan N. . “Hang Together or Hang Separately? Evaluating Rival Theories of Wartime Alliance Cohesion.” Security Studies (): –. Ruffa, Chiara. . Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations: Afghanistan and Lebanon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Saideman, Stephen M. . Adapting in the Dust: Lessons Learned from Canada’s War in Afghanistan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Saideman, Stephen M., and David P. Auerswald. . “Comparing Caveats: Understanding the Sources of National Restrictions upon NATO’s Mission in Afghanistan.” International Studies Quarterly (): –. Schmitt, Olivier. . Allies That Count: Junior Partners in Coalition Warfare. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Sciolino, Eliane. . “BALKAN Accord: The President; Clinton’s Bosnia Stand: Political Risks Remain.” New York Times,  November, . https://www.nytimes .com////world/balkan-accord-the-president-clinton-s-bosnia-stand-poli tical-risks-remain.html Trønnes, Otto. . “Mapping and Explaining Norwegian Caveats in Afghanistan from  to .” Master’s thesis, Trondheim: Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet. von Hlatky, Stefanie. . American Allies in Times of War: The Great Asymmetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolford, Scott. . The Politics of Military Coalitions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 9

Judges on the Battlefield? Judicial Observer Effects in US and UK National Security Policies Lena Trabucco

+ Introduction National security policymaking is a multifaceted process incorporating many backgrounds and sources of expertise—both military and civilian. One important component at this civil-military nexus, though often less discussed in civil-military discourse, is the role of international law. International law is not simply a domain for lawyers. The rules and regulations of warfare are relevant to the spectrum of national security experts as it delineates the range of policy options available in a crisis. Equally significant, however, is the role for legal accountability as a connection within civil-military relations. In the last half century, there has been significant developments toward expanding the reach of courts, both domestic and international, into the military realm. The establishment of ad hoc criminal tribunals, the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and various domestic legislation expanding national or universal jurisdiction, the international order is currently what some experts call the most judicialized of all time. These developments have implications for a range of national security actors—not just international lawyers. Take the following example. In the days leading to the Iraq invasion in , on a seemingly normal day at the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense headquarters, civil servants could hear a British general screaming “I refuse to go to The Hague for you” to a civilian counterpart (Trabucco ). For this chapter, the context of the conversation is less important than the illustration that legal accountability is an issue that crosses the civil-military divide. However, our understandings of legal accountability, and even international law more generally, as

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features embedded within national security policymaking merits deeper consideration. This chapter takes a step in that direction with a more nuanced examination of courts in national security policymaking. Beginning with a discussion of academic literature on the influence of courts on politics, I argue there is an inherent tension between disciplines. Broadly, political scientists explore international courts as deterrents for policymakers whereas legal scholars consider domestic courts to defer to policymakers in times of crisis. I consider each of these perspectives in depth, and certainly, on the face of it, the disciplines are debating different accountability regimes (international courts and domestic courts). However, political scientists and legal scholars are engaging with the same phenomenon—how does judicial accountability shape national security policymaking? This chapter presents an expanded framework that moves the debate beyond deterrence or deference. Using Ashely Deeks’s () original conception of courts as having “observer effects” on national security lawyers, I argue for an expanded version of judicial observer effects to move beyond an examination of lawyers to include both civilian and military actors. As the previous anecdote suggests, military actors perceive their own risks for legal accountability differently, and these perceptions may influence behavior from the top policy level down to the tactical levels of war. Additionally, this expanded framework better captures both internal and external factors that shape judicial observer effects. First, I discuss how a disaggregated internal perspective on the US executive branch shows that the various agencies relevant for national security policymaking have different perspectives when it comes to court jurisdiction. These different perspectives filter into different policy preferences. Recognizing that the executive branch debates the risks of legal accountability from this agency perspective offers greater insight into the sources that motivate policymakers. Second, I examine how external influences (particularly working alongside foreign allies and military partners) can also influence judicial observer effects. The process of coalition legal interoperability (or coordinating military operations around partners’ diverse legal obligations) can expose states to greater international and foreign court jurisdiction. For the United States, these considerations factored into cabinet-level discussions and guided many policymakers’ policy preferences. The judicial observer effect framework advances the debate beyond the dichotomous role for courts as deterrents or deferrers. Simultaneously, this framework illustrates how considerations of accountability, or judicial review, sit squarely at the nexus of national security policymaking and is certainly one factor contributing to this larger practice of military politics.

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Tension in the Literature Do Courts Defer or Deter? Recent literature on expanding legal accountability has become increasingly more interdisciplinary (Alter, Hafner-Burton, and Helfer ). Both international relations and legal scholars have addressed the proliferation of international courts and the “accountability revolution” to understand the consequences of an increasingly judicialized international system. This section surveys literature examining the function of judicial systems in national security and armed conflicts from two frameworks. The first is the deterrence framework—scholars in this framework argue that legal accountability can directly change behavior toward compliance and lead to individual risk assessments of legal violations (Jo and Simmons ; McAllister ). The second framework is the deference framework; scholars from this perspective typically examine national inter-branch dynamics arguing that national security deference doctrines results in a minimal impact of the judicial branch in crisis policymaking. Fundamentally, these two frameworks analyze the interaction of different sets of institutions but examining the same phenomenon. Each framework argues that courts (whether domestic or international) have a particular function in the course of an armed conflict and pursuit of national security. I will discuss each in turn.

Deterrence Framework After World War II, the creation of the tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo were pivotal to the evolution of international criminal law and individual responsibility. International criminal tribunals (ICTs) became an important tool for holding individuals accountable for heinous crimes and advancing individual and global justice. As the nature of warfare changed from interstate to largely intrastate, states formed ad hoc ICTs with a limited mandate to prosecute individuals for committing international crimes within the scope of a specific conflict. States created ICTs for conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, East Timor, Lebanon, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The ad hoc tribunals signaled an important step toward creating intentional global standards for legal accountability and justice; but ultimately the ICTs were costly and unsustainable, paving the way for a permanent ICC to prosecute the most egregious international crimes. The deterrence debate among international legal scholars is rooted in whether the threat of legal accountability actually influences government regimes and insurgency groups to alter behavior in favor of legal compliance.

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Skeptics of deterrence argue that threat of legal accountability cannot compete with strategic priorities and are unlikely to compel combatants to change behavior (McAllister : ). Skeptics contend that even if the risk of legal accountability were to be taken into consideration, the resources necessary to secure prosecutorial support and gather evidence in an ongoing conflict are extremely challenging; this may negate any deterrent effect of the court, because combatants conclude that prosecution is unlikely in light of these challenges (Mendeloff ). In other words, prosecutions require a lot of evidence and resources, and gathering this kind of information in an armed conflict is not always feasible. However, proponents of international courts’ deterrent capability find empirical evidence of changed behavior when ICTs have the necessary support to prosecute war criminals (Jo and Simmons ; Sikkink ; Hillebrecht ; Appel ; McAllister ). One study examines the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and finds evidence that ICTs are most likely to deter combatants when three conditions are present: prosecutorial support, combatant reliance on liberal constituencies for aid support, and centralized combatant groups (McAllister : ). The first condition, prosecutorial support, often comes from third parties (i.e., states, nongovernmental organizations, intergovernmental organizations) in the form of evidence, information, and access to a crime scene, witnesses, or suspects (McAllister : ). Second, combatants need access to resources (such as recruits, funding, weapons, recognition, or access to black markets). Some combatants rely on liberal constituencies for assistance in acquiring these resources, and often that support is conditional on adopting other ideals supported by liberal constituencies, such as respect for human rights (McAllister : ). The third condition is group centralization—when a consolidated chain of command weighs the costs and benefits of compliance with legal norms (McAllister : ). According to Jacqueline McAllister, if these three conditions are present in an armed conflict, there is a higher likelihood of court deterrence. These findings offer a positive framework operationalizing legal accountability in wartime decision-making, and find observable deterrent effects when these conditions reinforce each other, increasing the weight of accountability directly on combatants. Although the study exclusively examines the deterrent effect of the ICTY, McAllister argues that the findings are relevant for examining conflicts under ICC jurisdiction for three reasons. First, low-intensity conflicts (where she found deterrent effects for some combatants) are more common than larger civil wars or counterinsurgency campaigns. Second, the three deterrent conditions are present in many ongoing civil conflicts. Third, McAllister’s () findings are consistent with other empirical studies regarding the deterrent effect of the ICC.

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The ICC is a permanent criminal court with jurisdiction over certain international crimes with  member states that fall under the court’s jurisdiction (UN General Assembly ). As a standing (or permanent) court, with an independent prosecutor, many observers questioned the ability of the ICC to deter future conflict. Skeptics of ICC deterrence argue that the ICC is, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, instead risks conflict escalation that endangers civilian populations (Goldsmith and Krasner ; Snyder and Vinjamuri /; Ku and Nzelibe ). Snyder and Vinjamuri (/) argue that ICC jurisdiction, and international prosecutions more broadly, can rather discourage strategic bargaining and block the use of amnesties as a way to usher peaceful resolutions to a conflict. Amnesties may offer more attractive exit strategies and incentivize conflict de-escalation. Other skeptics believe that “the ICC could initiate prosecutions that aggravate bloody political conflicts and prolong political instability in the affected regions” (Goldsmith and Krasner ). Skeptics of ICC deterrence often go further than arguing that court jurisdiction does not grip policymakers, as we will see in the deference framework; rather, prosecutions may incentivize combatants to fight to the end and reject attempts at bargaining negotiations or peaceful resolutions. In short, according to this perspective, the ICC may make war longer and worse. Others disagree with this pessimistic role for the ICC. This camp argues that State Parties to the Rome Statute typically have better track records of respect for human rights (Appel ), that incorporating international crimes into domestic criminal codes encourages greater compliance from State Parties (Jo and Simmons ), or that the creation of the ICC can deter atrocities at the margins through making amnesties a less likely option for conflict resolution (Gilligan ). One empirical study on ICC deterrence states that there are two forms of possible deterrence: prosecutorial deterrence (compliance out of fear of anticipated legal sanctions or prosecutions) and social deterrence (nonlegal social costs of violation) (Jo and Simmons ). Jo and Simmons expect “the ICC may have varying effects on different categories of actors, depending on () their exposure to the risk of prosecution, and () the importance they attach—or the vulnerability they believe they have—to the social costs of criminal law violation” (: ). In a quantitative study, they find positive evidence of ICC deterrence in ongoing conflicts, and increased risks of prosecutions for combatants. They conclude that the ICC contributes directly to prosecutorial deterrence through the proprio motu powers of the prosecutor, or the power of the prosecutor to initiate its own investigation without state consent. The independence of the prosecutor, and thus a degree of uncertainty, directly impacts combatants. The ICC

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indirectly encourages lawful behavior by promoting domestic adoption of international crimes in criminal codes and bolstering national prosecutorial capacity. The ICC additionally deters through international support, including civil society, toward justice for atrocities against civilians (Jo and Simmons : ). This brief overview of the deterrence debate illustrates a wide array of deterrence capability, but especially important are the empirical studies that find that correlations and mechanisms for operationalizing deterrence on combatants to conclude accountability ultimately have a positive effect bending toward legal compliance in conflict situations. However, the deterrence debate focuses on international courts as an influence on individual and state behavior. The next section shifts the focus to examine how domestic courts operate as a counterpart to the executive branch and the historically wide flexibility given to the executive in its war-making capabilities. Scholars in this perspective offer a very different picture for courts in wartime.

Deference Framework Historically, domestic courts have averted strong judicial review regarding national security policies. There are numerous reasons for this, but one reason is that for military action specifically, primary jurisdiction is the military justice system. However, even for legal questions related to armed conflict at civilian level, domestic courts have had a minimal role. In the United States, and other common law systems such as the United Kingdom, domestic courts have exercised wide deference to the judgment of the executive branch when responding to a threat to national security. The practice of judicial deference is rooted in the recognition that courts should “assign varying degrees of weight to the judgment of the elected branches, out of respect for their superior competence, expertise and/or democratic legitimacy” (Kavanagh ). Similarly, the established military deference doctrine “requires that a court considering certain constitutional challenges to military legislation perform a more lenient constitutional review than would be appropriate if the challenged legislation were in a civilian context” (O’Connor : ). However, sometimes this practice of military deference is due to lack of legal clarity. As Jack Goldsmith (: ) has stated, “What the law required was uncertain at best in , and if anything, it favored the government.” John Ip suggests two important reasons domestic courts defer to the political and military competencies of the executive branch. First, it is “not constitutionally appropriate for the judiciary to deal with such issues, and that proper recourse in such a policy-driven area lies with the political

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branches” (Ip : ). The second issue is more practical—that “courts may lack the information needed to determine the case and face difficulties with maintaining the secrecy of sensitive information given the adversarial process” (). Each of these reasons are significant limitations for domestic courts that have effectively left many military legal issues outside the civilian court system. Some scholars celebrate this judicial deference regarding national security (Posner and Vermeule ). They argue that the courts are structurally inefficient to adjudicate national security concerns or the executive’s military strategy. Justice Clarence Thomas expressed this sentiment in his dissent of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, stating, The plurality’s evident belief that it is qualified to pass on the “military necessity” of the Commander in Chief ’s decision to employ a particular form of force against our enemies is so antithetical to our constitutional structure that it simply cannot go unanswered . . . the President’s decision to try Hamdan before a military commission . . . is entitled to a heavy measure of deference. (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , emphasis added)

Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule () similarly argue that the executive is entitled to deference because the courts are less likely to strike the right balance between individual liberties and security. They maintain that “judicial review of the security-liberty tradeoffs that government makes during emergencies is affirmatively harmful” (: ). As such, the executive should receive maximum flexibility necessary to strike the appropriate balance between collective security and individual liberty specific to the situation. Proponents of judicial deference rely on a bedrock of two separation of power values—effectiveness and democratic accountability—and have three core conclusions (Deeks  ). First, the executive must remain flexible and unburdened when defending the country against dire threats. Second, the executive has unparalleled expertise in confronting national security threats. Third, the executive is uniquely positioned to act quickly with access to secret intelligence (Deeks : ). For deference scholars, the institutional competencies of domestic courts are not designed to appropriately handle issues of national security or military decision-making. On the other hand, critics of judicial deference argue that it is imperative for courts to be involved in national security decision-making processes (Deeks : –). Critics argue that the purpose of separation of powers is to ensure that one branch does not assume too much power, especially in an area with high-stakes consequences such as national security. Martin Flaherty writes, “most often opposing accountability and energy is balance among the three branches, especially those designed to prevent

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tyrannical accretions of power” (: ). Especially during times of crisis, some believe the executive can be especially prone to rash decisionmaking, or “serious forms of lawlessness,” and adherence to rule of law becomes imperative to minimizing intrusions on liberty (Sunstein ). From this perspective, domestic courts have an imperative to balance the power allotted to the executive to ensure lawful behavior and constitutional checks. The tension between deterrence and deference is evident. On the one hand, deterrence scholars find empirical evidence that international (and in some cases foreign) prosecutions can alter individuals’ risk calculations in the fog of war and incentivize behavior in favor of legal compliance. On the other hand, deference scholars argue that domestic courts are extremely limited in their ability to check executive power and have effectively handed over unchecked and unbalanced war-making power to the executive branch. On the face of it, these literatures are talking past each other and referring to different phenomena. Political scientists are largely examining civil war contexts and interested in individual combatants—not necessarily government policymakers—whereas the deference discussion is centered on the power of the executive branch at the policymaking level. However, I maintain that each position is essentially describing the same phenomena from different angles. Each framework explains the threat of accountability as a component of national security decision-making processes, but the deterrence/deference approach cannot account for a nuanced picture of the threat of accountability. We need a framework that can go beyond the all-or-nothing influence of courts for a clearer picture of accountability in national security, and toward a greater understanding of international law in times of war.

Judicial Observer Effects This chapter presents the judicial observer effect framework as particularly useful in resolving the deterrence-deference tension in academic literature. Ashley Deeks originally offered the “observer effect” as a framework that better captures nuance in national security policymaking and argues that courts do not simply deter or defer—in reality, the influence is more subtle and complex. Deeks writes: One of the core tenets of national security doctrine is that courts play a deeply modest role in shaping and adjudicating the executive’s national security decisions. . . . Against this backdrop of limited judicial involve-

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ment in its security policy, the executive is highly attuned to potential court action. When the executive faces a credible threat of litigation or the pendency of one or more specific cases, it often alters the affected national security policies in ways that render them more rights protective. (: )

Deeks argues that this phenomenon, the observer effect, is a motivating force in US executive decision-making in times of crisis. Deference theorists lack a theoretical account for the observer effect because they do not allow the threat of judicial review to be itself embedded within policy process, and as such, Deeks argues, deference theorists overlook the observer effect. The observer effect phenomenon originally comes from the natural sciences. In physics, an observer effect is the change that is made because of the act of observing (Deeks : ). Similarly, in psychology, “some experts believe that individuals alter their performance or behavior when they know that someone else is observing them” (). Based on the broad applicability of the observer effect, I argue that we should qualify the influence of courts to be the judicial observer effect. Courts are not the only actors that observe the executive branch in times of crisis or war. There are solid reasons to consider a possible legislative observer effect or a media observer effect. To delineate the influence of courts from other potential observer effects, I will refer to the influence of courts (or judicial review) as the judicial observer effect. Judicial observer effects are “the impact on executive policy setting of pending or probable court consideration of a specific national security policy” (Deeks : –, emphasis added). Judicial observer effects occur at the policy-setting phase, when policymakers identify national security objectives and determine or design the best policy or strategy. Critically, judicial observer effects occur before any actual judicial review. Thus, “the [judicial] observer effect is distinct from the executive’s response to court orders that require the executive to make specific changes to a specific policy” (). There are numerous important conclusions from Deeks’s original contribution. Most importantly, Deeks urges legal scholars to recognize that executive policymaking does not occur in a vacuum, but is rather “highly attuned to potential court action” (). It is an important perspective, especially coming from a repeated insider within the executive branch. The admission that even high-stakes decisions among top policymakers are not immune to potential judicial review directly challenges the position that courts simply defer to the executive branch for crisis decision-making. However, the implications of this are relevant beyond legal scholarship.

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Lena Trabucco

For security studies scholars, Deeks’s perspective introduces a role for international law in wartime decisions that has thus far received minimal attention. The judicial observer effect framework encourages security studies scholars to understand the various ways that international law can influence wartime decisions. The judicial observer effect framework advances the literature beyond traditional approaches of international law as a mechanism of constraint or empowerment; rather, it captures a nuanced influence wherein potentially newly established court jurisdiction can incentivize a more cautious security approach. Judicial observer effects are particularly useful within the military politics perspective of this edition. Court jurisdiction does not necessarily apply evenly between military and civilian/political counterparts. Military commanders, including military lawyers, fall under the military justice system that civilian lawyer counterparts do not. Further research is necessary to understand the judicial observer effect at the military-civilian intersection. Nevertheless, and as will be expanded, there is evidence to suggest that the United States experienced tensions along the civilian-military divide, and military officials believed they were in vulnerable positions for judicial review—more so than their civilian counterparts. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that Deeks’s original contribution was limited in scope, and subsequently the conclusions about observer effects were limited. The study only examined the effect of US federal courts on the US executive branch. As such, the discussion does not include any judicial observer effect for international courts or foreign courts on American decision-making. This limitation excludes any potential external influence in the policy process, which is unlikely given that the US often works alongside allies and partners in conflict situations. Another limitation in Deeks’s assessment is treating the US executive branch as one unanimous actor. There is substantial evidence that different agencies within the US executive branch (such as the White House, the Department of Defense, the State Department, and intelligence services) do not necessarily agree in crisis decision-making. Each of these limitations—executive agency interaction and multinational operations—can offer lenses to capture a nuanced picture of judicial observer effects.

Judicial Observer Effects in Executive Agency Interaction The executive branch in the United States is constitutive of multiple agencies with various areas of expertise and responsibility within the government. For national security, numerous agencies with military, legal, and foreign policy expertise contribute to the creation of informed security

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policy. Some argue that the executive branch is the de facto authority for national security decisions as “the executive’s interpretation of its national security authority is . . . extremely significant and can often serve not only as one step in an inter-branch interpretive dance, but as lawmaking itself ” (Ingber : ). Each agency in the executive branch has its own team of lawyers. Executive branch lawyers have a vital role in national security policymaking because of their determination of the policy options available to policymakers. Essentially, “if the lawyers say something is legal, government officials who act on that advice are safe from prosecution—even if the legal theories later are discredited and withdrawn” (Savage : ). One example where the executive branch was divided on a policy position was the decision regarding the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the conflict in Afghanistan—a decision that set the tone for American military operations for the next fifteen years, causing significant conflict among US executive agencies (Goldsmith ; Yoo ). The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the US Justice Department argued that the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions, specifically prisoner of war (POW) status, were not applicable to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. However, the OLC said, as a matter of policy, that President Bush had the authority to decide whether to apply the Geneva Conventions but was not legally obligated to do so (Bybee ). The Department of Defense (DOD) made their position clear—they supported the application of the Geneva Conventions to the conflict. Both DOD legal and the Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps (the civilian legal office and military legal advisers, respectively) supported the applicability of Geneva to both Taliban and al-Qaeda, arguing that the Geneva Conventions were customary international law (thus binding on the United States). The DOD also argued that a decision to reject the application of the Geneva Conventions could put American troops at further risk (Yoo ). The State Department also supported the Geneva Convention applicability, but argued, among other reasons, that applying the Geneva Conventions would give more credibility to the coalition and reassurance to international partners (Powell ). William H. Taft IV, the State Department legal adviser, was the greatest supporter for applying the Geneva Conventions. In a memo to Alberto Gonzales, counsel to the president, Taft firmly stated: The President should know that a decision that the Conventions do apply is consistent with the plain language of the Conventions and the unvaried practice of the [US] in introducing its forces into conflict over fifty years. It is consistent with the advice of DOS lawyers . . . and the position of every other party to the Conventions. . . . A decision that the Conventions do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan in which our armed forces

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are engaged deprives our troops there of any claim to the protection of the Convention in the event they are captured and weakens the protections accorded by the Conventions to our troops in future conflicts. (Taft )

In a departure from the majority of the executive, President Bush ultimately agreed with the OLC recommendation. He decided the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al-Qaeda, as they are not a state and thus cannot be a state party to the treaty; members of the Taliban were to be considered “unlawful combatants” and thus not eligible for POW protections. Of course, it is the nature of government decision-making in any arena to disagree and advocate for diverse agency interests, and in one sense the Geneva example is not extraordinary. Nevertheless, bureaucratic competition or cooperation on policies such as these determined the nature of an armed conflict and had national security consequences that are still playing out today. This decision regarding Geneva had strategic and legal consequences for the United States and its allies; not the least of which was the justification from the OLC regarding the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, also known as the torture program. The goal here is not to show that national security agencies disagree with each other—this, of course, happens all the time. Each agency has different competencies and often advocates for different policy options. Rather, this is to illustrate the legal concerns that straddle the civilianmilitary divide and are central to the agencies’ considerations and policy preferences moving forward. Many perceived the risks of excluding Geneva Convention protections as too high, and advocated for these assurances even if it limited strategic or operational flexibility.

Judicial Observer Effects in Coalition Warfare Another example of judicial observer effects filtering into US executive policymaking is through the constellation of coalition warfare, also called multinational military operations. Multinational operations contain forces from two or more nations that function within the arrangements of a coalition or an alliance. Coalitions offer commanders a range of benefits, including wider access to resources from contributing nations and political legitimacy of collective action. Modern conflicts largely occur alongside partners and allies and are the bedrock of modern international security (Department of the Army ). The success of a coalition significantly depends on its ability to address challenges of interoperability. Coalition interoperability refers to the degree to which contributing nations are able to integrate or operate together

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to achieve their goal occurring at every level and dimension of force interaction (Hura et al. ). A broad definition of interoperability is “the ability of systems, units, or forces to provide services to and accept services from other systems, units, or forces, and to use the services so exchanged to enable them to operate effectively together” (Hura et al. : –). Under this interoperability umbrella are subsets of coalition integration—including legal interoperability, which is the coordination of operations around contributing nations’ legal obligations and interpretations without compromising coalition effectiveness and respecting applicable law (Zwanenburg ). Planning legal interoperability requires two kinds of legal coordination—around contributing states’ substantive legal obligations (particularly pertinent regarding human rights), and around contributing states’ interpretations of the same legal obligations. For example, two states can both be signatories to the same treaty but have different interpretations for a particular article or issue. Judicial observer effects are a natural result of legal interoperability because a state is not only “limited by his own nation’s laws and policies, but also by the laws and policies of each of the operations’ troop-contributing nations” (Fussnecker ). Legal interoperability occurs at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. However, in the days leading up to the conflict in Afghanistan, at the cabinet level, secretary of state Colin Powell urged President Bush to accept the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the conflict (as previously discussed). In a memo to White House Counsel and National Security Adviser, Secretary Powell offered two reasons to grant Geneva applicability—both of which reflect the judicial observer effects in legal interoperability. First, “Europeans and others will likely have legal problems with extradition or other forms of cooperation in law enforcement, including bringing terrorists to justice” (Powell : ). The primary concern here is that European partners have stricter human rights obligations than the United States and Secretary Powell notes to the president that European partners will have legal restrictions if the United States does not accept certain international standards in the conflict. Second, Secretary Powell noted, It may provoke some individual foreign prosecutors to investigate and prosecute our officials and troops . . . it will make us [US forces] more vulnerable to domestic and international legal challenge and deprive us of important legal options . . . we will be challenged in international for a [UN Commission on Human Rights, World Court]. (Powell : )

On the one hand, this position aligns with the overall arguments from the State Department to advocate and support for Geneva applicability. The

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purpose of the memo was to offer convincing arguments for the president to support Geneva applicability. Nevertheless, what is necessary to consider here is the discussion at the cabinet level of raising the risk of judicial review from foreign sources—whether through global organizations or foreign court jurisdiction. This illustrates how American policymakers are not limited to the risk of judicial review in federal courts; on the contrary, the State Department repeatedly raised the risks of foreign and international jurisdiction, and these risks are heightened through legal interoperability with coalition partners. Ultimately, each of these illustrations—the interagency interaction and coalition legal interoperability—represent avenues for judicial observer effects to infiltrate the national security policymaking process. It is crucial for security studies scholars to capture nuance regarding international law in national security.

Conclusions Military politics has numerous dimensions, and the judicial observer effect framework offers one way to encapsulate international law in national security processes. Legal accountability is not only a consideration for lawyers—it is relevant to the multitude of actors in the national security realm. The framework of judicial observer effects is a tool for understanding international law in action, and the practical considerations for military and civilian actors that grapple with military policy with high legal stakes. However, current thinking on judicial observer effects is limited and merits further research. This chapter is a starting point toward an expanded judicial observer effect framework that incorporates international and foreign judicial sources on national security decision-making. Expanding the judicial observer effect framework will also capture more internal and external nuance—such as how judicial observer effects influence interagency dynamics within the executive branch, and how multinational military operations influence judicial observer effects through a process of legal interoperability. Each of these examples illustrate how a more granular look can enlighten a role for international law in military politics.

Lena Trabucco’s research focuses on the intersection of international law and international security, specifically the role of the laws of war in international politics. Her dissertation explored the role of international and domestic courts in the conduct of armed conflict.

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Notes . On international law in decision-making, see Rapp (). On international court expansion, see Alter (), and Sikkink (). . On ad hoc criminal tribunals, see Mettraux (). On the International Criminal Court, see Schabas (), and Scheffer (). On domestic and universal jurisdiction, see Langer and Eason (), and Rikhof (). On judicialization, see Alter, Hafner-Burton, and Helfer (), and Abebe and Ginsburg (). . See for example Alter () and Sikkink (); on the “accountability revolution,” see Sriram (), which surveys the rise of prosecutions, particularly through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, while exploring the negative implications of an expanding system of accountability. . See Heller () and Cohen and Totani (). . For more on war crimes tribunals, see Bass (), Schabas (), and Goldstone (). Establishing international criminal tribunals can occur under the UN Security Council, or domestically. The mandates for many of these ICTs were limited temporally and geographically. Typically, the tribunals only had competence to review crimes committed within the context of the armed conflict and only for the time the armed conflict occurred. . See also Farer (), Alexander (), Cronin-Furman (), and Mendeloff (). . Cronin-Furman () finds ICC deterrence is weak without severe punishment and low probabilities of capture. . For a related argument on exile, see Krcmari (); see also Prorok () and Ku and Nzelibe (). . See also Dancy and Montal (). . This section will focus largely on the United States domestic court practice as the discussion for the rest of the chapter is about the United States. . Military justice differs by state and jurisdiction. For a starting point on the American military justice system, see Roan and Buxton (), and Rives and Ehlenbeck (). . See Goldsmith () for an in-depth analysis of court behavior in the context of the global war on terror; see also Wittes (); and Vladeck (: ) where he argues that courts have been “decidedly unwilling to engage the substance of counterterrorism policy.” For a larger discussion of US judiciary in the checks and balance system, see Whittington (). . See also Deeks (); for a larger discussion about deference to the executive in wartime, see Posner and Vermeule (). . See also Pearlstein (). Although these works are focused on American systems, these values are applicable to democratic systems. . See also Posner and Vermeule () and Van Alstine (). . See also Katyal () and Flaherty (). . See also Weizmann Institute of Science (). . See also Jewell (). . Ashley Deeks is currently the White House associate counsel and deputy legal adviser to the US National Security Council. Previously, she served as assistant legal



.

. . .

.

Lena Trabucco adviser for political-military affairs in the US State Department. She is also professor of law at the University of Virginia Law School. Other multinational arrangements could include supervision by an international organization, such as the United Nations, NATO, or Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. See Department of the Army (). See, for example, United States (), and HM Government (). For a more in-depth discussion of interoperability for states with varying legal obligations, see Zwanenburg (), especially page . For example, targeting laws under IHL typically consider concrete objects, such as infrastructure or weapons, to be legitimate targets only if these objects make “an effective contribution to military action.” Such objects are subsequently categorized as “military objects.” But the US has a broader interpretation of military objects than partners, “the United States interpreted this [military objects] to include objects that make an effective contribution to an enemy’s ‘war-sustaining,’ as well as its ‘war-fighting’ and ‘war-supporting’ capability.” In practice, this means the US interpretation authorizes targeting engagement for objects that coalition partners, and NATO, would categorize as ‘civilian objects’ because they may be more economic in nature. Under the US interpretation, legitimate military objectives could include exports that aim to inject capital into the armed forces or war efforts, or the airport that used for transportation. Understandably, this difference in interpretation has significant implications on the ground for legal interoperability. See also Rowe () and Williams Jr. ().

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Schabas, William. . An Introduction to the International Criminal Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. . The UN International Criminal Tribunals: The Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheffer, David J. . “The United States and the International Criminal Court.” American Journal of International Law : –. Sikkink, Kathryn. . The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics. New York: W. W. Norton. Snyder, Jack, and Leslie Vinjamuri. /. “Trials and Errors: Principle and Pragmatism in Strategies of International Justice.” International Security (): –. Sriram, Chandra Lekha. . “Revolutions in Accountability: New Approaches to Past Abuses.” American University International Law Review (): –. Sunstein, Cass. . “Judging National Security Post-/.” The Supreme Court Review : –. Taft, IV, William Howard. . “Memorandum to Counsel to the President, Re: Comments on Your Paper on the Geneva Conventions.”  February . Trabucco, Lena. . “Judges on the Battlefield: Judicial Observer Effects in US and UK National Security Policies.” PhD dissertation. Chicago: Northwestern University. UN General Assembly. . Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (last amended June ).  July . United States. . The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. President of the U.S. Van Alstine, Michael P. . “The Judicial Power and Treaty Delegation.” California Law Review : –. Vladeck, Stephen I. . “The Passive-Aggressive Virtues.” Columbia Law Review Sidebar : –. Weinstein, Jeremy M. . Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weizmann Institute of Science. . “Quantum Theory Demonstrated: Observation Affects Reality.” Scientific Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/// .htm. Whittington, Keith E. . “Judicial Checks on the President.” In The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency, eds. George C. Edwards and William G. Howell, –. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Jr., Winston S. . “Multinational Rules of Engagement: Caveats and Friction.” Army Lawyer (January), n.p. Wittes, Benjamin. . Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. New York: Penguin. Yoo, John. . War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Zwanenburg, Marten. . “International Humanitarian Law Interoperability in Multi-National Operations.” International Review of the Red Cross : –.

chapter 10

Small Powers’ Civil-Military Relations Two Smoking Guns Carsten Roennfeldt

+ Introduction Those concerned with strategic effectiveness, understood as the armed forces’ ability to achieve ends of policy, should welcome revitalized efforts to move beyond Samuel Huntington’s () seminal guidance for civilmilitary relations first published in The Soldier and the State in . Risa Brooks () calls for a new normative framework to improve the United States’ strategic effectiveness without putting in jeopardy liberal democracies’ fundamental values. In the same spirit, Thomas Crosbie gathered civil-military relations scholars in  to challenge dominant theory in the field that by “admonishing the military involvement in politics in toto . . . provide little guidance for officers who find themselves in politically charged situations” (Crosbie ). Suzanne Nielsen and Hugh Liebert () argue that Huntington’s delimitation of officer expertise to the management of violence reduces the United States’ ability to meet its security needs in the twenty-first century. Similarly, Carsten Roennfeldt proposes such expertise should include political competence to know “what is the right thing to do [with military forces] to achieve a common good [for society] in situations when there are several, often conflicting, objectives” (: ); to this Damon Coletta and Thomas Crosbie add a professional determination “to act boldly outside the rules . . . [if that] would benefit the state” (: –). Such and other recent criticisms draw heavily from scholarly efforts to move beyond Huntington’s conceptualization of military professionalism ever since Morris Janowitz in  proposed an alternative “professional self-conception” that includes an “enlarged politico-military responsibility” (: lvi).

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This debate is largely US-dominated, although non-superpower perspectives are increasingly engaging with it (Mukherjee ; Kasurak ). The present article contributes with a small-power perspective by focusing on military professional norms that have affected Norway’s strategic effectiveness in military operations abroad. The argument is explorative and conceptual and draws from Norway’s military contingents to Libya in  and to Latvia in  in order to set the scene, illustrate ideas, and provide smoking-gun evidence for further debate. The two cases suggest Huntington’s theoretical outlook has influenced civil-military relations in Norway with a negative impact on its military forces’ strategic effectiveness. The main finding is that small powers are ill-served by uncritically adopting civil-military relations norms tailored to the superpower. I propose that small powers facilitate collaborative political-military strategy dialogues at all levels of command, enable strategic control of tactical activities, and add a political dimension to military professionalism. The article arrives to these recommendations first by sketching out Huntington’s normative framework, then by introducing the cases, and, in light of these, discussing his framework and its critics.

The “Normal” Theory in Civil-Military Relations Indeed, Huntington elaborates on civil-military relations in a more nuanced way than his critics give him credit for. Nevertheless, in building his case, Huntington makes assertions that have since been used to legitimize “common sense” on the roles and responsibilities of politicians and civilians as guardians of national security. According to Eliot Cohen, “a simplified secondhand version of the book has come, in fact, to be commonly viewed as the “normal” theory of civil-military relations—the accepted theoretical standard by which the current reality is to be judged” (: ). Commandant of the US Army War College, Major General Rapp holds that “however appealing to the military, Huntington’s conceptualization of proper civil-military relations does not reflect the reality of security strategy making and implementation today” (: ). Yet the normal theory remains seminal in the way military professionals reason and operate. US General Stanley McChrystal, for instance, when force commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan from – drew from Huntington’s intellectual reputation to steer military professionals away from political considerations and, it seems, make politicians responsible for the war’s outcome: “I kept telling my staff in Afghanistan, ‘We don’t own this war. This is not our war. We are

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technicians. We are going to use the Sam Huntington model here’” (General McChrystal as quoted in Brooks : ). Another prominent figure, US General Tommy Franks, operated on the assumption that a sharp distinction between civilian and military roles must be maintained. While force commander in the Afghan war from  and in Iraq from , he told his military superior in the United States, “Keep Washington focused on policy and strategy. Leave me the hell alone to run the war” (General Franks as quoted in Owens : ). In the normal theory’s narrative, politicians set the goals and military professionals use their expertise in the management of violence to achieve them. Many statespersons are of the same opinion, says Cohen and points to US president George H. W. Bush’s reflections on the  Gulf War: “I did not want to repeat the problems of the Vietnam War (or numerous wars throughout history), where the political leadership meddled with military operations. I would avoid micromanaging the military” (quoted in Cohen : ). Three claims summarize the normal theory’s normative framework: • Politicians and military shall operate in two autonomous spheres. They interact at the highest executive level only and have different roles and responsibilities. • Strategy making is a transactional process. Politicians shall clarify objectives and let military design and execute the strategy to achieve them, while military shall refer and leave politically charged judgments to politicians. • Military professionals are apolitical, they obey the chain of command, and their expertise is the management of violence to win armed combat. Huntington’s seminal work provides ample quotes that, when used selectively, serve as the normal theory’s normative building blocks. These shall now be presented in the context of his main argument. Writing in the early years of the Cold War, Huntington’s objective was to find a way US civil-military relations could be ordered to balance “the tensions between the [imperative] demands of military security and the values of American liberalism” (: )—or, in more blunt terms, to discourage the armed forces from using their military capability to influence the United States, while at the same time enable them to avoid defeat in a potential war with nuclear Soviet Union. To balance these two imperatives, Huntington proposed the notion of “objective civilian control” (: –). The military security imperative Huntington treats as the military profession’s raison d’être. Referring to Carl von Clausewitz’s () dicta that

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“war is the continuation of politics by other means” and “war’s logic is political, its grammar is military” (Huntington : ), Huntington argues: This concept of war as an autonomous and yet instrumental science implies a similar theory with respect to the role of the specialist in war. The fact that war has its own grammar requires that the military professionals be permitted to develop their expertise at this grammar without extraneous interference. . . . The inherent quality of a military body can only be evaluated in terms of independent military standards. (: )

Huntington defines that expertise as “the management of violence” and explains “the function of a military force is successful armed combat. . . . The direction, operation, and control of a human organization whose primary function is the application of violence is the peculiar skill of the officer” (). To achieve the other imperative, objective civilian control promotes a “highly professional officer corps . . . immune to politics” () and “politically sterile and neutral” (). This ideal is also crucial for military effectiveness since “politics is beyond the scope of military competence, and the participation of military officers in politics undermines their professionalism” (). And further, “the area of military science is subordinate to, and yet independent of, the area of politics” (). Huntington holds that these two imperatives need not be in conflict “so long as each was kept within its proper sphere” (). He recounts US civil-military relations history to show that: The real problem was the ideological one, the American attitude of mind which sought to impose liberal solutions in military affairs as well as in civil life. This tendency constituted the gravest domestic threat to American military security. So long as the Cold War continued, that security would depend upon the ability of the United States to evolve an intellectual climate more favorable to the existence of military professionalism and the achievement of objective civilian control. ()

He argues further, “The essence of objective civilian control is the recognition of autonomous military professionalism; . . . [its anti-thesis] is the denial of an independent military sphere” (). Strategy, in Huntington’s framework, should be confined to the military sphere. He endorses the position exhibited in a US Command and General Staff School  publication: “Politics and strategy . . . are radically and fundamentally things apart. Strategy begins where politics ends. All that soldiers ask is that once the policy is settled, strategy and command shall be regarded as being in a sphere apart from politics” (). Hence, policy and strategy interact at the highest executive level but are processes to be treated separately.

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The top military leaders of the state inevitability operate in this intermingled world of strategy and policy. They must always be alert to the political implications of their military attitudes and be willing to accept the final decisions of the statesmen. When required in his executive capacity to make decisions involving both military and political elements, the military man ideally should formulate his military solution first and then alter it as needs be on the advice of his political advisers. ()

However, Huntington maintains that on topics with no political implication and within the military sphere officers are justified to disobey orders from politicians. “The statesman has no business deciding . . . whether battalions in combat should advance or retreat” (). Indeed, this is an extreme case since the “the supreme military virtue is obedience” (). Generally, military ranks are obedient to the chain of command as “the authority of superior officers is presumed to reflect superior professional ability” ().

Two Norwegian Cases Two cases will now illustrate how Huntington’s normative guidance is reflected in the way Norwegian officers reason and act. It is argued that both military operations were strategically ineffective, but for different reasons; the first case achieved few of the government’s goals, while the second had a strategic approach only at tactical level. The cases will be used as points of reference to illustrate theoretical points and ideas in the proceeding discussions to improve the political utility of military forces.

The Limited Strategic Effectiveness of Norwegian Air Wing (NAW) Thursday,  March , the United Nations’ Security Council () adopted resolution  authorizing the use of force “to protect civilians . . . under threat of attack” (Resolution , ) in Libya. The Norwegian government and many others were surprised that Russia and China did not veto the resolution. Still, the following day, Norway decided to support the resolution by deploying six F-—the Norwegian Air Wing (NAW)—to the NATO-led air campaign, known as Operation Unified Protector (OUP). On Monday, NAW arrived in Greece with a hundred forty staff members to participate in the bombing in Libya from  March until  August  (Sandnes : –). This subsection assesses NAW’s tactical activities in light of the government’s political ends. At the time, the Norwegian government led by prime minister Jens Stoltenberg comprised three political parties, including the Socialist Left Party traditionally opposed to Norway’s NATO membership. For more

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than a month, the international community had been appalled by Libya’s Head of State Muammar Gaddafi’s violent suppression of a popular uprising. States mobilized to stop it with reference to the  genocide in Rwanda and other recent humanitarian catastrophes, according to the Norwegian Libya Commission (Libya Commission : )—an independent commission mandated in  by the Norwegian government on Parliament’s request to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of Norway’s involvement in Libya in . A mix of liberal and real-political goals underpinned the Norwegian government’s decision to deploy NAW. Some objectives were explicitly stipulated, others formed part of long-standing Norwegian security policy. The major political ends were: • to implement UN Security Council resolution , notably to protect civilians; • to be seen by the United States as a good ally and to strengthen NATO; • to strengthen a UN-led world order; • to refrain from using force implicating regime change in Libya. In addition, Norway’s royal decree (: ) that authorized NAW, clarifies it could only operate in accordance with national law and national commitments to international law, henceforth referred to as national guidance. However, few of these stipulated ends were known to NAW’s detachment commander (DETCOM) operating at the tactical level in OUP’s chain of command. He received target lists from NATO’s operational headquarters in Naples, and his hundred forty Norwegian staff ensured NAW only bombed targets fulfilling national guidance criteria that came from Norway’s three-star Joint Headquarters (NJHQ) (Sandnes : –). A crucial role in this process was delegated to the Norwegian officer—a socalled red card holder—authorized by the Norwegian armed forces to say no, when NATOs operational headquarters asked NAW to bomb targets in conflict with national guidance. NAW dropped  bombs over Libya—a very large number based upon any previous actions by Norwegian standards since World War II. Norway was one of eight nations conducting air-to-ground missions and dropped – percent of the bombs during OUP’s initial weeks and  percent of the operations’ total numbers of bombs. Norwegian pilots earned a reputation for the precision with which they destroyed targets in Libya’s capital Tripoli and other highly populated areas, thereby leading the way for other allies to do the same (Henriksen : ; Libya Commission : ; Dragsnes : ). During the first weeks, NAW exclusively bombed targets directly threatening civilians. This changed by late April

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when NAW increasingly targeted more stationary military targets, such as a command-and-control installation in the residence of Libya’s head of state and ammunition depots, which destroyed the Libyan’s government’s means to maintain its monopoly of power. About  percent of the total number of targets NAW destroyed were artillery, tanks, and other military vehicles used directly against civilians (Libya Commission : , ; Dragsnes : , ). Assessing the extent to which these tactical military actions achieved government’s political ends is not an exact science. On the affirmative side, NAW’s performance is believed to have increased Norway’s reputation as a good ally—an assessment supported by many political acknowledgments like US President Obama’s “[you] punched above your weight” comment made to the Norwegian prime minister (Dragsnes : ; Libya Commission : ). Moreover, OUP in which NAW participated is generally accredited for having protected civilians in Benghazi and other Libyan cities during the first weeks, while the broader bombing campaign soon created a deteriorated security situation with negative implications for civilians in Libya and neighboring states (Engell : ; Libya Commission : –, ; Kuperman ). When considered from the position of achieving its other political goals, NAW’s strategic effectiveness is more questionable. For instance, it was detrimental to Norway’s restrained policy on forceful regime change, when NATO redirected the bombing campaign toward regime change and NAW led the way in its execution. It is also unlikely that OUP strengthened the UN, since some of the Security Council’s permanent members became strongly critical to its effects on Libya (Dragsnes : , ; Henriksen ), or indeed that OUP strengthened NATO; few NATO member states actually participated and the campaign revealed just how dependent European members are on the United States (Michaels ; Libya Commission : , –, ; Henriksen ; Dragsnes : , –). This brief assessment suggests that NAW only achieved some of the government’s political ends, albeit important ones. Moreover, NAW allegedly created an internal crisis in the three-party government. When the media reported that Norway’s bombing campaign contributed to a regime change in Libya, the Socialist Left Party demanded the F- contingent be terminated after its initial three-month deployment ended on  June, while the Labor Party wanted to extend it. They agreed on a compromise to prolong NAW’s deployment with six weeks and to reduce it to four F-s (Henriksen : –; Larsen ; Verdens Gang ). We shall now turn to the other Norwegian case where the contingent commander aimed to directly achieve political ends but in ways developed

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at the tactical level with no proactive involvement from higher levels of command.

Norwegian Task Unit’s (NORTU) Tactical Strategy On  September  the Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg announced that Norway would send a mechanized infantry company to take part in the NATO exercise “Silver Arrow” in Latvia. This message followed the conclusion of NATO’s Wales summit six months after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. A Norwegian Task Unit (NORTU) was deployed and subsequently replaced by other Norwegian contingents that in  formed part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence operation in the Baltics. Norway’s political goals related to NORTU were: • to actively support NATO’s reassurance and deterrence measures in the context of a “Russia [that] has shown its will and capability to use military force against neighboring states” (Office of the Prime Minister a); • to be seen by the United States as a good ally and to strengthen NATO; • to give Norwegian forces valuable training and exercise experiences (Office of the Prime Minister a). By late September  NORTU was fully deployed to Latvia. Its hundred ninety troops and force commander Major Seppola formed part of an Estonian battalion during the two-week exercise. At the tactical level, he was under the command of the Norwegian Senior National Representative, Major Løvland, based in Latvia’s capital Riga, who in turn was under the command of NJHQ. Down this chain of command, the force commander received an order that in his own words basically stipulated, “Travel to Latvia and participate in an exercise” (Seppola, personal communication,  February )—and a generally worded operational plan with a communication platform reflecting these three ends related to NORTU. Following these orders, NORTU played its part in the exercise (Moe ; TV ). For the remaining two months of NORTU’s deployment, the force commander received no new orders. But he wanted to do something meaningful, “so we began brainstorming in my command group: What shall we do? And why?” (Seppola, personal communication,  February ). With only a vague idea of the political reasoning behind the deployment, NORTU trailed the Norwegian government’s recent official statements about the NATO summit and the exercise in Latvia (Office of the Prime

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Minister a; Office of the Prime Minister b; NATO ). At the tactical level, NORTU concluded that the Norwegian government wanted: • to demonstrate solidarity with NATO; • to be seen by others—and particularly by the United States—as a highly competent fighting force; • to deter Russia; • to reassure people in the Baltic states that NATO will help them; • to demonstrate to Norwegians that their armed forces are well equipped, well trained, and ready to deploy rapidly (Seppola, personal communication,  February ). NORTU discussed the way the US contingent had approached their deterrence and reassurance task during the exercise. “For them [the US] it is very important to be . . . visible in media, to the population, and not least to Russia. . . . It dawned on us that we had a similar task. But Norwegian politicians are less clear on such matters. This was an exercise, and we should just be there” (Seppola ). The force commander was not convinced that simply “being there” and training soldiers would automatically help his government achieve its broader security goals. An opportunity unexpectedly presented itself when the Latvian chief of defense invited NORTU to join a military parade with other allies on Latvia’s National Day. The Norwegian force commander saw this as an opportunity to communicate solidarity and reassurance in practice, thus contributing to his government’s ends. He also realized the risk that media coverage of NORTU’s participation in a military parade could be ill-received in Norway, where people often associate such events with totalitarian regimes. Hence, the force commander informed NJHQ about the invitation and his concerns, recommended that should NORTU participate, and requested instructions from higher levels. NORTU was ordered to participate. Norway’s chief of defense, Admiral Haakon Bruun-Hanssen, arrived to attend the parade and publicly broadcasted: “We are here to reassure the Latvians who feel threatened and to show NATO’s unity and solidarity . . . I hope it will be perceived [by Russia] as a clear signal that NATO is united, that NATO’s member states are solidary, and that we are willing to defend each other” (Verdens Gang ). In the same manner, the force commander sent the message that NORTU was in Latvia “to solve the task decided upon at the Wales Summit. That is why my company combat group train with them [allied forces]—to increase our interoperability” (Verdens Gang ; see also Defense Visual Information Distribution Service ). Another tactical activity to achieve the goal of being seen as a good ally was NORTU’s invitation to allies for a one-day training session. Notably,

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he invited a tank squadron from US First Cavalry Division’s - Cavalry Regiment to form part of his contingent for the occasion. The observers, including a US brigade commander, saw US soldiers being forced to retreat against “invading forces” played by Norwegians and others. The allies commented on the Norwegians’ ability to plan and lead a multinational live-fire training exercise that involved large caliber direct and indirect fire munitions combined with highly dynamic mounted and dismounted maneuvers, done effectively through English and via radio communication. US First Cavalry Division’s and Latvian armed forces websites and social media broadcasted the event (Seppola, personal communication,  February ; Latvijas armija ). Again, while the political effects of such tactical activities are difficult to document, it is reasonable to assume they supported these political ends. However, at a tactical level, the reputational effects were more tangibly demonstrated when US soldiers on exercise in Poland the following year approached Norwegian soldiers to extend their approval of NORTU’s performance in Latvia (Seppola, personal communication,  February ).

From Sequential to Collaborative Strategy Dialogues The two cases give grounds to reflect on the normal theory, its critics’ different views on civil-military relations, and how theoretical ideas shape the way military operations are conducted and the political utility they have. John Binkley (: –) argues that Huntington misleadingly uses Clausewitz’s authoritative work to theoretically legitimize objective civilian control, the normal theory’s cardinal notion. Clausewitz would not have approved of separating politicians and military in two autonomous spheres, nor would he have approved of an apolitical military profession. To the contrary, Clausewitz argued that “war cannot be divorced from political life, and whenever this occurs in our thinking about war, the many links that connect the two elements are destroyed and we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense” (: ). In addition, Eliot Cohen is critical of the normal theory being used as a guide for civil-military relations to achieve strategic success: “[It] does not suffice as a description of either what does occur or what should . . . The most successful cases of wartime leadership in a democratic state . . . reveal nothing like the rigid separation dictated by the ‘normal’ theory of civil-military relations” (: –). Cohen offered his study to improve what he saw as the United States’ political and military leaders’ shortcomings in the wars of Vietnam and of the s, including particularly the Balkan Wars. His “gold standard” for how strategy should be made is Lin-

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coln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion’s stewardship during their respective wars of national survival. These statesmen succeeded, Cohen argues, because they were in close dialogue with their subordinated military leaders when clarifying political ends and in exploring ways to achieve them. The political leaders challenged their officers’ assumptions in light of facts on the ground, including on tactical and technical issues, and sat them up in debates to defend their proposed courses of action with people who disagreed. To succeed in war, Cohen recommends [that] political leaders must immerse themselves in the conduct of their wars no less than in their great projects of domestic legislation; that they must master their military briefs as thoroughly as they do their civilian ones; that they must demand and expect from their military subordinates a condor as bruising as it is necessary; that both groups must expect a running conversation in which, although civilian opinion will not usually dictate, it must dominate, and that that conversation will cover not only ends and policies, but ways and means. (: ; emphasis added)

The two Norwegian case studies offer no evidence to suggest that political and military leaders engaged in such collaborative conversations about strategy. Compared to Churchill and Ben-Gurion, the two Norwegian prime ministers had marginal experiences with armed conflicts but extensive experiences with domestic politics—including as Minister of Finance, and of Trade and Energy in the case of Stoltenberg; and Solberg had been in charge of the Ministry of Local Government. Moreover, the Norwegian government used little time to decide the ends and means for both NAW and NORTU. For instance, a little group that included the prime minister and his chief of defense used one day to decide NAW’s deployment (Libya Commission : –). The six F- option was recommended only three days in advance by a Norwegian Air Staff officer who by mail answered a request for operational advice. To his knowledge, the political decision was taken without further military planning (Henriksen : ). The prime minister phoned the leaders of the two other parties in the coalition government to gain their political acceptance. The leader of the Socialist Left Party requested time to sound out her party. In a phone call the following day, she gave her support but also questioned the necessity of making “such a coercive contribution” (Libya Commission : ). Likewise, the other case reveals no collaborative strategy dialogue between politicians and the military. While the political announcement followed NATO’s Wales summit, the decision to deploy NORTU was taken at lower levels in the chain of command prior to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and at that time was considered to be an ordinary military exercise (Seppola, personal communication,  February ).

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The decision-making processes that shaped the two operations were sequential and can be described as strategic only in the broadest sense of the term. The Norwegian government decided the ends, allocated the means, and then left it to military leaders to find ways to connect these ends and means. Yet both contingent commanders were uncertain about the government’s ends, concerns, and how the government would balance conflicting interests. The national chain of command did not provide them with plans connecting ends, ways, and means. Instead, one contingent commander received tasks from NATO’s operational headquarters; the other connected ends, ways, and means at the tactical level. Hence, the two military operations were conducted with a “rigid separation” between civilian and military leaders, which the normal theory recommends, and which Cohen identifies as the major normative obstacle to effective strategy making. The government did not reach out to discuss strategy with subordinated contingent commanders. Nor did these military leaders at the tactical level directly contact their political masters for clarification when needed. Rather, they were loyal to the normal theory’s rationale for the chain of command, having only operative contact within the operational level at the cost of strategic guidance. Sarkesian and Connor (: ) argue that the normal theory’s notion of two autonomous spheres has created a “wall” between two institutions whose cooperation is central for national security. The normative guidance has been used “as a justification for a membrane between the political and military” (Brooks : ), which has created a “black hole” in strategy-making processes (Gray : ). “Huntington’s military officer spoke only of managing violence; his statesman spoke only of political objectives,” Nielsen and Liebert laconically state; they assert that “the work of strategy . . . was left without a voice” (: ). This holds true in one of the Norwegian cases as well. In the other, strategy had a voice, but a military one and only at the tactical level. The government’s behavior gives reason to believe that its primary interest was that the military contingents were deployed, not what they did.

From Military to Political Chain of Command To recollect, the normal theory paints strategy in military terms and as a transactional process between politicians and military, while Cohen recommends a political-military strategy made in a more collaborative manner. Still, both assume strategy is made and executed in an exclusively national chain of command with three levels. Moreover, Cohen seems to accept— and his case studies give evidence to—the normal theory’s assumption that

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“the function of a military force is successful armed combat” (Huntington : ). However, small powers’ military forces will cease to be instruments of national security policy if they adopt these two assumptions. With military budget close to  percent of that of the United States, Norway does not have its proper military means to yield national security through armed combat (IISS ). This has implications for the ends-ways-means components of strategy. Norway relies on support from NATO and in particular from the US, as clearly reflected in the two cases’ political ends. However, the same cases’ limited strategic effectiveness also illustrate that the ways military means can achieve these ends are unclear. Rather than adopting US-biased civil-military norms, small powers must acquire a better understanding of their particular challenges with regard to these assumptions. Moreover, the insights gained may prove useful for wider endeavors to rethink small powers’ civil-military relations and military professionalism in that context. One place to start is Jonathan Vance’s () notion of contribution warfare. This idea draws on a long-held Canadian approach of using military forces without a specific national self-interest other than being seen as a useful ally by a major power whose protection one seeks (Vance : ). In the contemporary context, Canada’s principal strategic objective concerns the political advantages of being seen to support US-led military operations. “The bottom line is that Canadian actions at the tactical level are routinely tallied as assets in-theatre, as opposed to [military] outcomes achieved” (Vance : ). In Norway’s Joint Operational Doctrines, contribution warfare is first mentioned in  and defined as “participation in an operation where state security is not at risk, but where contributing solidary in an alliance is an end in its own right” (Armed Forces ). Vance’s () perspective not only captures Norway’s cardinal security goal but can also explain why the Norwegian government’s primary interest was that military contingents were deployed, not how they operated. His view casts the deployments as talking points in a political strategy to be seen as a good ally—that is to say, “facts on the ground” that diplomats and politicians can refer to in their dialogues with counterparts. The Norwegian prime minister’s justification for the deployment to Latvia exemplifies this: “NATO agreed on a list of measures to reinforce NATO’s capability to manage the developments. The measures correspond with long-term Norwegian policy. Norway has contributed and will continue to contribute to the implementation of these measures” (Office of the Prime Minister b). Vance () directs attention to the operational level in the chain of command. In a conventional conception, this has three levels (United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence ). The operational level encompasses

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the processes and command-and-control structures between the strategic and tactical levels “to ensure that tactical actions are orchestrated in such a way that strategic objectives are met in the most effective way possible” (Vance : ). In contribution warfare, small powers primarily provide troops at the tactical level that solve tasks defined by an operational level that is generally controlled by a major power. In other words, small powers that participate in contribution warfare with a conventional understanding of the chain of command will experience a missing link between their national strategic objectives and their tactical activities. They risk, in Vance’s () formulation, doing “tactics without strategy”; that is to say, they are disconnected from their own national strategy. The political consequences of doing “tactics without strategy” is exemplified with NAW’s precision bombing of targets the Norwegian government had not been involved in identifying and did not want to destroy (Libya Commission : ). As argued, such tactical activities supported the political goal to be seen as a good ally but eroded the goal of avoiding regime change by force. The reason this example qualifies as “tactics without strategy” is not that one objective was achieved at the expense of another, but that the politicians did not take part in the discussions about how the two goals should be balanced. Paraphrasing Vance (), the government may well experience this as conducting “policy without tactics,” since its policy and military activities were uncoordinated. NAW also demonstrates some tactical military implications of doing “tactics without strategy.” The red card holder explains: “We had relatively few guidance on how we should understand the [UN] resolution. We were aware that the topic had been discussed politically, but this was not necessarily translated into guidance at our level, so we had to make sense of it ourselves” (Nordskog : ). With scarce written instructions, his understanding of Norway’s policy was for all practical purposes formed through oral discussions with NJHQ’s deputy commander for the first two months of the bombing campaign. Norway’s chain of command instructed NAW to support NATO’s operational headquarters in Naples, from which it received its target lists. That list went via the Norwegian red card holder who removed targets assessed to deviate from Norwegian policy and guidance (Libya Commission : ). Clearly, such command-and-control processes involves a risk that tactical leaders will, for any number of reasons, act in ways that deviate from the government’s policy. To mitigate that risk, Vance advises small powers to take “effective strategic command of tactical forces” (: ). Since their military contingents are part of coalition operations led by others, there must be a direct link in the national chain of command between the tactical and strategic levels.

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Another, no less important, feature of contribution warfare is to acknowledge the implications of deploying military forces for political ends— which in the Norwegian cases included “to be seen by the US as a good ally” and “to protect civilians.” How can military forces achieve that? The normal theory’s assumptions about the function of military force and its guidance for military effectiveness are all directed to achieve military objectives. Political ends are, through the normal theory’s prism, a function of military objectives. However, what kind of military objectives should Norway aim for to achieve its political ends? Will any achievable military objective suffice to deliver these political ends? The bewilderment involved in answering these questions illustrates the shortcomings of the normal theory’s guidance. Indeed, it directs attention to the kind of competence military professionals need in order to solve tasks in contemporary military operations.

From Apolitical to Politically Competent Military Professionalism Officers that are apolitical, obedient, and experts in the management of violence aimed at achieving success in armed combat are the normal theory’s ideal, as explained at the outset. This ideal can be found in the ways that Norwegian officers reasoned and behaved in NAW. DETCOM maintains NAW was “an unconditional success” (Sandnes : ). As evidence to sustain his claim, he highlights that NAW’s equipment and personnel were deployed to Greece within four days, that Norwegian pilots dropped many more bombs than in any previous operation since World War II, and that they did so in highly populated areas without causing unintended collateral damage (, ). He concludes that “the single most important fact for the success was the high level of skills and competence in the fields of logistics and operational support and among pilots” (). Hence, in the spirit of Huntington’s guidance that “a military body can only be evaluated in terms of independent military standards” (: ), DETCOM’s success criteria correspond with Huntington’s definition that “the direction, operation, and control of a human organization whose primary function is the application of violence is the peculiar skill of the officer” (Huntington : ). The Norwegian red card holder largely operated with a similar understanding, although demonstrating awareness of political concerns. Before forwarding NATO’s operational headquarters’ target list to NAW, he screened them against a self-made checklist with eight criteria. Mostly these concerned legal and operational matters, but two criteria reflected

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the Norwegian government’s political goals to protect civilians and not to target Libya’s leadership (Libya Commission : ). It seems he treated these political goals in a relatively technical manner—both because of his checklist approach and because he had not used the red card six weeks into the campaign (Johansen ). As NATO’s target list began to include installations in Libya’s capital, he did ask NJHQ, “Are we prepared for the increased risk and increased consequences of mistakes?” (Nordskog : ). Still, when he received no instructions to the contrary, NAW began bombing such targets, thus contributing to the controversial regime change. In a similar apolitical vein, executive Norwegian officer General Sverre Diesen (), Norway’s chief of defense from  until , argues there is no need for military professionals to think strategically in operations like NAW, since a Norwegian contribution is unlikely to have any significant impact on the war’s outcome. He concludes that “the traditional ends-means logic in military strategy no longer applies. The primary justification for the military contribution concerns security policy. Such a justification can be equally good, but it is not suitable for classical military strategic reasoning” (Diesen : ). This apolitical officer ideal is a principal line of attack on the normal theory. Along the lines of Morris Janowitz, Samuel Sarkesian (: ) advocates a political dimension to military professionalism that includes political competence and awareness. Schadlow and Lacquement suggest that Huntington’s normative “prescription is for a military that focuses on battles, not wars” (Schadlow and Lacquement : ). And Wesbrook follows this with: “If there is a need for the soldier to understand war, then there is a need for him to understand politics. Without the latter, the former is meaningless” (Wesbrook as quoted in Binkley : ). The normal theory’s delimitation of professional expertise in the “management of violence” has created a situation that, as Richard Kohn (: ) observes, in the most important area of professional expertise—the connecting of war to policy, of operations to achieving the objectives of the nation—the American military has been found wanting. The excellence of the American military in operations, logistics, tactics, weaponry, and battle has been manifest for a generation or more. Not so with strategy.

Advocating an apolitical officer corps “mean[s] removing them [military professionals] from the debates about policy and strategy that require their input” (Owens : ), and it discourages them from asking questions in highly political armed conflicts to understand problems they are tasked with solving (Hill and Gerras ). US literature calls for such competence

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in the context of senior officers (Allen : ; Brooks : ; Nielsen and Liebert : ; Collins ). Yet many small powers, including Norway, need politically astute officers, since these countries routinely deploy contingent commanders at ranks as low as captain or lieutenant (OF-). But what does it mean to be political in military operations? That should be a key question in the revitalized efforts to develop a new normative framework for military professionalism. Further elaborations may begin by returning to the bewilderment concluding the previous section. The utility of military force to achieve relevant outcomes in politically charged conflicts has been a central question in the “old wars—new wars” debate (Kaldor ; Cooper ; Münkler ). Huntington’s normative framework is premised on an “old” conception of war. Yet the prominent British general Rupert Smith provocatively argues that “such war no longer exists” (: ); rather: Our confrontations and conflicts must be understood as intertwined political and military events, and only in this way can they be resolved. As such, it is no longer practical for the politicians and diplomats to expect the military to solve the problem by force, nor is it practical for the military to plan and execute a purely military campaign, or in many cases take tactical action, without placing it within the political context, with both politicians and the military adjusting context and plan accordingly throughout the operation as the situation evolves. (: )

In what Michael Howard () calls a “coda to Clausewitz’s On War,” the British officer Emile Simpson argues that Western military forces fail to be instruments of policy because the military profession shoehorns their military operations into traditional understandings of war. Congruent with Huntington’s dictum that “the function of a military force is successful armed combat” (: ), a traditional understanding of war appreciates “the use of armed force within a military domain that seeks to establish military conditions for a political solution” (Simpson : ). To coherently connect the ends-ways-means components of strategy, Simpson argues that military forces should be used in ways “that directly seek[s] political, as opposed to specifically military, outcomes” (). His outlook applies to all levels in the chain of command. Based on experiences from several deployments to Afghanistan, Simpson argues: “The outcome of an [military] action is usually better gauged by the chat at the bazaar the next day, and its equivalent higher up the political food chain, than body counts. The control of political space is as important, if not more important, than controlling physical space” (). To capture such sociopolitical dynamics, Roennfeldt () proposes a reconceptualization of war that subordinates force to the meaning dimensions of power. This outlook situates military

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operations within broader political campaigns to shape human behavior and to mobilize public support for political ends. An example of a politically attuned military mindset is found in NORTU’s force commander’s reasoning and tactical activities. He explains, “We did not go there [Latvia] to exercise and train. That, we might as well had done in Norway. We went there for other reasons. Exercises and training were merely side effects” (Seppola, personal communication,  February ). With scarce guidance from higher levels of command, he sought out relevant statements from the government to understand the operation’s political goals before he planned ways to achieve them with readily available means. Political astuteness is demonstrated in the force commander’s efforts to improve Norway’s reputation as a good ally by recommending that NORTU should participate in the military parade and by inviting allies to take part in a live-fire exercise. Such bottom-up approaches need not be seen to conflict with Vance’s () top-down proposals to pursue strategic effectiveness. Huntington and his critics agree that it will be antithetical for a liberal democracy to cultivate a concept of military professionalism that facilitates officers seeking political power, lobbying in favor of a political party, and publicly advocating the armed forces’ institutional interests. What critics take issue with is that Huntington’s concept proscribes necessary political competence to assist the government’s efforts to achieve the ends of national policy. Extending the notion of military professional competence to include such political features does not reduce the necessity for Huntingtonian “management of violence” expertise, but it recognizes it is insufficient to make military forces an instrument of politics. Sarkesian situates this discussion in the broader debate on civilmilitary relations: “to presume that the military perspective should not include the bringing to bear of a military intellectual focus that appreciates and understands the consequences of military decisions upon the political and social life of the system, is to deny the very criteria of ‘profession’” (: ). His view finds support in the sociology of professions. A defining feature of professions, according to Talcott Parsons (: ), is their “fiduciary responsibility” to serve society in politically and ethically contested domains like security and health. Society has granted professions discretion to manage its respective domains in the best interests of society. Professional choices are not unlimited, however. “Discretion, like the hole in a doughnut, does not exist except as an area left open by a surrounding belt of restrictions” (Dworkin : ). Appreciating the military in an area defined by and rooted in the surrounding society, is very different from the normal theory’s image of two autonomous spheres. In democratic states, only society can evaluate the quality of military forces. Huntington’s

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(: ) idea that such assessment is rightly done along “independent military standards” misunderstands the profession’s societal rationale and ignores that it is for society to define its military security imperative. The doughnut metaphor informs the depth of Brooks’s (: ) assertion that professional autonomy is a privilege, not a right. Politically competent officers are necessary to preserve national security and to maintain the trust on which their existence is based.

Conclusion Renewed scholarly efforts to move beyond Huntington’s seminal normative framework for civil-military relations is highly relevant for a small power like Norway. Without claims of generally valid empirical evidence, the two cases do suggest that Huntington’s framing of civil-military relations has a strong impact in Norway and has created normative barriers that reduce the political utility of Norwegian military forces deployed in international operations. NAW achieved few of the political goals it was deployed to achieve. And while NORTU’s activities aimed directly to achieve political ends, the plans were developed at the tactical level without the active involvement of political leaders. The two military contingents also serve as critical cases to reflect on the potentials and limitations for small powers of contemporary largely US-biased literature on the subject. Scholars are generally positive to move beyond the normal theory’s apolitical ideal for military professionalism; however, they are unclear about the kinds of political responsibilities and roles that military professionals can have without putting liberal democratic values in jeopardy. The cases do not indicate that Norwegian officers challenged civilian authority; on the contrary, they repeatedly asked for guidance from higher levels in their national chain of command. Yet political control of both operations was absent in anything but the broadest sense of the term—not because it was restrained by military professionals, as the contemporary literature is concerned, but because politicians disengaged from the strategy processes to the extent that contingent commanders did not clearly understand the political purposes and concerns related to their deployment. The normal theory is widely criticized for leading to such strategic ineffectiveness by prescribing two autonomous spheres that segregate civilians from military professionals and delegate responsibilities and labor between them. Norway has adopted this norm with similar strategic implications, but for different reasons. The literature argues that the normal theory has created a transactional strategic dialogue between the two spheres;

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however, in the two cases mentioned in this chapter, that process was sequential. The Norwegian approach to strategy seems to be that once politicians have said why, when, and what shall be deployed, officers find out how to carry out military operations with few opportunities to talk with their political masters about how these ends, ways, and means should be bridged and when necessary redefined. Huntington’s much-criticized normative guidance that the officer corps must be apolitical is reflected in the way that NAW’s commander approached and evaluated his mission. On the other hand, NORTU’s commander applied a politically oriented strategic mindset that Huntington’s critics call for, promising to achieve political objectives without crossing the line into political activism and lobbyism that both Huntington and his critics warn against. Arguably, NAW’s apolitical stance had a greater impact on Norwegian domestic politics since it allegedly created an internal crisis within the three-party government. Before summing up her recommendations for a new normative framework for civil-military relations in the United States, Brooks (: ) asks what should be done. Supporting this broad effort, I have also argued that Norway should find answers suited to its proper challenges and requirements. In broader terms, the findings give grounds for recommending that small powers first and foremost refrain from uncritically conducting their civil-military relations along norms developed for use by a superpower. The contemporary debate focuses on issues and requirements in the United States with an armed force that by its sheer volume and “management of violence” skills is capable of militarily defeating any adversary’s armed forces. Small powers cannot achieve such military outcomes without the support of the United States and must therefore design their civil-military relations norms to facilitate a political-military strategic dialogue that aims primarily at securing such support. Second, small powers’ civil-military relations must be ordered on the assumption that their military forces at all levels of command primarily seek political outcomes. Clearly, major powers also use their armed forces to achieve political outcomes, but they can choose to do so by militarily enforcing an opponent to accept such outcomes. Small powers do not have the means to sustain that option. They must develop strategies that identify ways in which their military forces can create effects on the ground that directly support the government’s policy. This does not exclude wining military engagements at a subtactical level, but it focuses on their political effects. This leads to a third recommendation: compared to the United States, it is even more important that small powers’ military professionals are politically competent also at junior level. Taking due note of mainstream literature’s efforts to avoid military behavior that is detrimental to the values of liberal democracies, small powers’ political rationale for contributing to military operations requires that

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their officers at all levels of command have relevant competence to participate in a strategy dialogue with civilian counterparts. To this end, small powers’ civil-military relations norms must spur military professionals to be politically competent. And finally, a new normative framework for small powers’ civil-military relations must inspire the civilian side to further engage in running collaborative strategy dialogues with key military leaders about how their military forces are used in the best interests of society, including but not limited to its military security. Carsten Roennfeldt has been an associate professor in International Relations at the Norwegian Military Academy since . Previously he worked at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Notes . “Strategy” is a central term in this article and used in different combinations that needs clarification. The term is broadly understood as defined by Colin Gray: “The use made of force and the threat of force for ends of policy as decided by politics. It is the bridge that connects politics and policy with military power” (: ). See also Strachan () and Miller et al. (). Unless otherwise specified, the term “strategic” is used along the lines of Gray, rather than as reference to a level in a chain of command or the like. The term “strategic effectiveness” describes a quality of having achieved ends of policy by means of force. More practically, “making strategy” refers to the cognitive processes of coherently connecting and balancing the ends (objectives), ways (courses of action), and means (resources). This endsways-means approach was conceived by Arthur F. Lykke Jr. (Echevarria : –) and constitutes the basic logic in NATO’s operational art (United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence : para. .–.). The term “strategy dialogue” refers to the communication between key actors involved in making strategy. . I use the term “small power,” rather than “small state,” to convey “small” refers to military strength rather than geographical size. . While civil-military relations theory often uses the term “civilian” to encompass broader societal aspect of the subject matter, the present argument applies the term “politician” to convey that it is civilian leaders that are central in this treatment of strategy. . Other professional military scholars concur, see Stavridis et al. () and Allen (: ). . Brooks (: ) criticizes the normal theory for fostering a strategy-making dialogue that is transactional, as opposed to collaborative, in the sense that military leaders take an advisory role providing military options to achieve ends defined by political leaders. This is strategic ineffective because military leaders’ responses to political leaders’ questions tend to be least-common denominator options “with the mind-set of ‘tell us what you want to do and what resources you are willing to

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. .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

. . . .



commit,’ . . . Rather than question civilians about whether their strategic or political goal is achievable, the military works with what it is given, to an uncertain end” (Brooks : ). Feaver () discusses Huntington’s key concern as the civil-military problematic. To be correct, from  March to  March , NAW contributed to the US-led air campaign Operation Odyssey Down and then to OUP from  April to  August  (Libya Commission : ). The committee was led by a former minister of foreign affairs and involved interviews with more than a hundred key political and military decision-makers, as well as other relevant actors (Libya Commission : , ). Royal decree (: ). The prime minister portrayed it as the first manifestation of Responsibility to Protect (RP), a principle Norway had long promoted, according to which the UN Security Council should have a duty to protect civilians at risk (Office of the Prime Minister ). Libya Commission (: ). This is a premise of Norwegian security policy and stressed by changing governments as the primary goal for Norwegian participation in military operations (Libya Commission : –). This is a long-standing objective of Norwegian security policy (Parliament a, b; Libya Commission : –). That goal was explicitly mentioned by the three parties in their overall policy agreement to form a coalition government (Labor Party, Socialist Left Party, and Centre Party ). French and British efforts to remove Gaddafi’s regime by force, the Norwegian government argued, would make the situation worse and be contrary to the mandate from the UN Security Council (Parliament b; Parliament c; Libya Commission : , ). Sandnes (: ). In comparison, the Norwegian Air Force dropped no bombs during the Kosovo campaign in  and seven bombs during the operations in Afghanistan (Henriksen : –). Henriksen (: , ), Libya Commission (: ), and Dragsnes (: –). The Norwegian government hosted secret and allegedly promising negotiations between Libya’s political opposition and Gaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, for a peaceful transfer of power in Libya (Libya Commission : ). This is a cardinal Norwegian Security policy goal; see footnote . The term “contingent commander” encompasses both NAW’s detachment commander and NORTU’s force commander. See Ångström () for this perspective applied on Sweden. See for instance Sarkesian (: ), Ruffa, Dandeker, and Vennesson (: –), Owens (), Binkley (: ), Roennfeldt (), Brooks (: ), Nielsen and Liebert (: ), and Coletta and Crosbie (: ).

References Allen, Charles D. . “Civil-Military Relations in Transitions.” Joint Force Quarterly (): –. Ångström, Jan. . “Contribution Warfare: Sweden’s Lessons from the War in Afghanistan.” Parameters (): –.

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Carsten Roennfeldt

Armed Forces. . Joint Operational Doctrine. Defence Staff. https://fhs.brage.unit .no/fhs-xmlui/bitstream/handle///FFOD percent.pdf?sequen ce=andisAllowed=y. Binkley, John. . “Clausewitz and Subjective Civilian Control.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Brooks, Risa. . “Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States.” International Security (): –. ———. . “Beyond Huntington: US Military Professionalism Today.” Parameters: U.S. Army War College (): –. Clausewitz, Carl von. . On War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Eliot A. . Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. New York: Anchor. Coletta, Damon, and Thomas Crosbie. . “The Virtues of Military Politics.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Collins, Joseph J. . “Preparing Senior Officers and Their Counterparts for Interagency National Security Decisionmaking.” Joint Force Quarterly : –. Cooper, Robert. . The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (rev. ed.). New York: Atlantic Books. Crosbie, Thomas. . What Is “Military Politics”? The Military Politics Center. https:// www.militarypolitics.org/about-. Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. . Norway Supports Latvia’s th Year. Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.  November . https:// www.dvidshub.net/image//norway-supports-latvias-th-year. Diesen, Sverre. . “Hva er militær strategi?—Har vi behov for slik tenkning i Norge?” In Norsk luftmakt over Libya—suksess uten innflytelse, eds. Torgeir E. Sæveraas and Vidar Løw Owesen, –. Trondheim: Akademika forlag. Dragsnes, Jens Gunnar Haugen. . “Trenger vi å forstå effekten av bomber vi slipper? Om operasjonell bruk av luftmakt.” In Norsk luftmakt over Libya—suksess uten innflytelse, eds. Torgeir E. Sæveraas and Vidar Løw Owesen, –. Trondheim: Akademika forlag. Dworkin, Ronald M. . “The Model of Rules.” The University of Chicago Law Review (): –. Echevarria II, Antulio J. . Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engell, Robert. . “Conclusion: Lessons and Consequences of Operation Unified Protector.” In The NATO Intervention in Libya: Lessons Learned from the Campaign, eds. Kjell Engelbrekt, Marcus Mohlin, and Charlotte Wagnsson, –. Abingdon: Routledge. Feaver, Peter D. . “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Gray, Colin S. . Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ———. . War, Peace and International Relations: An Introduction to Strategic History. Abingdon: Routledge. Henriksen, Dag. . “Suksess uten innflytelse? Norges erfaringer fra operasjonene over Libya.” Internasjonal Politikk (): –. ———. . “The Political Rationale and Implications of Norway’s Military Involvement in Libya.” In Political Rationale and International Consequences of the War

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in Libya, eds. Dag Henriksen and Ann Karin Larssen, –. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, Andrew, and Stephen J. Gerras. . “Asking Strategic Questions: A Primer for National Security Professionals.” Joint Force Quarterly : –. Howard, Michael. . “Narratives of War.” The Times Literary Supplementary.  April . http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article.ece. Huntington, Samuel P. . The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Janowitz, Morris. . The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. New York: Simon and Schuster. International Institute for Strategic Studies. . IISS-Military Balance Plus. https:// milbalplus.iiss.org/member/economics.aspx. Johansen, P. A. . “Har aldri sagt nei.” Aftenposten.  May . https://app.retriev er-info.com/services/archive?languageCategory=lang_NO percentClang_SEands earchString=har percentaldri percentsagt percentnei. Kaldor, Mary. . New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kasurak, Peter. . “Huntington in Canada: The Triumph of Subjective Control.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Kohn, Richard H. . “Tarnished Brass: Is the U.S. Military Profession in Decline?” World Affairs (): –. Kuperman, Alan J. . “A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign.” International Security (): –. Labor Party, Socialist Left Party, and Centre Party. . Politisk plattform for flertallsregjeringen. https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/smk/vedlegg// ny_politisk_plattform_-.pdf. Larsen, C. J. . “SV alene om kampfly-nei.” Aftenposten.  May . https://app .retriever-info.com/services/archive?languageCategory=lang_NO percentClang_ SEandsearchString=Libya percentkampfly. Latvijas armija. . Video from Military Exercise in Latvia September . https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO_WEwtkkAk. Libya Commission. . Evaluering av norsk deltakelse i Libya-operasjonene i : Rapport fra Libya-utvalget. Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/departementene/fd/dokumenter/rap porter-og-regelverk/libya-rapporten.pdf. Michaels, Jeffrey H. . “Able But Not Willing: A Critical Assessment of NATO’s Libya intervention.” In The NATO Intervention in Libya: Lessons Learned from the Campaign, eds. Kjell Engelbrekt, Marcus Mohlin, and Charlotte Wagnsson, –. Abingdon: Routledge. Miller, Geoffrey D., Chris Rogers, Francis J. H. Park, William F. Owen, and Jeffrey W. Meiser. . “On Strategy as Ends, Ways, and Means.” The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters (): –. Moe, Ingeborg. . “Disse blir NATOs spydspisser—Aftenposten.” Aftenposten.  November . https://www.aftenposten.no/verden/i/jPgXn/disse-blir-natosspydspisser. Mukherjee, Anit. . “Educating the Professional Military: Civil-Military Relations and Professional Military Education in India.” Armed Forces and Society (): –.

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Münkler, Herfried. . The New Wars. New York: Polity Press. NATO. . Wales Summit Declaration Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Wales.  September . https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_.htm. Nielsen, Suzanne C., and Hugh Liebert. . “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Nordskog, H. J. . “Målvalg (targeting) og kommando og kontroll: Norges innflytelse.” In Norsk luftmakt over Libya—suksess uten innflytelse, eds. Torgeir E. Sæveraas and Vidar Løw Owesen, —. Trondheim: Akademika forlag. Office of the Prime Minister. . Statement on Libya in Paris.  March . https:// www.regjeringen.no/en/historical-archive/Stoltenbergs-nd-Government/Of fice-of-the-Prime-Minister/taler-og-artikler//statement-on-libya-in-paris/ id/. ———.. a. Sender hærstyrke til NATO-øvelse i Latvia [Press release].  September . https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumentarkiv/regjeringen-solberg/aktu elt-regjeringen-solberg/smk/pressemeldinger//Sender-harstyrke-til-NATOovelse-i-Latvia/id/. ———. b. Sterkt samhold og solidaritet preget NATO-toppmøtet [Press release].  September . https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumentarkiv/regjeringensolberg/aktuelt-regjeringen-solberg/smk/nyheter//Sterkt-samhold-og-sol idaritet-preget-NATO-toppmotet/id/. Owens, Mackubin Thomas. . “What Military Officers Need to Know About CivilMilitary Relations.” Naval War College Review (): –. ———. . “Military Officers: Political without Partisanship.” Strategic Studies Quarterly: SSQ (): –. Parliament. a. Hearing: Wednesday . March—Subject nr.  [Stenographic record]. Parliament’s administration.  March . https://www.stortinget.no/no/ Saker-og-publikasjoner/Publikasjoner/Referater/Stortinget/-// muntligsporretime/. ———. b. Hearing: Tuesday . March —Subject nr.  [Stenographic record]. Parliament’s administration.  March . https://www.stortinget.no/no/ Saker-og-publikasjoner/Publikasjoner/Referater/Stortinget/-///. ———. c. Hearing: Monday . May—Subject nr.  [Stenographic record]. Parlitament’s administration.  May . https://www.stortinget.no/no/Sakerog-publ ikasjoner/Publikasjoner/Referater/Stortinget/-///. Parsons, Talcott. . Action Theory and the Human Condition. New York: The Free Press. Rapp, William E. . “Civil-Military Relations: The Role of Military Leaders in Strategy Making.” Parameters (): –. Roennfeldt, Carsten F. . “Productive War: A Re-conceptualisation of War.” Journal of Strategic Studies (): –. ———. . “Wider Officer Competencies: The Importance of Politics and Practical Wisdom.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Royal Decree. . Fullmakt til deltakelse med norske militære bidrag i operasjoner til gjennomføring av FNs sikkerhetsrådsresolusjon  (). Ministry of Defence.

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https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/fd/temadokumenter/libya-del takelse_kgl-res---.pdf. Ruffa, Chiara, Christopher Dandeker, and Pascal Vennesson. . “Soldiers Drawn into Politics? The Influence of Tactics in Civil-Military Relations.” Small Wars and Insurgencies (): –. Sandnes, Hans Ole. . “Detachment Commander—det norske bidraget: En ubetinget suksess?” In Norsk luftmakt over Libya—suksess uten innflytelse, eds. Torgeir E. Sæveraas and Vidar Løw Owesen, –. Trondheim: Akademika forlag. Sarkesian, Samuel C. . “Military Professionalism and Civil-Military Relations in the West.” International Political Science Review (): –. ———. . The US Military Profession into the Twenty-First Century: War, Peace and Politics. New York: Frank Cass. Sarkesian, Samuel C., and Robert Connor. . The US Military Profession into the st Century: War, Peace and Politics. London: Routledge. Schadlow, Nadia and Richard Lacquement. . “Winning Wars, Not Just Battles: Expanding the Military Profession to Incorporate Stability Operations.” In American Civil-Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era, eds. Suzanne C. Nielsen and Don M. Snider, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Simpson, Emilie. . War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Rupert. . The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books. Stavridis, James G., Ervin J. Rokke, and Terry C. Pierce. . “Crafting and Managing Effects.” JFQ: Joint Force Quarterly : –. Strachan, Hew. . “Strategy in Theory; Strategy in Practice.” Journal of Strategic Studies (): –. TV. . “Norske toppsoldater skal berolige krigsredde latviere.” TV .  October . https://www.tv.no/a//. United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence. . Allied Joint Publication-: Allied Joint Doctrine for the Planning of Operations. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file//AJP__with_UK_elem_final_web.pdf. United Nations Security Council. . Resolution  (). https://documentsdds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N///PDF/N.pdf?OpenElement. Vance, C. Jonathan. . “Tactics Without Strategy, or Why the Canadian Forces Do Not Campaign.” The Operational Art: Canadian Perspectives Context and Concepts, –. Winnipeg: National Defence. Verdens Gang. . “Intet nytt fra Gadaffi.” Verdens Gang, –.  May . ———. . “Her sender norske soldater en klar beskjed til Putin.” Verdens Gang.  November . https://www.vg.no/i/vMxl.

conclusion

Military Politics as Research Program Thomas Crosbie

+ In a hundred years from now, the military profession may be a distant memory, a vestigial form of sociality surpassed by new ways to organize collective violence. Militaries may be defunct, replaced by entirely other configurations—whether private, public, or some mixture of both. Although inequalities and social conflict will surely persist, violence may manifest in entirely unrecognizable forms, so unprecedented as to mark a definitive break with the martial traditions that gave rise to professional militaries. At that time, military politics will be happily ceded to the historians. We are not there yet. Today, we desperately need a contemporary military politics research field, one focused squarely on the agentic character of militaries within and across political systems. In the present moment, democratic states compete with authoritarian states across a spectrum of conflict that spans countless forms of competition, some violent, some less so, from cyber sabotage to conventional war to nuclear brinkmanship. States overwhelmingly rely upon those in uniform (“professional” officers, to greater or lesser degree) to guide or often to lead the projection of multiple forms of state power. Why do states still bet on militaries? Path dependency explains much of the current configuration. Military leaders sit atop services that monopolize much of the coercive power of their state. These services are generally much better resourced than sister agencies within their country. They have another benefit: they draw upon constantly updated professional methodologies (military doctrine) that are shared across national borders. These “ways of war” have been undergoing mission creep for decades and now overlap with work done by many other governmental agencies. Typical military leaders can now be more or less certain that their service includes a wide range of individuals who are expert in managing not only violence but also many cognate forms of political influence, including whole agencies and career lines dedicated to civil-military coordination, media man-

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

agement, and procurement, for example. In other words, the militaries of small states and great powers alike learn from one another how to appropriately involve the military in diplomatic, informational, and economic affairs quite broadly, and indeed must do so simply to recognized as capable warfighters. What is strange is not that militaries are embedded in political systems or that military leaders can, should, and do work toward affecting those systems, but rather that we have somehow convinced ourselves to look the other way for so long. For sixty years, the majority of scholars and a very large number of service members have shared a basic understanding that militaries should not become entangled in (or polluted by) domestic politics. Unfortunately, as critics have pointed out for decades, militaries, simply by virtue of being state structures, actively co-construct the political environments in which they operate. This basic fact has long been dismissed by Huntingtonians as an irrelevance. For them, good, professional officers simply ignore politics and get on with their job of managing violence. Others accept this premise but dismiss military politics as a merely another form of bureaucratic politics, moreover one that inevitably tarnishes those directly involved. These viewpoints are not conceptually compelling, as argued in many places in this volume, and they do us all a great disservice when they are imparted upon practitioners, who must nevertheless learn to navigate military-political dilemmas one way or another. The long-standing need to pivot from civil-military relations to military politics is more pressing now than ever. Transformations in the character of war, particularly the way in which conflicts are more and more characterized by a focus on political vulnerabilities, suggest that military-political struggles are more than bureaucratic in nature. Thus, being effective at military politics should not be taken to mean being good at maximizing your own service’s budget or at gobbling up budgetary slack. Rather, being effective at military politics is partly what it means to be effective as a military professional, although we currently lack a detailed understanding of exactly where the one spills over into the other. Indeed, the major recent events on the world stage mentioned in the introduction—including the  January  armed insurrection in America, the fall of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Ukraine—suggest three different ways in which military-political competencies are being stressed, and where our scholarly insights remain insufficient to guide practitioners. To prepare for this uncertain future, officers would do well to consider how they would act under a variety of different pressures. These pressures can be thought of in terms of three categories: as dilemmas of principal breach (e.g., how to remain resilient in the face of antidemocratic attacks from one’s own principal), principal neglect (e.g., how to avoid wars that cannot

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be won but that the principal wants to fight), or principal guidance (e.g., how to place military expertise in balance with other forms of expertise). This way of categorizing military-political dilemmas may prove helpful in rethinking the sort of “game” that defines a given situation’s civil-military dynamics. Unfortunately, it does not provide very much insight into what should be done in response to any particular dilemma. To that end, a very basic framework was introduced in chapter , where I noted that officers can be expected to “do” military politics along two axes: an axis of vertical alignment with stakeholders and subordinates; and an axis of horizontal alignment with other arms, services, domestic agencies, and international partners. Of course, not everything done to align vertically or horizontally needs to be labeled as a form of military politics. The point is simply that military politics must frequently be done across both axes, and it can be done well or poorly. In chapter , I also indicated a number of ways scholars have already modeled effective military politics in these two axes. What remains for this concluding chapter is to pull together the major platforms that can be used to establish a foundation for future military politics research.

Platform  Post-Normative The remarkable influence of Huntington’s () first intervention in the field of civil-military relations is a testament to the theory’s innate appeal, which derives in large part from his introduction of the profession as an ideal type. This ideal type is deeply appealing to many in and out of uniform, placing officers on equal standing as the higher-status occupations of law and medicine, and even claiming that officers morally surpass these others through Huntington’s insistence that they safeguard the society as a whole rather than merely individuals within the society. Peter D. Feaver attributed The Soldier and the State’s success to its central argument’s formal qualities: “a few, tightly-reasoned, deductive propositions” (: ). Whatever the cause, for good or ill, Huntington’s theory of the military profession ranks among the most successful applications of Weber’s ideal type technique. Recall that Huntington can be credited with fusing the theory of profession around three elements (expertise, responsibility, and corporateness). The ideal type of profession is one in which an occupational group has monopolized expertise, internalized its sense of responsibility to its society, and coordinated corporateness to such a degree that there is no confusion about who belongs and who does not. While Huntington himself viewed

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

the American military as not particularly close to the ideal, the influence of this theory can be felt in all those efforts undertaken by those in uniform to get closer to it. And that is hardly a misreading of his intent: indeed, the final chapter of Huntington’s book is explicitly dedicated to exhorting officers to be “more” professional (closer to the ideal), and to encouraging civilians to cede more authority to these professionals. We have already considered a number of problems with the theory, so here it will suffice to say that a primary goal of a new military politics field should be to displace both that specific theory and the very goal of the theory, namely to establish a very narrow conception of what properly constitutes professionalism. Drawing on the more recent sociology of professions (Abbott ; Crosbie and Kleykamp ) and of expertise (Collins and Evans ; Eyal ; Libel ), a less normative, more descriptive approach can be employed to capture any given military occupational group’s degree of expertise monopoly, internalized responsibility, and coordinated corporateness. More in each category is by no means always the goal. After all, being relatively high in each category tells us no more than that: there is no magic in the word “profession”; it merely means ranking relatively high in expertise monopoly, internalized responsibility, and coordinated corporateness. The hard questions still need to be asked and, one hopes, answered. The goal, then, is to dispense with the normative resonance of our concepts in order to capture the diversity of actual applications of these concepts, a “post-normative” theory of professions that accepts a variety of balancing points, defined contextually. Let us consider a few ways this post-normative approach might play out. From an expertise perspective, interesting questions arise concerning how the officers in a particular state view the application of their expert knowledge, relative to the knowledge of collaborating agencies. For example, do officers in the US Marine Corps view their role as promoters of military solutions over diplomatic solutions? Or do they view their role as moderating their military guidance in order to support diplomatic efforts? In all likelihood, the answers vary, but perhaps their variance is strongly correlated with career pathways or other observable factors. From a responsibility perspective, questions might be framed in terms of how a group of officers may differ in their interpretation of how active or passive they should be with respect to orders they disagree with, while nevertheless agreeing that they must all remain responsible and subordinate to civilian authority. For example, how do officers in a multinational operation differ in the degree to which they set the mission’s objectives above their nation’s broader security interests? Perhaps officers from small states are more willing to put the interests of the mission ahead of their national policymakers’ stated preferences, or perhaps it is the other way around. From a corporate

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Thomas Crosbie

perspective, no less important questions have recently arisen concerning the shifting boundaries of the military in many, if not all, democratic states. For example, how can states use lateral entry to attract civilians with valuable skills (in hacking or forensic accounting, to suggest two very different possibilities) while also ensuring that these latecomers internalize the same sense of responsibility as their long-serving counterparts? Military politics can address such questions without imposing a normative vision that there is only one pure form of professional conduct to which all officers should constantly strive. In doing so, it can also shed its Western bias, looking contextually at how different national militaries balance expertise, responsibility, and corporateness. An ambitious but not impossible goal for such a post-normative, dewesternized approach would be the development of guidelines for officers’ political conduct that are tailored to various national contexts. Such guidelines would reflect the different regulatory regimes, civil-military traditions, and geostrategic cross-pressures acting upon security practitioners. These guidelines would also provide insights into what such practitioners believe is the right way for Danish, or Colombian, or Australian (or any other country’s) officers to provide various forms of military advice. Dewesternizing in this way should not come at the expense of an accurate understanding of the geostrategic context. Denmark, for example, is a small power with much less impact on global security than France, the United Kingdom, or indeed the United States. Nevertheless, it sometimes transpires that global security is very much affected by one country’s unique military politics, as was seen when counterpiracy occupied a major focus in global security debates. Counterpiracy techniques were deeply influenced by the unique fusion of interests between private and public sectors in small European states (Bueger ; Henningsen ), giving rise to military innovations that were extremely consequential but fell far outside Huntingtonian norms. Viewing states on their own terms is critical for an accurate understanding of military politics.

Platform  Reflexive A reflexive military politics research program is one sensitive to its potential to impact the very relationships it seeks to analyze. Unlike most populations studied by social science, military officers are routinely exposed to the scholarly research about them. This occurs most often as a consequence of the standard requirement that officers be educated at several stages of their careers in Professional Military Education (PME) programs. These programs

Military Politics as Research Program



often feature civil-military relations components, and related scholarship often appears in other elements of their education. Many officers also write theses or dissertations on military-related topics. Additionally, those officers who write military doctrine increasingly draw upon academic studies about militaries to help contextualize their claims, often in ways that very closely resemble civilian scholarship. Finally, professional journals are produced and widely distributed by many armed services, allowing academic knowledge and ideas to be widely debated within the profession. A military politics research agenda accepts the high degree of likelihood that observing military-political processes can trigger changes within those processes, changes that may be unexpected and will likely be highly fraught if significantly misaligned with traditional Huntingtonian views of the profession. The burden ultimately falls on scholars to be reflexive toward the “masks” we help fashion for officers in their navigation of political dilemmas. These masks are profoundly meaningful for many service members, and highly consequential for our democracies. Reflexivity is also needed in our collective recognition of where, when, and how military politics research is conducted. Of the contributors to this volume, half are employed at PME institutions, and half at traditional civilian academic institutions. Scholars at PME institutions may benefit from closer engagement with military realities and easier access to data, but they may suffer from chilling effects associated with the risks of falling afoul of their national military’s command structure. Scholars at civilian institutions are likely to have greater difficulties gaining access to data, and are also more likely to struggle to place research on this topic in the sorts of journals that most benefit their careers (due to long-standing neglect of military topics in mainstream social science disciplines). A reflexive approach to military politics would ideally strive to mitigate several costs associated with this type of research. Basic strategies could include: (a) the creation of “third spaces” outside national chains of command where sensitive topics can be debated; (b) the sharing of data and access to practitioner communities, ideally to establish multiple lines of comparative research; and (c) the development of various publication forums—some of which are optimized to face military audiences, and others optimized to face mainstream academic audiences.

Platform  Military Centered The military-centered research platform consists of three elements: (a) the recognition of the military as a critical intervening variable; (b) a fo-

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Thomas Crosbie

cus on military actors, institutions, and events, rather than other elements of the broader security or defense ecosystems; and (c) a privileging of the agency of military actors in shaping their environments. These elements are, of course, tightly linked, and many military politics projects will easily encompass all three. However, each of these can also be viewed as an independent field of study, of equal significance to our understanding of military politics as such. Although the contributions to the present volume are all qualitative in orientation, quantitative research is also needed on this topic and may be particularly valuable in charting military-political effects that become evidence when the military is treated as an intervening variable in domestic or international political processes. Likewise, while the second element indicates that military politics research should focus on military actors, institutions, and events, it should not exclude other relevant factors. The rise of privatized security (Swed and Crosbie ) and paramilitary configurations (West and Crosbie ), for example, is critically important for understanding how military professionals are displaced on the battlefield. Nevertheless, despite growing competition and blurring boundaries within the defense ecosystem, militaries remain central actors and cannot be ignored. The third element tightens the focus on how military actors affect their political environments. Attempts to model such agentic qualities were described in chapter  in greater length, but here it suffices to observe that a military politics research agenda worthy of that name will not overlook the active role played by officers (particularly) and other military populations (enlisted, noncommissioned, and warrant officers; military families; and veterans) in the “doing” of military politics. None of this is to say that every analysis would necessarily begin and end with people in uniform, but rather that such analyses should always remain sensitive to the military as a critical element of national and international politics—one that distorts and reforms the processes that unfold around it. Thus we arrive at our goal, clearly sighted for perhaps the first time. We seek a dewesternized, post-normative, reflexive, military-centered, practical science that accounts for the ways that politics affect militaries, and militaries affect politics. We believe that a better accounting for these issues will be beneficial for all involved. So, let us begin.

Thomas Crosbie is an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. His research focuses on the intersection of military politics and military operations. In addition to his articles and book chapters on military politics topics, he has edited volumes on the

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privatization of security (with Ori Swed), paramilitary culture (with Brad West), and maritime operations (with Edward R. Lucas, Samuel RiveraPaez, and Felix Falck Jensen). He is the series editor of Berghahn Books’s Military Politics series.

Notes . Few have ever been observed abstaining entirely. Even the legendarily nonpartisan George C. Marshall was actively engaged in media management and political influence throughout his tenure as chief of staff of the US Army, as I have argued elsewhere (Crosbie ).

References Abbott, Andrew. . “Linked Ecologies: States and Universities as Environments for Professions.” Sociological Theory : –. Bueger, Christian. . “Learning from Piracy: Future Challenges of Maritime Security Governance.” Global Affairs (): –. Collins, Harry and Robert Evans. . Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crosbie, Thomas. . “The Golden Age, Revisited: George C. Marshall’s Press Work, –.” War in History (): –. Crosbie, Thomas and Meredith Kleykamp. . “Fault Lines of the American Military Profession.” Armed Forces & Society, (): –. Eyal, Gil. . “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic." American Journal of Sociology, : –. Feaver, Peter D. . “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control.” Armed Forces and Society (): –. Henningsen, Troels B. . “Frogmen and Pirates: The Utility of Special Operations Forces for Small States Against For-Profit, Illicit Networks.” Defence Studies (): –. Libel, Tamir. . “From the Sociology of the (Military) Profession to the Sociology of the (Security) Expertise: The Case of European National Defence Universities.” Defence Studies, (): –. Swed, Ori and Thomas Crosbie. . The Sociology of Privatized Security. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. West, Brad and Thomas Crosbie. . Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture: Post-Heroic Reimaginings of the Warrior. New York: Springer.

Index

 January  US Capitol violence, –, –, , ,  Adams, Thomas K.,  Adkins, Brent, ,  Afghanistan War, –, , , –, –, – Allen, Charles D., ,  alliances. See multinational operations American Political Science Association,  Aron, Raymond,  Ashkenazi, Gabi,  Aspin, Les, – assemblage theory, , , – Auerswald, David, n Australia,  Azaria, Elor,  Barak, Ehud, , , ,  Barany, Zoltan,  Barkawi, Tarak,  Barrett, Archie, n Baudrillard, Jean,  Ben-Ami, Shlomo,  Binkley, John,  Black Lives Matter protests of , – Blank, Stephen J.,  Blunt, James,  Bosnia, –, – Bousquet, Antoine,  Brighton, Shane,  Britain, , – Brooks, Risa, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Brooks, Rosa,  Bruun-Hanssen, Haakon,  budget, US military. See also US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen: Base

Force debate, , –; Budget Control Act of , –; Budget Enforcement Act, ; George H. W. Bush administration, ; National Guard and, , –; Obama administration and sequestration, , –, –; resources, foundational nature of, , –; terrorist attacks of /, –; transformation of military forces, , – Bush, George H. W.,  Bush, George W., , , –, – Bush (George H. W.) administration, –,  Bush (George W.) administration, , – Canada, , –, ,  Carr-Saunders, Alexander,  Cartwright, James,  Chandra, Siddharth,  Cheney, Dick, – Churchill, Winston, ,  civilians. See also civil-military relations; militaries; multinational operations: acting in interests of society, , ; asymmetrical advantage of, –; authority over military, –, , –, , , , ; civilian supremacists, –, , –; competing demands from, ; incentives in policy engagement with military, –; legitimation via military, –, ; military’s dependence on civilians, –, ; professional supremacism, ; right to be wrong, , – civil-military relations. See also budget, US military; civilians; contrarianism, military; dissent, military; Feaver,

Index Peter D.; Huntington, Samuel P.; Israel; military politics; multinational operations; normal theory; officer corps; US National Guard; war:  January  failures, –; civilian authority accepted, –, , , , , ; civil-military dialogue, –, , , ; civil-military spheres of influence, , , , , –, –; defined, , ; EVLN model of dissent, –, , t; exchange relations, –; federalism in US military, –, ; horizontal alignment, , , ; hybrid political threats, ; interchangeability with military politics, , –; legal accountability, –; legitimation via military, –, ; military expertise and responsibility, , –, ; militarypolitical activity, , t; military restraint, –, ; military’s dependence on civilians, –, ; military structure impacts advice and leadership, –; public attitudes toward military, ; recruiting, , ; resource mobilization, , , – ; Sarkesian’s theory of equilibrium, –; small powers and, – (see also Norway); United States and, –, ; vertical alignment, , , , ; Vietnam War,  Clark, Wesley,  Clausewitz, Carl von. See also war, ontology of: assemblage theory and, ; civilian supremacists and, –; commanding a political endeavor, ; dual ontology of war, , , , –, , ; incompatible with professionalism doctrine, ; misused by Huntington, ; real vs abstract war, –; trinity “paradox,” –, , ; On War,  Clinton, Bill, –,  Clinton administration, – coalitions. See alliances and coalitions; multinational operations



Coates, Breena E.,  Cohen, Eliot A., , –, , , , , , –,  Cohen, Stuart,  Coker, Christopher, – Cold War, – Coletta, Damon, , –,  Colton, Timothy J., – Connor, Robert,  contrarianism, military: defined, , ; expression of, –, –; in Israel Defense Force, –, –, , ; scope –, t; second intifada, – Cormier, Youri,  counterinsurgency operations,  courts: coalition legal interoperability, , –; decision-making processes, ; deterrence vs deference frameworks, –, ; Geneva Conventions’ applicability in Afghanistan, –, –; international criminal tribunals, , –; judicial observer effects, , , –; legal accountability and civil-military relations, – Crosbie, Thomas, –, , –,  Crouch, Harold,  Crozier, Brett, – Currie, Kenneth M.,  Deeks, Ashely, , – defense politics, . See also military politics DeLanda, Manuel, – Deleuze, Giles,  Dempsey, Martin, –,  Desch, Michael, ,  Diesen, Sverre,  Diogenes Laërtius,  dissent, military. See also officer corps; US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen: actions of insistence, –, t, , , ; advice and advocacy, , t, , , , , ; civilian supremacists and, t, –, ; civil-military incident



Index

timeline t; domestic peacetime norms and, –; ethics education, –; EVLN model of dissent, –, , t; immoral orders, , , , , ; James Mattis, ; jus ad bellum, –, t; jus in bello, –, t; jus post bellum, –, t; Lafayette incident, , , –; Latin America, ; Mark Milley, , ; McMasterism, , –; methodology for survey on, –, t; miliary members as moral agents, ; normal theory, ; orders presumed legal, ; permissibility of, , , ; political partisanship, ; as principal breach dilemmas, ; professional supremacists and, –, –, ; resignation, , , , –; retirement, , ; under supreme emergency conditions,  Doughty, Robert A.,  Douglas, Lewis,  Dubik, James, ,  Eden, Lynn,  education, military, – Eiland, Giora,  Eisenhower, Dwight,  Eisenkot, Gadi, –, , ,  Evans, Mark,  Feaver, Peter D. See also Huntington, Samuel P.; normal theory: asymmetrical advantage of civilians, ; bureaucratic officer corps theory, , , , , , ; civilian vs military spheres, ; civil-military dialogue, ; contributions to civilmilitary relations, ; elite military officers, n; McMasterism, ; motivators for military agents, ; professional vs civilian supremacists, –, –; response to Huntington, ; shirking, –, , , , ; vertical alignment

problems, ; Armed Servants, ; Soldiers and Civilians, n Felice, William,  Ferris, Gerald,  Finer, Samuel,  Flaherty, Martin, – Foster, Norman, ,  France,  Franks, Tommy,  Fraser, David, – Gaddafi, Muammar,  Gates, Robert, –,  Golan, Yair,  Golby, Jim, , , , –,  Goldsmith, Jack,  Goodman, Ryan,  Gordon, Andrew,  Gould, Michael,  Green, Collin,  Guattari, Felix,  Hagel, Chuck,  Halutz, Dan,  Hamas,  Hendrix, Justin,  Hezbollah,  Hillier, Rick,  Hirschman, Albert O., ,  Hoffmann, Frank G.,  Honna, Jun,  Hopkins, Harry L., ,  Howard, Michael, , ,  Huntington, Samuel P. See also civilmilitary relations; Feaver, Peter D.; normal theory; professions and professionalism: apolitical character of officer corps, –, , ; civil-military spheres of influence, , , , , –, –; evaluation on military standards, , –; incompatibility with Clausewitz, –, ; on military disobedience, ; military-political agency, ; misuse of Clausewitz, ; on National Guard, –; obedience and freedom of action, ,

Index , ; officer corps as profession, , –, –, ; professionalism in military, –, –, , , , , –; small powers’ military forces and, ; strategy a transactional process, –; unrealistic expectations, ; vertical alignment problems, , ; World War II misinterpreted, , –; Changing Patterns of Military Politics, ; The Soldier and the State, , , , , –, ,  Indonesia,  international law. See courts Ip, John, – Iran,  Iraq War, ,  Israel: civilian authority over military, –; Disengagement Plan, –, ; legitimacy via military, , , –, ; military contrarianism, , –, –, , ; Operation Defensive Shield, ; Oslo Accords, , ; partnership model, , ; second intifada, –,  Israel Defense Forces (IDF): civilian authority over military, –; contrarianism, –, –, , ; criticism of, –, ; extra-institutional control, –; Operation Protective Edge, –; reputation harmed, –, ; trust in, –; Western Wall tunnel crisis,  Ivey, Andrew,  Jackson, Mike,  Janowitz, Morris, , , , ,  Jasowski, Maiah,  Jenkins, David,  Jo, Hyeran,  Jones, David,  Joyner, James, ,  Kahn, Paul,  Kammen, Douglas, 



Karlin, Mara,  Kohn, Richard H., , , n,  Krulak, Charles,  Lacquement, Richard,  Lacroix, Jacelyn,  Latin America, –,  Latvia, –, ,  law. See courts Leahy, Peter,  Levy, Yagil,  Libya, –, , – Liebert, Hugh, ,  Lieuwen, Edwin,  Lindsay, James,  Lipkin-Shahak, Amnon,  MacMillan, Margaret, – Macron, Emmanuel,  Madison, James,  Mansoor, Peter R.,  Marshall, George, –, , –, –, n Masland, John W.,  Mattis, James, , –,  Mauceri, Philip,  McAllister, Jacqueline,  McAtee, David,  McCain, John,  McChrystal, Stanley, – McDonald, Ronald H.,  McMaster, H. R., , – McNamara, Robert, – Mewett, Christopher,  Mietzner, Marcus,  Milburn, Andrew,  militaries. See also budget, US military; civil-military relations; contrarianism, military; dissent, military; multinational operations; officer corps; professions and professionalism; individual states: agentic character, , ; civilianmilitary overlap, , ; constructing political environments, ; effective and subordinate, –, ; military interests, , –; military restraint,



Index

–, ; military’s dependence on civilians, –, ; military voice, –, –, , , ; obedience and conformity, ; politically agentic, –, –; public attitudes toward, ; state reliance on, –; structure impacts advice and leadership, – military politics. See also civilmilitary relations; Feaver, Peter D.; Huntington, Samuel P.; normal theory; individual states: civilian supremacism, t; defined, –, –, ; as discipline, –, –, –, –; horizontal alignment’s challenges and motivations, –; militarycenteredness, , –; officers as reflexive practitioners, ; postnormative professionalism, , –; principal-agent theory, ; principal breach dilemmas, –, , , –; principal guidance dilemmas, , –, –; principal neglect dilemmas, , –, , –; professional supremacism, t; reflexivity in, –, –; vertical alignment of military actions with civilian prerogatives, –; as virtuous mean, – militias, –. See also US National Guard Miller, Christopher C., – Milley, Mark, –, –, , , ,  Mills, C. Wright,  Moelker, Rene,  Mofaz, Shaul, , , ,  Molotov, Vyacheslav, , – Morgenthau, Henry,  Mullen, Mike, –,  multinational operations. See also NATO; Norway; World War II: apolitical officer ideal, ; Bosnia, , , –; chain of command, , –, ; coalition forces in

Afghanistan, , –; coalition legal interoperability, , –; communication and cooperation, –, –; competing civilian demands, , –, ; contribution warfare, –; discretion granted to officers, –, ; interoperability defined, –; judicial observer effects in, , –; managing the home office, , –, ; obstacles to relationshipbuilding, –; Operation Enduring Freedom, ; Operation Torch, –, –; politics inherent in, ; red card holders, –, , –; shared norms, ; tactics without strategy, – Murray, Williamson,  Myers, Richard, ,  Nagl, John, –, –, , –, ,  Napoleon,  NATO. See also multinational operations: AJP- Allied Joint Doctrine, ; in Bosnia, –, –; Comprehensive Operations Planning, ; horizontal alignment of military and nonmilitary interests, ; military politics defined, ; multinational chain of command, –; nature of war, , ; Operation Unified Protector, , –; pre-existing factors for cooperation, –; Silver Arrow exercise in Latvia, –; war doctrine’s purpose,  Netanyahu, Benjamin, ,  Netherlands, , , – Nielsen, Suzanne, ,  normal theory. See also civilmilitary relations; Feaver, Peter D.; Huntington, Samuel P.: civil-military relations and, , , , , , ; dissent, ; general criticism, –, , –; ill-suited to

Index modern warfare, , –; limited explanatory value, –; normative framework, –, –; in Norway, ; objective control, , –, ; strategy-making processes and, –; unrealistic, ; in USA,  North Atlantic Treaty Organization. See NATO Norway: contribution warfare, –; in Latvia, –, , ; in Libya, –, , –; military professional norms, ; military strategy and, , ; normal theory and normative barriers, ; Norwegian Air Wing (NAW), –, , , –, –; Norwegian Task Unit and tactical strategy, –, , , –; political goals of military exercises, –, –, , ; politically astute officers needed, , ; principal neglect dilemmas,  Numa, Roni,  Nunn, Sam, n Obama administration, , –, – Obama, Barak, –,  officer corps. See also contrarianism, military; dissent, military; Israel; US Joint Chiefs of Staff : agentic nature, –, ; as apolitical profession, , –, , , , –; as bureaucratic interest group, –, ; civilian oversight, , , ; competing demands from civilians, ; dissatisfaction with exchange relations, –, , ; ethics education, –; horizontal alignment’s challenges and motivations, –; obedience and freedom of action, , ; participation in decision to go to war, ; political agency, , –, , –, , ; as political



interest group, , ; politically astute officers for small powers, , –; political savvy scale, –; as profession, , –, –, ; professional officer corps theory, ; professional vs civilian supremacists, – Orend, Brian,  Palestine, –, – Panetta, Leon,  Parsons, Talcott,  Patton, George S., – Peri, Yoram, ,  Pion-Berlin, David,  Plato, – Pompeo, Mike,  Portal, Charles, n Posner, Eric,  Powell, Colin, –, – professions and professionalism: client preferences, –; corporateness and the military, –; expertise and the military, , –; features of, ; fiduciary responsibility of, ; as ideal type, –; military as profession, –, –, , ; officer corps as, , –, –, ; paradoxes of professionalism, ; political dimension, ; post-normative professionalism, , –; professionalism in military, –, –, , , , , –; professional supremacists, –, –; responsibility and the military, , –; theory of, , – racial justice protests of , – Radway, Laurence I.,  Rapp, William E., ,  Roennfeldt, Carsten, , , , – Roosevelt, Franklin D., –, , , – Root, Elihu, 

 Ruffa, Chiara, ,  Rumsfeld, Donald, , –, ,  Russia, –, – Sarkesian, Sam C., –, , , ,  Schadlow, Nadia,  Schake, Kori N., , , , –,  Schilling, Warner R.,  security politics, . See also military politics Sharon, Ariel, ,  Shelton, Hugh, , ,  Shinseki, Eric, n Shklar, Judith N.,  Simmons, Beth A.,  Simpson, Emile,  Smail, John R. W.,  Smith, Adam (US representative),  Smith, Rupert, ,  Snider, Don M., , ,  Snyder, Jack,  Soeters, Joseph,  Solberg, Erna, ,  Spencer, Richard,  Stepan, Alfred,  Stevenson, Jonathan,  Stoltenberg, Jens, ,  Stone, David R.,  Summers, Harry,  Sundhaussen, Ulf,  Taft, William H., IV, – technological development, –, –, , , –,  Thomas, Clarence,  Truman, Harry,  Trump administration, –, ,  Trump, Donald:  January  Capitol violence, –; Iran nuclear deal, ; Lafayette incident, , , –; National Guard and racial justice protests, ; use of military force undermined,  Ukraine, – United Kingdom, , –

Index United States of America. See also budget, US military; courts; entries beginning with US; individual presidents:  January  US Capitol violence, –; Afghanistan War, –, , –, –; Air Force, , , , , ; COVID- vaccination mandate, ; Defense Department, ; dual military structure, , , , ; executive branch deference, –; federalism in military, –, ; GoldwaterNichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, , , , ; judicial observer effects, , –; Latvia training exercise, –; legal accountability, ; military politics of, ; military strategy lacking, ; militia tradition, –, ; National Security Act of , , , –; presidents, –; standing regular forces mistrusted, ; US Reserve,  Uruguay,  US Army: ADP - Doctrine Primer, ; force structure cuts, ; National Guard and, , , , ; nature of war, , –; tensions with Adjutants General,  US Congress. See also budget, US military: Base Force debate, , ; Defense Department authority limited, ; defense policy, ; democratization of processes, –; dissent before, ; GoldwaterNichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, , ; incentives in policy engagement with military, –, ; National Security Act of , –; sequestration under Obama administration, , ; Tea Party, ; transformation of military forces, ,  US Joint Chiefs of Staff : advice to civilians, , –; coordination between service branches, ; dislike for Rumsfeld, –, ;

Index National Security Act of , –; objections to cuts, ; power of, –; sequestration under Obama administration, ; transformation of military forces, – US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen. See also budget, US military: advocate for military preferences, –, , –; Base Force debate, –; beholden to service chiefs, , , , ; Colin Powell, –; Goldman-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, , ; Hugh Shelton, , , ; Mark Milley, –, –, , , , ; Martin Dempsey, –, ; Mike Mullen, –, ; power of, , –; presidential choices implementation, ; public face of military, ; racial justice protests of , ; Richard Myers, , ; sequestration under Obama administration, –; transformation of military forces, ,  US military, service branches: budget cuts, –; competition among, , ; congressional support, –, ; coordination between, , ; disputes adjudicated in private, ; Goldwater-Nicholas Department of Defense Reorganization Act, , ; as independent organizations, ; National Security Act of , ; structure impacts advice and leadership, –; transformation of forces, , –,  US National Guard:  January  US Capitol violence, , , –; Adjutants General, , , –; budget cuts and, , –; federalism in, , –, –, , , ; force structure and civilmilitary tensions, –; funding, –, , –; Huntington’s assessment of, –; political use by politicians, , ; public profile, , –; racial justice protests

 of , –; reforms, –; tensions with Active military, –, , –, ; Total Force policy, 

Vance, Jonathan, , –,  Vennesson, Pascal,  Vermeule, Adrian,  Vietnam War, ,  Vinjamuri, Leslie,  voice, military, –, –, , ,  Vom Hagen, Ulrich,  Walzer, Michael, n war. See also Afghanistan War; Israel; multinational operations; normal theory; Norway; United States of America; World War II: adaptation, ; civilian supremacists and, ; contribution warfare, –; domestic politics and military strategy, , –; ends-ways-means components of strategy, , , ; gray-zone warfare, ; Huntingtonian norms undermine effectiveness, –, ; international law in decisionmaking, ; international politics and military strategy, , –; jus ad bellum, –; jus in bello, –; military operations as political, ; new vs old conceptions of, –; officers’ participation in political decision-making, ; professional supremacists and, , ; public opinion and, , , –, , ; resourcing, –; strategic assessment, – war, ontology of. See also Clausewitz, Carl von: chameleon metaphor, , ; dialectical theory of war, ; dual ontology of war, –, –, –, –; label attached to social phenomena, ; mutable vs immutable nature of war, –, , –, , ; trinity “paradox,”

 –, , ; war assemblage, , – Warnagiris, Christopher,  Weissglass, Dov,  Wesson, Robert,  Wilson, P. A.,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig,  Wolf, George B.,  Work, Robert O.,  World War II. See also multinational operations: Franklin D. Roosevelt, –, , , –; Gymnast, , , , ; Huntington’s misinterpretation of, , –;

Index Operation Torch political environment, –, –, –; political nature of military decisions, –; public opinion and, –, , ; Roundup, , , ; Sledgehammer, ; Vyacheslav Molotov, , – Yaalon, Moshe, –, ,  Yingling, Paul, –, –, , –, ,  Zelenskyy, Volodymyr, – Zirker, Daniel, 