democracyarsenal.org: So, What About Civilian Control?

May 10, 2006

So, What About Civilian Control?
Posted by Heather Hurlburt

It’s gotten awfully trendy to toss around concerns over civilian control of the military. But do we really have a problem, and if so, what is it?

This week, conservative Republicans think that naming an active-duty military officer to head the CIA puts dangerous pressure on civilian control of intelligence affairs.

Last month, when half-a-dozen retired generals called for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s resignation, a line of worry ran from the White House talking points to the Washington Post editorial board and even some progressives: the generals were, in the words of the Post, assaulting "the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control…. If [the generals] are successful in forcing Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, they will set an ugly precedent."

And, lest we forget, for much of the 1990s we heard from the right how the incompetent Clinton Administration was unable to master the military.

Now, I’m in a strange position here. I do think we have a problem with the balance of power in our civil-military relationship. But our friends on the right are wringing their hands about symptoms, not root causes. Retired generals trashing Don Rumsfeld, or Les Aspin for that matter, is hardly the heart of the matter. Neither is appointing active-duty military officers to senior positions in intelligence, the war on drugs, etc. etc.

Last month the problem was (retired) military officials questioning the judgement and qualifications of the civilian Secretary of Defense. This, said Charles Krauthammer, might lead to factions within the active-duty military:

That happens in places such as Hussein's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

Lest you think I am picking an extreme target here, Slate’s Fred Kaplan agreed that the long-term threat is factionalism within the force.

And when you stop to look at the analyses, folks have quite different definitions of what the problem is.

This week the problem seems to be expanding military control of our intelligence apparatus:

Dennis Hastert said “I don’t think a military guy should be head of the CIA, frankly.”

Senator Susan Collins saw the problem as DoD moving to take control of the intelligence apparatus by “seeking to fill any vacuum or create one if necessary.”

Others (including Andrew Bacevich) have argued that the Rumsfeld-bashing is really about ongoing Vietnam blowback, with officers anxious to ensure that blame falls on the civilian, not military, leadership. This is, perhaps, to be expected in an era when all politics is conducted more publicly than ever before.

And remember, in the Clinton years the problem was that the civilians couldn’t control the military, which “was largely allowed to set its own policy” (an assertion that would surprise many of the DoD civilians I worked with back then, but never mind).

We have two separate categories of concern here -- one about the reach of the military as a an institution, expanding its reach and moving uncontrolled into areas that make us uneasy (military intelligence; the perceived potential for insubordination in the Clinton years).

The other is that the military will become factionalized, less stable, and ripe for exploitation either by our existing political parties or other, more sinister forces.

There is one incontrovertible truth about the uniformed military that, to my surprise, has not come up in recent deabtes. The end of the draft and other social pressures have created a uniformed military whose membership is culturally and politically different from the rest of the US, and becoming more so. An extensive study in the early 1990s documented cultural and political differences, perhaps best encapsulated by this popular survey response:

there is reason for “serious pessimism about the moral health of civilian society and that the military could help society become more moral, and that civilian society would be better off if it adopted more of the military's values and behaviors."

This is a real long-term issue. But we let ourselves off the hook too easily, progressives especially, if our attention stays focused on that. For when it comes down to military power, after all, who gave the military its large budgets, its intelligence responsibilities, its status nearly outside criticism? Us. The problem might lie not just with the uniformed military but with the civilians as well. Across the political spectrum, we’ve found it easier and easier to hand money, responsibility and rhetorical overloads of praise to our military. Retired General Anthony Zinni calls this the “Mikey” problem, as in: “give it to Mikey. He’ll eat anything.” (actually, the point was that Mikey hated everything, but never mind.) Would it be too much to argue that since the end of the Cold War -- and perhaps even before, since Vietnam, or since we abolished the volunteer force -- the civilian side has had other priorities higher than effective oversight, even when the military, or elements of it, would have welcomed that oversight?

Fewer people in politics – and few kids of the elites from either party -- choose to serve accentuating the cultural divide and feeding a vague sense of unworthiness which we then reinforce by dumping more money, more missions. 80 percent of our intelligence budget now goes to the military, apparently; we won’t even get started on the disparity on what we spend on military and non-military forms of problem-solving. Even when the Pentagon asked Congress to put more money into peace-building at the State Department, Congress wouldn’t go along.

We build up the military, and call up its images of heroism and sacrifice, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, for our own political gain Is it any wonder the muscles we need to rebalance the civil-military scales are a little flabby?

I keep thinking of a moment I witnessed last year at a weekend national security talkfest crammed with former Congressmen, military luminaries, journalists, Hill staffers. I was quite surprised to hear a retired Marine express concern about the balance of civil-military relations. But I was even more surprised when the comment fell into silence, and the discussion continued as if it had never been made.

...

A treat for you die-hards who read to the end:

A fascinating sidelight here is that one of the more comprehensive studies of civil-military relations in the last decade was co-led by none other than Peter Feaver, the Duke University political scientist recruited last year to the Bush White House to put into practice his theory that the right kind of jawboning by President Bush could turn around public sentiment on the war. In 2003, Feaver published a study arguing that the civil-military relationship is like the relations between the government and other subordinate agencies, and that military loyalty is a function of the cost of disloyalty, just as it is for others, and not by itself a sign of military professionalism.

(For the political science majors in the room: this is a direct challenge to the classic Samuel Huntington view that many of you remember reading as undergraduates.)

May 10, 2006 at 02:22 PM in Defense | Permalink

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May 10, 2006

So, What About Civilian Control?
Posted by Heather Hurlburt

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May 10, 2006

So, What About Civilian Control? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

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So, What About Civilian Control?
Posted by Heather Hurlburt