argumentative essay on military government is better than civilian government

It exists along a continuum of more, or less, civilian control, from the extreme of countries ruled by military establishments, or that experience periodic coups d’etat and frequent direct or indirect military intervention in politics, to those that do not even possess standing military forces. The best way to understand civilian control, to measure its existence and evaluate its effectiveness, is to weigh the relative influence the military and civilians have in the decisions of state concerning war, internal security, external defense, and military affairs.

Sometimes, where civilian control is weak or nonexistent, military influence laps over into other areas of public policy and social life. Even in mature democracies that have long practiced civilian control, the balance between military and civilian varies with time and place, with the personalities involved, with the personal or political ambitions of senior military officers and leading politicians, and with the circumstances that give the military prestige and weight in public opinion. Even in those democracies with rich traditions of unbroken civilian dominance, war and security can (and have) become so important in national life and so central to the definition of the state, that the military, particularly during or after a crisis or war, can use its expertise or public standing to limit civilian influence in military affairs. In the wake of World War II, senior American generals and admirals possessed great influence in government. Nearly every American war has produced a heroic commander who emerges to run for president or consider doing so, Colin Powell being only the most recent example.

• The Truman-MacArthur crisis in 1951 originated in trying to limit a conflict early in the era of atomic weapons, in a part of the world the American political and military leadership deemed secondary in the Cold War struggle against communism. The crisis exploded when a legendary general whose reputation overshadowed the president’s, a general who was not willing to settle for stalemate after suffering a shocking defeat at the end of a fabled career, would not cease public disagreement with American policy and strategy.

Foundations of Civilian Control

T H E    F I R S T    R E Q U I R E M E N T  for civilian control in democracy is democratic governance itself, that is, the rule of law, a stable method for succession, workable practices for electing officials,

and a government and governing process accepted as legitimate by elites and by the population as a whole (perhaps spelled out in a written constitution).Civilian control can support or sustain democracy, but civilian control is only one aspect of democratic rule; civilian control is necessary for democracy but not sufficient. Without a stable and legitimate governmental system and process, the military may be induced to intervene or interfere in order to protect society from chaos, internal challenge, or external attack–even though intervention may itself perpetuate instability and destroy the legitimacy of the government. The tradition of legitimacy in government acts on the one hand to deter military interference in politics and on the other to counteract intervention should it threaten or occur. In countries with English legal traditions, but also in others like Switzerland or the Scandinavian states, the rule of law puts the military by definition under civilian authority and keeps it there.

• through force, by other armed forces in society (such as militia or police or an armed population); and,
• by the knowledge that illegal acts will not be tolerated, and will lead to personal dishonor, disgrace, retirement, relief, fine, arrest, trial, conviction, prison–whatever punishment is legal, appropriate, and can be made to stick. The more likely that violations of civilian control will not be forgiven and will be met by effective resistance, the less likely they are to occur. Historically a most effective counterweight has been a reliance on citizen-soldiers as opposed to full-time professionals. The ” standing army” has often been difficult to manage. But knowledge that revolt would lead to crisis and be opposed by an armed population, or that citizen forces might not heed the orders, has been an effective deterrent. Size matters. Standing forces should be as small as security permits: so that the population consents to provide the resources, so that the military will be oriented exclusively to external defense, and to reduce civil- military friction.

Because of their expertise and role as the nation’s guardian, military leaders in democracies can possess great public credibility, and can use it to limit or undermine civilian control, particularly during and after successful wars. The difficulty is to define their proper role and to confine their activity within proper boundaries even when those boundaries are fuzzy and indistinct. The scholar of civil-military relations in Israel, Yehuda Ben Meir, believes that the military should advise civilians, represent the needs of the military inside the government, but not advocate military interests or perspectives publicly in such a way as to undermine or circumscribe civilian authority.

Helpful to this ethos is an officer corps that is, in every respect possible, representative of the diversity or homogeneity of the larger society. Some countries have enjoyed civilian control with officers drawn only from particular races, religions, classes, or ethnic backgrounds. But it seems far wiser to build an officer corps that equates itself with the national population and whose officers identify their first loyalty to the country rather than the profession of arms. Drawing them from one segment risks them identifying as guardians above, and independent of, society–separate and superior. If they see their own values at variance with those of the population and their loyalties to their group of origin and to the military as primary, they may delude themselves into thinking that their purpose is to preserve or reform society’s values and norms, rather than safeguard the nation’s physical security.

Nor should the military participate in any fashion in politics, not as members of parties, in elected office, or even in appointive office as members of a political administration at the local or national level. If officers belong to a political party, run for office, represent a particular group or constituency, publicly express their views (and vote), attack or defend the executive leadership–in short, behave like politicians–they cannot be trusted to be neutral servants of the state and guardians of society. Even personal identification with a political program or party can compromise an officer in the performance of his or her duty.

In theory, nothing physical in most societies prevents armies from interfering in politics or even attempting to overturn their government. But where civilian control has succeeded over a long period, military professionals have internalized civilian control to an extraordinary degree. In those countries, the people and civilian leaders expect, because of law or tradition, military subordination to civil authority. The organs of public opinion, in the press and among elites, accept the principle and in times of stress in civil-military relations declare it as an axiom of government. Some countervailing power to the military force may exist, but the military understands that any step toward insubordination would immediately provoke a crisis that by consensus they would lose, with the possibility of legal sanctions to them personally.Yet ultimately, on a day-to-day basis, it is the military officers’ own discipline and restraint that maintains civilian control. Whether or not they would face dismissal or prison, they choose to submit, to define their duty as advice to civilian bosses rather than advocacy, and to carry out all lawful orders effectively and without complaint. But because civilians frequently lack knowledge and understanding of military affairs, and the apportioning of military and civilian responsibility depends so often on circumstances, the relationship even in the most stable governments has, historically, been messy, uncertain, and filled with friction. And thus, historically, the degree of civilian control , that is, the relative weight of the civilian and the military , has been dependent on the people and the issues.

T H E    T H R E A T S    T O    C I V I L I A N   control have been unspecified but assumed in this essay. It bears repeating that any breakdown or erosion of constitutional process caused or used by the military or that permits the military to become independent represents a threat to democratic rule.

Unitary control of the military, or control by one person or branch or institution of government that unbalances power, can permit the military to become the tool of tyranny and, quite possibly, the successor tyrant. A military establishment larger than needed, tasked with missions beyond national defense, strains the trust between soldiers and society that must underlie stable civilian control. Political or bureaucratic conditions periodically offer armed forces limited opportunities to disobey, circumvent, ignore, or defy civilian authority. And of course last, and most dangerous, a military leadership willing to intervene improperly in politics and governance always threatens military subordination.

• Externally, a security crisis so grave as to imperil the existence of a nation invites military intervention under the illusion of efficiency, as occurred in Germany in World War I.

D E M O C R A C Y is a disorderly form of government, often inefficient, always frustrating. Maintaining liberty and security, governing in such a manner as to achieve desirable political outcomes and at the same time military effectiveness, is among the most difficult dilemmas of human governance.

As the new millennium approaches, newly emerging democracies with long-established armed forces accustomed to a large degree of autonomy face the challenge of gaining enough influence and control to say with confidence that they have civilian control over their military. Military establishments which are unused to having their judgment or authority questioned by anyone, much less the cacophony of groups and individuals (many of whom most flagrantly do not subscribe to the values and behaviors traditional to military groups) typical of democratic governance, will experience an equally uncomfortable challenge.

How will that transition come about, or be managed, without the kind of internal conflict, or even violence, which so threatens democratic process? On the answer to this problem, undoubtedly worked out slowly and painfully, will rest much of the future of democracy in human society.

Dick Kohn is professor of history and chairman of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as executive secretary, Triangle Institute for Security Studies . Further, he is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of American Diplomacy.

Why civilian government is better than military in Nigeria?

Civilian government is better than military rule in Nigeria because it promotes democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law, leading to greater stability and economic prosperity for the country.

What are the key differences between civilian and military rule in Nigeria?

Civilian government is run by elected officials and is based on the principles of democracy, while military rule is characterized by the control of the government by the armed forces.

How does civilian government promote democracy in Nigeria?

Civilian government allows for free and fair elections, gives citizens the right to participate in politics, and fosters a system of checks and balances.

What role does respect for human rights play in civilian government?

Civilian government is based on the respect for human rights, including freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, which are essential for a thriving society.

How does civilian government contribute to the rule of law?

Civilian government upholds the rule of law by ensuring that all individuals, including government officials, are subject to the same laws and justice system.

What are the economic benefits of civilian government in Nigeria?

Under civilian government, Nigeria can attract more foreign investment, develop strong institutions, and implement economic policies that promote growth and development.

Can civilian government help to reduce corruption in Nigeria?

Yes, civilian government can foster transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption measures to combat corrupt practices.

What are the drawbacks of military rule in Nigeria?

Military rule often leads to restrictions on civil liberties, political repression, and a lack of accountability, which can hinder the country’s progress.

How does military rule impact foreign relations for Nigeria?

Military rule can strain diplomatic relations with other countries and affect Nigeria’s international standing and credibility.

What are the common concerns with military intervention in Nigerian politics?

Military interventions in Nigerian politics often lead to instability, human rights abuses, and a lack of trust in the government.

How does civilian government contribute to national unity in Nigeria?

A civilian government can work towards inclusivity, representation, and dialogue among diverse ethnic and religious groups in Nigeria, fostering national unity.

What role does the military play in a civilian government?

The military in a civilian government serves to protect the country’s borders, contribute to peacekeeping efforts, and assist in disaster relief.

How does civilian government impact the development of democratic institutions in Nigeria?

Civilian government can strengthen democratic institutions such as the legislature, judiciary, and civil society organizations, promoting good governance.

What are the challenges of transitioning from military to civilian rule in Nigeria?

Challenges include consolidating democratic gains, addressing political fragmentation, and reforming military institutions to be subordinate to civilian authority.

How does civilian government address the needs of the Nigerian people?

Civilian government can implement social and economic policies that address poverty, unemployment, healthcare, and education, prioritizing the well-being of its citizens.

What is the role of the citizenry in upholding a civilian government?

Citizens play a crucial role in holding their elected officials accountable, participating in civic engagement, and defending democratic values to ensure the success of civilian government in Nigeria.

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About Robert Carlson

Robert has over 15 years in Law Enforcement, with the past eight years as a senior firearms instructor for the largest police department in the South Eastern United States. Specializing in Active Shooters, Counter-Ambush, Low-light, and Patrol Rifles, he has trained thousands of Law Enforcement Officers in firearms. A U.S Air Force combat veteran with over 25 years of service specialized in small arms and tactics training. He is the owner of Brave Defender Training Group LLC, providing advanced firearms and tactical training.

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Guest Essay

The Downside of High Trust in the Military

By Jessica D. Blankshain and Max Z. Margulies

Ms. Blankshain and Mr. Margulies have written extensively about national security, foreign policy and civil-military relations.

With the United States military withdrawn from Afghanistan, we are faced with many pressing questions, among them: How and why did we engage in war for so long with so little to show for it?

A common explanation blames the American public for inattention and indifference to the war’s lack of progress. At the heart of this alleged public apathy is an ever-widening gap between the military and the society it serves: When the public is almost totally insulated from the human and financial costs of war, it has no reason to care. Call this the “ the military is at war, Americans are at the mall ” theory. For those who hold this view, the solution is to make Americans pay the costs of war more directly , through a draft or explicit war taxes or both.

We’re not persuaded by this argument (note: All views here are our own and do not represent the official views or positions of our employers). First, the perception that most Americans are “at the mall” is not new. “Off the base, it was as if there was no war taking place,” one veteran said of Korea, America’s original “forgotten war” (despite the use of the draft and a large number of veterans in the population). “The war wasn’t popular, and no one wanted to hear anything about it.” Second, policymakers are unlikely to implement policies like a war tax or draft in a way that imposes substantial political costs, as the American experience in Vietnam demonstrated. Finally, the logic of this argument — which shames the public while putting the military on a pedestal — may actually be making things worse.

We see a different civil-military relations problem — one that American experience in Afghanistan and the past 20 years of American foreign intervention have made painfully clear. The fundamental problem is a yawning gap between trust in the military and trust in civilian institutions of government.

For decades polls have shown that Americans trust the military more than most other institutions. One recent survey found that Americans were significantly more likely to say that the military has done a good job in Afghanistan over the past 20 years than to say the same of any relevant presidential administration.

This trust gap suggests at least a partial explanation for the longevity of the war in Afghanistan. As Phil Klay, a U.S. Marine veteran, argued in 2018, one reason the public doesn’t critically engage with military policy is that civilians have been convinced that they should defer to those with military experience and that criticizing the wars is akin to failing to support the troops.

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Article Contents

Introduction, military in government and international conflict, research design, additional analyses, syria during the black september crisis.

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Generals in the Cabinet: Military Participation in Government and International Conflict Initiation

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Peter White, Generals in the Cabinet: Military Participation in Government and International Conflict Initiation, International Studies Quarterly , Volume 65, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 551–561, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqab012

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How does the presence of military officers in national government affect a state's likelihood of international conflict? We know a great deal about how overall regime type affects international conflict, but there is substantial variation within regime types in the participation of military officers in the government. We know little about how this variation affects a state's conflict propensity. In this Research Note, I examine three competing arguments for the effect of military participation in government on conflict initiation: Military Aggression, Military Conservatism, and Civil–Military Competition. Military Aggression suggests that military involvement in government will tend to guide the state toward conflict, given a military predisposition to favor the use of force. In contrast, Military Conservatism argues that military officers in government will lead the state to less conflict, given their personal familiarity with its costs. Civil–Military Competition holds that when military officers and civilians share political power, a variety of pathologies in national security deliberation and decision-making emerge, increasing conflict propensity. I test these three propositions cross-nationally using data on the number and type of positions held by military officers in cabinets and state councils and international conflict and find the strongest support for Civil–Military Competition.

¿Cómo impacta la presencia de oficiales militares en el gobierno nacional en la propensión a conflictos internacionales de un estado? Sabemos mucho sobre cómo el tipo de sistema general impacta en el conflicto internacional, pero hay variaciones importantes dentro de los tipos de sistemas en lo que refiere a la participación de oficiales militares en el gobierno. Sabemos poco sobre cómo esta variación afecta la propensión a conflictos de un estado. En esta Nota de investigación, examino tres argumentos distintos sobre cómo la participación militar en el gobierno afecta su predisposición a iniciar conflictos: Agresión Militar, Conservadurismo Militar y Competencia Cívico-Militar. La Agresión Militar plantea que la participación militar en el gobierno tenderá a influenciar al estado hacia el conflicto, debido a la predisposición militar a favor del uso de la fuerza. En cambio, el Conservadurismo Militar propone que la presencia de oficiales militares en el gobierno llevará a que el estado se involucre en menos conflictos, debido a que los oficiales están familiarizados con su costo. La Competencia Cívico-Militar sostiene que, cuando los oficiales militares y los civiles comparten poder político, surgen diversas patologías en la deliberación y toma de decisiones en materia de seguridad nacional, lo que aumenta la propensión a conflictos. Evalúo estas tres premisas a nivel internacional utilizando datos sobre el número y el tipo de cargos ocupados por oficiales militares en los gabinetes y consejos estatales y sobre el conflicto internacional, y encuentro mayor evidencia a favor de la Competencia Cívico-Militar.

Dans quelle mesure la présence d'officiers militaires dans un gouvernement national affecte-t-elle la probabilité de conflit international de cet état ? Nous savons beaucoup de choses sur la manière dont la globalité du type de régime affecte les conflits internationaux, mais il y a des variations substantielles de participation des officiers militaires aux gouvernements selon les différents types de régime. Nous ne savons que peu de choses sur la façon dont cette variation affecte la propension d'un état à s'engager dans un conflit. Dans cet exposé de recherche, j'examine trois arguments concurrents sur l'effet de la participation militaire aux gouvernements sur le déclenchement de conflits :  agression militaire,  conservatisme militaire et concurrence entre civils et militaires. L'argument de l'agression militaire suggère que l'implication des militaires dans un gouvernement aurait tendance à orienter l’État vers le conflit en raison de la prédisposition des militaires à favoriser l'utilisation de la force. À l'inverse,  l'argument du conservatisme militaire soutient que les officiers militaires présents dans le gouvernement mèneront l’État vers moins de conflits du fait de leur propre familiarité avec leurs coûts. Et l'argument de la concurrence entre civils et militaires prétend que lorsque des civils et des militaires partagent le pouvoir politique, diverses pathologies émergent dans la délibération et la prise de décisions sur la sécurité nationale, ce qui accroît la propension au conflit. J'ai mis ces trois propositions à l’épreuve à l’échelle transnationale en utilisant des données sur le nombre et le type de postes occupés par des officiers militaires dans les cabinets et conseils d’État ainsi que sur les conflits internationaux, et j'ai constaté que l'argument le plus justifié était celui de la concurrence entre civils et militaires.

How does military participation in national cabinets affect international conflict? Recent research has advanced our understanding of the conflict propensity of military regimes ( Weeks 2014 ), as well as how the military background of leaders influences conflict propensity ( Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015 ). However, across regimes-types and leaders there is substantial variation in the levels of military involvement in government. The military is not absent from civilian regimes, and leaders with military backgrounds sometimes have civilian cabinets and at other times cabinets that are heavily militarized. We do not understand the impact of military involvement in government on international conflict outside of the background of the leader and regime type.

In this Research Note, I test three arguments to address this question: Military Aggression, Military Conservatism , and Civil–Military Competition. Military Aggression argues that there are inherent attributes of military officers that make them favor military action. As military officers in the government increase, so will that state's conflict propensity. In contrast, Military Conservatism suggests that, given their familiarity with the cost of armed conflict, military officers are judicious with regard to the use of force. As military officers have an increasing role in government, conflict propensity will decrease. The final argument is Civil–Military Competition . This argument focuses on the pathologies that arise in governments where there is shared power between military officers and civilian elites. Where the military is involved in non-security aspects of the government, conflict propensity is higher, and this is particularly true where there is also a strong civilian elite in the regime.

I test these competing arguments quantitatively using yearly, cross-national data on the number of military officers in national cabinets. In examining the initiation of militarized disputes where there are fatalities, I find the strongest evidence in support of Civil–Military Competition . Rather than there being a broad trend toward conservatism or aggression, increased military officers in government correspond to the increased likelihood that a state initiates violent international conflict when the military is involved in the non-security aspects of government. Military participation in government (MPG) exerts a stronger impact on the conflict propensity of civilian-led regimes, though this does not make them more conflict-prone than military-led regimes except at very high levels of military participation.

This note makes three contributions. First, it advances our understanding of how the military influences foreign policy. Second, it demonstrates significant variation in military involvement in government across and within different regime types and the role that it plays in explaining international conflict. Third, it leverages new data on MPG to adjudicate between three competing arguments in the literature regarding military attitudes toward conflict, suggesting that it is not inherent traits of military officers, but rather it is institutional arrangements in civil–military relations that matter.

This note proceeds in six sections. In the first, I outline the arguments. In the second, I discuss the data and the research design. In the third, I present the results of the empirical analysis. In the fourth, I conduct additional analyses to verify the robustness of the main results. In the fifth, I demonstrate the mechanisms behind non-security MPG and conflict in a brief case narrative of Syria during the Black September crisis of 1970. The article concludes with discussion of the implications of the results.

While we know that military-dominated regimes are more likely to initiate international conflict ( Lai and Slater 2006 ; Weeks 2014 ) and that certain types of military experience make leaders more likely to initiate conflict ( Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015 ), we do not understand the impact of military involvement in government outside of the leader and regime type. The military is not absent from regimes that are not military dictatorships. For example, the People's Liberation Army has played an extensive, and varied, role in government and politics throughout Communist rule in China. Democracies also are not immune to military involvement in government, with the records of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, and Sri Lanka showing periods when military cabinet officials or parallel ruling councils have coexisted (often uneasily) with elected civilian governments.

How does this more limited type of military involvement in government affect the likelihood of international conflict? There are clear cases of civil–military dysfunction contributing to international conflict that cannot easily be explained by regime type: for example, the Pakistani military's possible role in autonomously initiating the 1999 Kargil War with India 1 and the role that political struggles between civilian and military factions played in miscalculations by the Egyptian government in the lead up to the 1967 war with Israel ( Brooks 2008 ). In each case, the military was a political actor, but not the dominant one. In this section, I outline the three competing arguments for the effect of MPG on conflict initiation.

Military Aggression

The expectation that military officers should favor more aggressive postures in international relations is intuitively appealing. In their training and experience, senior military officers may be socialized to favor offensive military doctrines, which may lead them to favor “first-strike” options ( Posen 1986 ). Weeks (2014) argues that military officers are socialized to view military action favorably for resolving international disputes and as less costly. Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis (2015 , hereafter HSE) agree that military socialization in favor of conflict does occur—though the enthusiasm for military action is tempered by combat experience. They may also view the international environment as inherently hostile and prefer an aggressive stance in international affairs ( Brunk, Secrest, Tamashiro 1990 ). In contrast, civilian politicians and experts are more likely to take into account the diplomatic, economic, and political ramifications of conflict—which may serve to make them more cautious ( Desch 1999 ; Brooks 2008 ). Military officers may also favor international conflict, because heightened tensions and conflict increase military resources and budgets ( Sechser 2004 ). International conflict can also lead dictators to loosen coup-proofing controls on militaries, increasing their autonomy ( Talmadge 2015 ). Logically, given military preferences, socialization, and incentives, as the number of military officers in the government—and the degree of military influence in the regime—increases, so should the state's propensity for international conflict.

Hypothesis 1 : As military participation in government increases, so too does the likelihood of international conflict initiation .

Military Conservatism

The inverse of the Military Aggression argument is Military Conservatism . Related to HSE's argument that combat experience should temper military enthusiasm for aggression, there is a literature that argues for Military Conservatism regarding the use of force. Huntington (1957 , Ch. 3) argues that military officers are characterized by “Conservative Realism,” where they view the international environment in terms of potential threats and value security above all else but see war as a last resort that carries with it extreme danger. There is some empirical evidence in support of this. In several studies of retired and current American military officers and civilian foreign policy practitioners, there have been findings that those with a military background are no more likely to favor military action in response to foreign policy problems than civilians—though military officers and veterans generally favor escalation to higher levels of force once conflict has begun ( Betts 1991 ; Feaver and Gelpi 2011 ). Military officers may also view military force as useful in a more limited set of foreign disputes than civilian politicians ( Feaver and Gelpi 2011 ). Further, while HSE find that leaders with military experience without combat and those who are former rebels are more conflict-prone, those with combat experience are no more bellicose than civilian leaders. Because military members bear the costs of war most acutely and are also uniquely qualified to evaluate the limitations of military force, when the military is more involved in the highest levels of government, there may be reduced propensity for international conflict. 2

Hypothesis 2 : As military participation in government increases, the likelihood of international conflict initiation decreases .

Civil–Military Competition

A third approach, Civil–Military Competition , is agnostic regarding any inherent predisposition to conflict, instead arguing that where civilians and military elites are sharing and in competition over political power, pathologies are introduced into foreign policy decision-making, which make international conflict more likely. These include poor information sharing, multiple chains of command, the growth of armed organizations outside the military, and political incentives to exacerbate international tensions. Most important is the existence of more than one authority in the state to initiate and escalate international conflict, which creates more opportunities for domestic actors to use international conflict to gain political advantage.

First, Civil–Military Competition makes errors in “strategic assessment” more likely ( Brooks 2008 ). Brooks demonstrates that both preference divergence and shared political power between civilian and military elites negatively affect a government's ability to effectively process information and make sound, unified foreign policy decisions. 3 Brooks argues that when civilian politicians and military officers share political power, foreign policy decision-making authority is contested and unclear. Here, military and civilian officials may issue contradictory orders, postpone a decision, or fail to reach a decision. It is unlikely that the state's decision-making process is fully coordinated between the military, diplomatic, and intelligence arms of the government. There is little in the way of consultation, information sharing, and joint decision-making. Poor decisions—that do not take into account relative capabilities, externalities, and other factors that would suggest caution—are more likely.

In addition to these types of error, a particular dangerous element of Civil–Military Competition is the existence of more than one command authority. Both the military and the civilian authority are capable of commanding military force. In Egypt's case, the diffusion of authority between Nasser and ‘Amr meant that ‘Amr was able to unilaterally escalate tensions with Israel by prepositioning troops without civilian authorization ( Brooks 2008 , 89–91). This dual authority is exacerbated by the proliferation of armed organizations within the state. Political competition between civilian and military leaders takes place in the shadow of a coup (e.g., Svolik 2012 ). A common response is for civilian leaders to build up armed alternatives to the military to “counter-balance” it (e.g., De Bruin 2018 ). This has the effect of not only creating two command authorities, but two militaries—one which answers to the military hierarchy and the other to the civilian leadership. Either the civilian or military leadership can use the forces under their command to initiate or escalate international conflict.

Because the political contest divides the authority to initiate armed conflict, common elements of political competition—e.g., policy disagreement, outbidding—are exacerbated. If there is disagreement over foreign policy between civilian and military leaders, under Civil–Military Competition, one side has the outside option of unilaterally escalating a potential dispute to achieve their preferred outcome, such as Pakistan's military in the 1999 Kargil conflict.

Another factor is domestic political support. When civil and military leaders are sharing power, a key factor in their relative power is their respective support in the broader society ( Brooks 2008 ). When an international issue has domestic salience, there is an incentive for “outbidding”—with either the civil or military leaders escalating international conflict to demonstrate their bona fides to a domestic audience. Because under Civil–Military Competition the authority to start or escalate conflict is divided, the outbidding risk extends beyond rhetoric to actual conflict. This was a likely factor, for example, in the civilian faction in Syria sending the armed forces under its control into Jordan in 1970 to support the Palestinian side in the civil war there.

Domestic political incentives for international conflict exist for leaders under other civil–military arrangements, but they are especially severe under Civil–Military Competition, because of the division of military authority. There is more than one command authority, and very often, more than one armed force that can be ordered into conflict. Put differently, under Civil–Military Competition, in addition to a higher likelihood of miscalculation, there is a greater opportunity for the civil or military factions in a regime to act on incentives to outbid or divert domestic politics using international conflict. This opportunity does not exist in the same way in systems where command authority is unitary. In contrast to the aggression and conservatism arguments, Civil–Military Competition does not presuppose that one group—the military or the civilians—will pursue a more aggressive course; either can. In Egypt in 1967, it was the military pursuing escalatory action, while in Syria in 1970 it was the civilians.

Under Civil–Military Competition, it is likely that there will be military officers at high levels of government in non -security roles. This creates the conditions for competition between the military and civilians as political factions. With the division of political power into military and civilian factions, also comes the division of the authority to initiate international conflict. Under Civil–Military Competition, there are more paths through which international conflict may be initiated and through which either faction may act on political incentives to escalate international tensions.

In some cases, the military-held positions themselves will endow the holder with political and decision-making authority. For example, in Egypt in 1967, Field Marshal ‘Amr was also the first Deputy President of Egypt. In other cases, the holding of ministries related to economic or social affairs indicates a broader share of political power for the military as an institution and potential civil–military conflict more broadly. In Syria in 1970, General Mamdouh Jaber was the Minister of Rural Affairs, but Syrian military influence extended far beyond this particular portfolio. Even if the positions do not statutorily include in their duties the decision to go to war, when the military occupies positions related to political leadership, economic or social policy, or territorial administration, it indicates military intrusion into traditionally civilian decision-making and domains of governance.

Hypothesis 3 : As military participation in areas of government outside of defense increases, so too does the likelihood of international conflict initiation .

Critically, for the Civil–Military Competition argument to be supported, the effect of military intrusion into the non-security aspects of government should be found in civilian-led regimes—where there is truly shared power between civilians and the military. Where there is a military leader of the state, increased military involvement in government reflects the increased militarization of an already military executive.

Hypothesis 3a : As military participation in areas of government outside of defense increases, so too does the likelihood of international conflict initiation. This effect will be observable in civilian-led regimes .

The logic of Civil–Military Competition also suggests that not only will there be a strong effect in civilian-led regimes. Regimes with shared civil–military power will be more conflict-prone than military-led regimes. Military dominance of politics also negatively affects foreign policy decision-making but not to the same degree as contested political power between civilian and military factions ( Brooks 2008 ). Accordingly, the effect of non-security MPG should be greatest where there is also a strong civilian component to the regime.

Hypothesis 3b : As military participation in areas of government outside of defense increases, so too does the likelihood of international conflict initiation. This effect will be greatest in civilian-led regimes .

For the independent variable, I use the MPG data ( White 2017 ). These data capture the number and types of positions held by military officers in national cabinets or cabinet equivalents. Following White (2017) , I use counts of active-duty officers to capture the military’s role in executive decision-making. The MPG data divide the counts into security- and non-security components. Government members are counted in either the security or non-security count based on whether any of their portfolios pertained to security or the armed forces. Incidences of active-duty military officers holding non-security positions occur in 21.69 percent of country-years.

Security positions include the ministers of defense, foreign affairs, interior, and justice—as well as any national security adviser position, positions related to specific regions or security concerns, specific military branches, as well as border security or law enforcement. Examples in the data of non-security positions held by active military officers include a range of political leadership roles, such as the Vice Premiership in China (1964–1988) or that of Deputy Prime Minister in Syria (1985–2003), as well as that in various economic and social ministries, such as the Minister of Civil Aviation in Egypt (2002) and the Minister of Health in Sierra Leone (1967).

Figure 1 shows the proportion of states that have active military officers in cabinets and state councils from 1964 to 2008 (the data's range), differentiating by security or non-security role (differentiations by regime-type are in the online appendix ). This demonstrates that having some military involvement in the security sector is always more common than in non-security areas. 4 It is clear also that a greater share of states in the international system see military involvement in government during the Cold War. This may stem from the relative frequency of military regimes during that period. For both types of military involvement in government, there was a steep drop-off with the end of the Cold War. It is notable, however, that decline in military involvement in government at the end of the Cold War has not continued in the post–Cold War period, with non-security involvement never dropping below 12 percent of states and security involvement never below 29 percent.

Proportion of states with active military officers in government, security, and non-security roles.

I use as independent variables counts of the number of active military officers in government, aggregating all military officers in government (MPG) and differentiating by role—security ( Security MPG ) versus non-security ( Non-security MPG ). For the dependent variable, I generated an indicator for whether or not a state initiated a militarized interstate dispute (MID) in a given year using the MID 4.0 data ( Palmer et al 2015 ). I also generated an indicator for whether or not a state initiated an MID that resulted in fatalities in a given year to examine whether any effect for Security MPG or Non-security MPG extends to MIDs that involve at least some violence.

To ensure that the analyses do not conflate military involvement in government with overall regime characteristics, I include regime-type indicators from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2014 , hereafter, GWF). These include separate indicators for civilian personalist dictatorships, military personalist dictatorships, collegial/institutional military regimes (i.e., juntas), dominant party systems, and democracies. Effectively, this approach gives each regime type its own intercept and captures the effect of within-regime variation in MPG on conflict initiation.

I include from HSE indicators for whether the leader was a former soldier or officer with combat experience, without combat experience, or a former rebel—with the base category being no rebel or military experience. While HSE conduct leader-year analysis, I am using the country-year, so I aggregate HSE's leader-year data to this level of analysis. This means that in years where there were leadership changes, these indicators account for the experience of multiple leaders.

In addition to state capability controls, such as the state's value in the Composite Index of National Capabilities ( Singer, Bremer, and Stuckey 1972 ) and major power status, I include a counter for the age of the regime in years (from GWF), which controls for the conflict-proneness of new regimes ( Mansfield and Snyder 2007 ). Given the connection between intra - and interstate armed conflict ( Gleditsch, Salehyan, and Schultz 2009 ), I included also an indicator for an internal armed conflict that resulted in at least twenty-five battle-deaths in that year—using the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset ( Themner and Wallensteen 2014 ). I control for state's history of conflict and underlying conflict-propensity in two ways. The first is the inclusion of a count of the total number of MIDs that a state has experienced since 1946. The second is the inclusion of a cubic polynomial of a count of the years since the last MID initiation by the state. This also addresses temporal dependence with a binary dependent variable ( Carter and Signorino 2010 ). In all models, the right-hand side variables were lagged by one year to address potential reverse causality. Robust standard errors were calculated by clustering on country. Given the binary dependent variable, I used logistic regression.

Table 1 shows the results from country-year analysis of MID initiation, where the independent variable is the aggregated count of all MPG. The analysis examines separately MPG's impact on the initiation of all MIDs and also only MIDs that result in fatalities. Once control variables are added (Models 2 and 3; table in the online appendix ), MPG is not significant for all MIDs but is highly significant and positive throughout the MIDs with fatalities models. This suggests that where military involvement in government influences conflict initiation, it is generally in those conflicts that ultimately result in actual violence.

Military participation in government and international conflict initiation

Table 2 shows results for the same analysis, but MPG is disaggregated into its security and non-security components. The results here demonstrate that the positive effect for overall MPG is driven primarily by military involvement in the non-security aspects of government. In the fatal MIDs analysis, both the security and non-security MPG counts are positive, but only non-security MPG is positive and significant ( p  < .01).

Security- and non-security MPG and international conflict initiation

Notes : Robust standard errors in parentheses.

** p  < .01, * p  < .05, + p  < .1 (two-tailed); tables with controls in the online appendix .

Figures 2 and 3 plot the predicted probabilities of a state initiating an MID that results in fatalities at different levels of MPG and non-security MPG—generated from the full models. They demonstrate large increases in the probability of fatal MID initiations as the levels of MPG increase. At 0 MPG, the predicted probability of fatal MID initiation is 4.09 percent; with the addition of one military officer, it increases to 4.28 percent (a 4.65 percent increase); and with two, it increases to 4.48 percent (a 9.54 percent increase). When there are sixteen military officers, the probability of fatal MID initiation more than doubles—to 8.31 percent—with the level of uncertainty around these predictions becoming substantially greater at the rarer, highest levels of MPG. For non-security MPG, the effects are greater than with overall MPG, with one military officer in a non-security role corresponding to a 4.44 percent chance of conflict initiation, two to a 4.67 percent chance, and with the probability doubling at fifteen officers (rather than sixteen).

Substantive effect of MPG on fatal MID initiation.

Substantive effect of Non-security MPG on fatal MID initiation.

Taken together, the main analyses are strongly suggestive of a lack of support for the Military Conservatism argument (Hypothesis 2). Neither the aggregated MPG count nor its disaggregated security and non-security components are negatively associated with conflict initiation at any conventional level of statistical significance. Rather, with fatal MIDs aggregated MPG is positively associated, and this effect is driven primarily by non-security MPG. The positive effect for aggregated MPG suggests support for the Military Aggression argument. However, the outsized role that non-security MPG plays in this effect suggests support for Civil–Military Competition .

Here, it is important to contrast the null result for security MPG with the positive and significant result for non-security MPG. The results indicate that military officers occupying positions related to foreign policy and national security—including those of minister of defense, foreign affairs, or national security adviser—do not exert a significant impact on conflict initiation. In contrast, when the military “steps out of its lane” and holds positions relating to political leadership, economic or social affairs, or territorial administration, there is a significantly greater likelihood of conflict initiation. This provides support for the Civil–Military Competition argument in relation to Military Aggression. Were the Military Aggression argument supported, logically we would expect increased military influence in the sectors of the government directly related to security and foreign policy decision-making and advising to be increasingly associated with international conflict. Rather, it is only when the military occupies positions that have little direct relevance to security and foreign affairs that international conflict initiation is more likely.

To further adjudicate between the Military Aggression and Civil–Military Competition arguments, an examination of the corollary hypotheses to the competition argument is useful. Hypothesis 3a anticipates that there will be an observable effect of non-security MPG in civilian-led regimes, while Hypothesis 3b anticipates that this will make civilian-led regimes more conflict-prone than military regimes when there is non-security MPG.  Figure 4 a shows plots of predicted probabilities at different levels of non-security MPG, conditional on a military- or civilian-led regime (table in the online appendix ). There are also two plots derived from the first that compare separately the predicted probabilities for military- (4b) and civilian-led (4c) regimes with the baseline probability of a state initiating a fatal MID derived from the same model (in black). The model from which these predicted probabilities were derived builds off of the main analyses, but aggregates the collegial military regime and personalist-military regime indicators into one “military regime” indicator to set these apart from civilian-led regimes—the base category. Security and non-security MPG were interacted with the military regime indicator to examine the impact of each type of MPG conditional on whether the regime was civilian- or military-led.

(a–c) Non-security MPG's effect on fatal MID initiation, conditional on civilian- or military-led regime.

The space between the 95 percent confidence intervals for the baseline prediction (in black,  figure 4c ) and the predictions for civilian-led regimes at different levels of non-security MPG (in green) indicates that on average, in civilian-led regimes, where non-security MPG is at least five, the probability of that state initiating a fatal MID is significantly greater than the baseline probability. The same is not true, however, for military-led regimes (in orange). This suggests that not only is there a strong effect for non-security MPG in civilian-led regimes (supporting Hypothesis 3a), the effect of non-security MPG on the conflict propensity of civilian-led regimes is greater than its effect on military-led regimes. This is suggestive of support for Hypothesis 3b. However, it cannot be said that non-security MPG makes civilian regimes more conflict-prone than military-led regimes. When the predicted probabilities for both military- and civilian-led regimes are overlaid ( Figure 4a ), the overlap of the confidence intervals suggests that there is not a statistically significant difference between the two at different levels of MPG. This is confirmed by examining the statistical significance of the difference of the predicted probabilities between the two regime categories—which is significant at the 0.05 level only when non-security MPG is greater than 21. In the rare cases where civilian-led regimes have extremely high levels of non-security MPG, they may be more conflict-prone than military-led regimes. The results do demonstrate, however, that non-security MPG in civilian-led regimes makes them more conflict-prone than other civilian regimes at a rate that is greater than the impact on military-led regimes.

MPG has a strong positive effect on the initiation of violent international conflict, but this effect is driven primarily by military officers taking non-security roles in government, indicating that the military is intruding into traditionally civilian spheres of policy-making and leadership. Taken together, the results provide strong evidence against the Military Conservatism hypothesis (Hypothesis 2). Distinguishing between the Military Aggression and Civil–Military Competition hypotheses is more difficult, but the results provide stronger support for Civil–Military Competition. The effect of MPG on fatal MID initiation is positive and significant across these analyses, but this effect is driven by military involvement in non-security roles. Critically, there is no evidence that increasing the military's role in positions related to security or foreign policy increases international conflict propensity—only when the military steps into fields outside of those that directly pertain to international conflict does the state's risk for initiating violent international conflict increase. There is also strong evidence that increasing non-security MPG has a greater effect on the conflict propensity of civilian-led regimes than military regimes, though this will only make civilian-led regimes more conflict-prone than military regimes at extremely high levels of non-security MPG.

To provide added confidence in the statistical analyses, I explored a range of additional control variables and model specifications. In all robustness checks, I focused on fatal MID initiation, examining three specifications—full MPG, security/non-security MPG, and the security/non-security MPG interaction with the military regime indicator. The full results from these analyses are available in the online appendix .

First, I parsed the non-security MPG variable into separate counts for non-security positions related to policy areas central to the political and economic administration of the country—e.g., political leadership, economic development, finance, and territorial administration—and positions in more peripheral policy areas—e.g., culture, health, education, and religion. I found that positions focused on the political, territorial, financial, and economic administration of the country account for most of the effect found for non-security MPG. This suggests that it is areas related to leadership and administration of the country that are most salient to the Civil–Military Competition that can drive increased conflict propensity.

In additional analyses, I included two binary indicators for whether or not there was any active-duty military officer in a security role or in a non-security role. I found these binary indicators to be not significant both alone and with the security and non-security MPG counters—whose effect remains substantively unchanged. This suggest that it is not the mere presence of any military officers in non-security roles that affects conflict propensity, it is their level—e.g., how deep is military intrusion into government? This holds too when the effects are separated by civilian- and military-led regimes in the model with the interaction with the military regime indicator.

Given the relative rarity of fatal MID initiation in the data, I reran the analysis using rare events logit ( King and Zeng 2001 ). In this specification, none of the findings for MPG change substantively, and indeed, in most cases achieve greater statistical significance. Second, as  figure 1 indicates, there are clear system-wide time trends in MPG. In order to ensure that these temporal trends were not an omitted factor that biased the results, I added yearly fixed effects, which did not substantively change the main findings.

In additional models, I included a counter for the number of years since the state last experienced a coup attempt—derived from Powell and Thyne's (2011) data. This also did not substantively alter the main findings. To ensure that the effect of the MPG counts was not merely picking up the effect of overall cabinet/state council size, I included the count of the total number of cabinet- or state council-level officials in the government (civilians and military). I also explored an alternative specification of military involvement in government—Military Government Share (MGS) from White (2017) . Rather than capture the overall level of MPG, MGS captures the share of cabinet-level positions held by active military officers—i.e., a proportion ranging from 0 to 1. The use of these measures does not yield results that are meaningfully different from those using MPG.

Additional international factors also may contribute to both MPG and conflict propensity. Accordingly, I replicated the main analyses with the addition of controls for both the number of contiguous states using the Correlates of War (COW) contiguity data ( Stinnett et al. 2002 ), as well as the number of alliances in which the state is engaged, using the COW alliance data ( Gibler 2009 ). The results from these analyses also did not substantively alter those from the main analyses.

Another potential concern is that the anticipation of international conflict may both contribute to a state's propensity to initiate conflict and also to bring more military officers into government. Existing literature ( Desch 1999 ; Piplani and Talmadge 2016 ; White 2017 ) has demonstrated that the effect of international conflict on MPG and coups is negative. Given this, any potential bias should set a higher bar for finding a statistically significant positive association for MPG and conflict initiation. In addition, non-security MPG exerts the strongest impact on international conflict initiation. If the anticipation of international conflict by the government was driving both increased MPG and conflict, we would expect to see this played out most clearly in Security MPG—i.e., in defense-and security-focused government positions.

I also explored the effect of MPG on the outcomes of MIDS. I reproduced the multinomial logit analysis of MID outcomes from Maoz et al. (2019) , adding to their models the independent variables from the main analyses here (expanded discussion in the online appendix ). I find that fatal MIDs initiated by states with higher levels of non-security MPG are not significantly more or less likely to end in victories (relative to stalemates or draws). There is some weak evidence that for states with higher levels of non-security MPG, a stalemate or draw is more likely than an outright loss, though these results are not significant at conventional levels. The strongest finding is that higher security MPG makes decisive outcomes more likely (victories or loses, relative to stalemates or draws). Taken with the main analyses, these results suggest that while military participation in regime leadership makes the initiation of violent international disputes more likely—particularly when that military involvement is in non-security aspects of the regime. The impact on the subsequent outcome of the dispute is largely indeterminate.

I further explore the connection between Civil–Military Competition, non-security MPG, and international conflict with an examination of Syrian intervention in Jordan during the 1970 “Black September” crisis. While the Syrian regime had come to power in a military coup in 1963, by 1970 the leadership had bifurcated into distinct and competing civilian and military camps. This was described in Syria as izdiwajiyyah —“power dualism” between the military on one hand, and the civilians, intelligence services, and non-military security forces on the other ( Batatu 1999 , 144–45). Salah al-Jadid, the head of the Syrian Ba'ath Party, led the civilian faction and favored more radical economic, social, and foreign policies—including active support for the Palestinian cause. The more moderate, military faction was headed by then-Minister of Defense General Hafez al-Assad and favored a less aggressive policy ( Collelo 1987 ; Seale 1988 , Chapter 11; Dam 1996 , 67–68). This was competition for political power between distinct civilian- and military-based factions ( Maoz 1988 , 37). Early in 1970, Assad had severed the military from the civilian Ba'ath Party and set up a separate party structure within the military ( Seale 1988 , Chapter 11).

At the same time that the Syrian regime split into competing military and civilian factions, the highest levels of the regime exhibited shared offices between civilian and military authorities. Inside Syria's cabinet in 1970, in addition to civilian ministers, there were five generals, including Assad. Assad was Minister of Defense, and there were three other “Deputy Ministers of Defense,” as well as a general as Minister of Rural Affairs. 5 The military occupation of the Ministry of Rural Affairs—belied a much greater military role in regime and Ba’ath Party politics. And while holding nominally security portfolios, two of the generals in ministry of defense roles, including Assad, also held positions in the Ba’ath Party's sixteen-member executive committee, indicating a broader non-security role as well.

On September 16, Jordan began a military operation against the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). This was motivated by the increased assertiveness and autonomy of the PLO inside Jordan. In Syria, the Civilian Party faction saw this crisis as an opportunity to both support the PLO and to strengthen its hand relative to the Army—given the Party's close identification with the Palestinian cause and the military's relative caution ( Lawson 1996 , 68–71). Forging connections with Palestinian groups was a way for factions in Syria to cultivate anti-Israeli and revolutionary bona fides in domestic politics—a strategy that the Party actively pursued in the late 1960s, “outbidding” the Army faction in terms of championing the politically popular Palestinian cause ( Lawson 1996 , 71; Borghard 2014 , 111). Further, the Party established Palestinian militias that answered directly to it—serving as an armed counterweight to the military ( Collelo 1987 , 38–39; Van Dam 1996 , 67). Pursuing aggressive support of the Palestinian cause allowed the Party to distinguish itself politically from the Army, increase their domestic political support, and build an armed counterweight to the military. This armed counterweight also allowed the Party to intervene abroad without the military.

On September 18, Palestinian units in Syria under the command of Jadid—the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) and the al-Saiqah (“Thunderbolt”) militia—crossed into Jordan to support the PLO. Two days later a single armored division with its tanks repainted with PLA markings followed ( Ashton 2006 , 148–50; Lawson 1996 , 74–75). The total force mobilized amounted to less than two divisions—and was conspicuously denied any air cover by the Syrian Air Force, which was kept grounded by its commander, Assad. This can likely be explained by the opposition to intervention by Assad and other senior commanders ( Lawson 1996 ). The small size of the force and the lack of air cover proved fatal to the intervention, with the unopposed Jordanian Air Force destroying almost 100 Syrian/PLA tanks, forcing a retreat ( Ashton 2008 ).

The near-universal consensus in the literature is that the withholding of air power stemmed from the competition between the Party and the Army (e.g., Collelo 1987 ; Lawson 1996 ; Pollack 2004 ). The piecemeal nature of the ground intervention by units under Jadid's control supports the interpretation that the intervention was on at the behest of the Party faction, not the Syrian regime as a whole ( Maoz and Yaniv 1986 ; Ashton 2008 , 195). That Assad was able to withhold forces even after the civilian side of the regime committed itself to intervention illustrates the multiple chains of command that stem from Civil–Military Competition. Military force could be both deployed to Jordan and withheld by the dueling command authorities.

In the struggle for power with the Army, the Party was able to distinguish itself in Syrian politics as the champion of the Palestinian cause. While this likely represented a sincerely held policy preference, it also allowed the Party faction to identify itself with a popular, revolutionary cause, at the expense of the Army. This allowed it to cultivate Palestinian militias answerable directly to the Ba’ath Party as a counterweight to the military and which would spearhead the incursion into Jordan.

The failure of the incursion in Jordan was a major factor in Jadid losing power less than two months later and Assad and the Army faction rising to power. While Jadid sought to blame Assad for the failure in Jordan, Assad was able to associate Jadid with the failure ( Lawson 1996 , 74–75). Pro-Palestinian adventurism was a double-edged sword for the Party faction—any success in Jordan would have represented a political windfall for the Party faction at the expense of the Army—but the Party also “owned” any failure.

Of the three arguments, the results presented here provide the strongest support for Civil–Military Competition . MPG in non-security areas is strongly associated with the initiation of violent international conflict, while MPG in security roles is not. When military officers occupy typically civilian positions, it can be indicative of shared power and a diffusion of decision-making authority between the civilians and the military. The multiple command authorities create more opportunities for policy disagreements and political rivalry to spill over into international conflict. In line with this logic, the effect of MPG on conflict propensity is greater in civilian- than military-led regimes—though only at very high levels of MPG do civilian-led regimes become more conflict-prone than military regimes.

This suggests that military involvement in government has a strong effect on a state’s conflict propensity, but it is not some inherent trait of military officers that exerts an effect on conflict, rather it is institutional arrangements that matter. There is no evidence in support of the Military Conservatism argument—no aspect of MPG is negatively and significantly associated with conflict initiation. And while the aggregated MPG count is positive and significant, this effect is driven by non-security MPG.

These findings give us a much greater understanding of the role that militaries can play in governments and in foreign policy decision-making. In between civilian- and military-dominated regimes, there is a spectrum of military involvement in government, and in this spectrum, there is the potential for substantially increased conflict propensity. Civilian-led regimes that are only partially civilianized see increases in their tendency toward conflict. This is not because the military officers in the regime are inherently aggressive, but because shared power and potential competition between civilian and military elites lends itself to poor decision-making and more opportunities for competing political actors to initiate international conflict.

A key takeaway is that civilian-led regimes should not be judged as being inherently pacific without examining the role that the military plays in such settings. While democracies and single-party states tend to, on average, be less conflict-prone ( Weeks 2014 ), the results here suggest when these regimes incorporate a substantial military presence in the government outside of a purely security role, they are more conflict-prone than civilian-led regimes without such civil–military arrangements.

It is useful to place these findings in the context of the broader civil–military relations literature. Narang and Talmadge (2018) find that militaries that are involved in politics tend to perform poorly once interstate war actually beings. (Though auxiliary analyses of a broader set of MID outcomes in this note does not provide clear evidence to support or contradict these findings.) Narang and Talmadge's findings relate also to White's (2017) finding that international conflicts that end badly are likely to lead to military withdrawal from civilian government roles. Bringing these works together with the findings here presents a compelling story regarding civilian-led regimes that share political power with their militaries: regimes with military officers in non-security roles are more likely to initiate international conflict, which may go poorly, and these losses tend to lead to periods of reform that depoliticize and professionalize the military, reducing its role. Future research first should seek to more fully unpack the relationship between MPG and performance in international conflict. A second question is the degree to which regimes who initiate conflict stemming from civil–military conflict “repeat their mistakes”—i.e., do regimes that initiate international conflict because of the pathologies brought on by shared civil–military power reform to avoid that dynamic in the future?

The data used in this project were collected with support from a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Improvement Grant (SES #1424001). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the NSF or the US government.

Peter B. White ( [email protected] ) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Auburn University.

Author's note : The author would like to thank Richard Betts, Risa Brooks, David Cunningham, Michael Desch, Paul Huth, Michael Kenwick, Lucia Tiscornia, and Robie White, as well as three anonymous reviewers at International Studies Quarterly, for their valuable feedback. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2017 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association International Security Studies Section, as well as the 2017 Emerging Scholars in Grand Strategy workshop at the University of Notre Dame. The data used in this project were collected with support from a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Improvement Grant (SES #1424001). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the NSF or the US government. The data underlying this article are available on the ISQ Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/isq .

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Another possible argument is that military officers’ preferences depend on capabilities. Weak state capabilities make for conservative military views and vice versa. For this to be true, we would expect that any impact of MPG be conditional on state capabilities. I explore this in the online appendix and do not find strong evidence of a conditional effect.

Certainly there are cases where there will be salient intra-regime divides between political factions that include both civilians and military officers. It has been argued, for example, that this was the case in China during Mao's rule ( Whitson 1972 ), where the lines between Communist Party (CCP) cadres and PLA officers could be blurry. However, even in such cases, there is still a military institutional identity to which at least some military officers will adhere.

This reflects the proportion of states that have at least one active-duty military officers serving in each category. When military officers serve in a non-security capacity, they tend to be present in greater numbers. In countries where there is at least one military officer in a security role, the average number in a security role is 1.682; for officers in a non-security role, it is 3.327.

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Article contents

Civil–military relations.

• Mackubin Thomas Owens Mackubin Thomas Owens The Institute of World Politics
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.123
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 30 November 2017

Civil–military relations is an interdisciplinary area of research, reflecting the work of political scientists, military, sociologists, and historians. History and culture, the constitution of the state and the statutes and practices arising therefrom, changes in the international security environment, technology, the character of conflict, and the changing concept of “soldier-hood” all influence the civil–military relations of a state. There are many possible patterns of civil–military relations that provide different answers to the questions of who controls the military and how, the degree of military influence appropriate for a given society, the appropriate role of the military in a given polity, who serves, and the effectiveness of the military instrument that a given civil–military relations produces. Moreover, there is no “general” or “unified field” theory that successfully explains all of these patterns. For a variety of reasons, Samuel Huntington's institutional theory remains the dominant paradigm for examining civil–military relations. When it comes to the question of civilian control of the military, Peter Feaver’s agency theory corrects some of the flaws in Huntington’s theory. Morris Janowitz and the military sociologists also provide useful insights, especially regarding the question of who serves and related issues. In the case of concordance theory, critics argue that the definition of military intervention sets the bar too low to be meaningful. Ultimately, the patterns of civil–military relations affect national security because of their impact on strategic assessment.

• civil–military relations
• military influence
• military instrument
• institutional theory
• agency theory
• concordance theory
• military intervention
• strategic assessment
• national security

Introduction

The term “civil–military relations” refers broadly to the interaction between the armed force of a state as an institution, and the other sectors of the society in which the armed force is embedded. It is an intensely interdisciplinary area of research, reflecting the work of political scientists, military sociologists, and historians. Arguably, the field of civil–military relations really took off – at least in the United States – as social scientists became part of the war effort in World War II. Much of this early civil–military relations research focused on the individual service member and small unit cohesion (Stouffer et al. 1949 –50; Gray 1959 ).

Subsequently, there have been several “waves” of civil–military research (Desch 1999 :2). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Samuel Huntington ( 1957 ), Morris Janowitz ( 1960 ), and Samuel Finer ( 1962 ) reoriented research away from individuals and toward the relationships among military institutions, societies, and governments in the post–World War II period. But given the belief that military intervention in the United States was highly unlikely, the focus of much postwar civil–military relations research was comparative, with special attention to emerging states in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East (Shils 1962 ).

A second wave emerged in the 1970s in response to the belief that US–Soviet détente might create the conditions for international peace (Betts 1977 ; Perlmutter 1977 ; Nordlinger 1977 ). A third wave broke with the end of the Cold War and continues to this day. Much of this wave's research has focused on civilian control of the military in liberal democracies (Dunlap 1992 ; Weigley 1993 ; Kohn 1994 ; 2002 ; Luttwak 1994 ; Foster 1997 ; Holsti 2001 ) and the consequences of a possible “gap” between liberal society and a possibly distinct military culture (Ricks 1999 ; Guttman 2000 ; Feaver and Kohn 2001 ). It has not been unusual during this period to hear warnings about a “crisis” in civil–military relations (Foster 1997 ; Kohn 1994 ; 2002 ; 2008 ).

For the most part, those who study civil–military relations take for granted that there are significant differences between the leaders, institutions, values, prerogatives, attitudes, and practices of a society at large, on the one hand, and those of that society's military establishment, on the other (Welch 1993 :507–11). Paradoxically, these differences apply even to military governments, since the distinction has to do with functional roles, not background. The functional role of the “political” leader, whether he wears a uniform or not, is to address the whole array of domestic and foreign affairs that the state may face. The functional role of the “military” leader is to run the military on a day-to-day basis (Brooks 2008 :3).

The basis of civil–military relations is a dilemma: what Peter Feaver has called the civil–military problematique , which requires a given polity to balance two concerns. On the one hand, it must create a military establishment strong enough to protect the state. On the other, it must somehow ensure that this same military establishment does not turn on the state that established it (Feaver 1996 ).

The response of a polity to the civil–military problematique can be seen as a bargain negotiated among three parties: the citizens, the civilian governmental authorities, and the uniformed military. The purpose of this bargain is to allocate prerogatives and responsibilities among the parties.

Obviously, the terms of the bargain and the bargain itself will vary from state to state and, even within a single polity, may vary across time. For instance, in liberal democracies, the playing field is relatively balanced: all three parties have more or less of a say in negotiating the terms of the bargain. Although the citizenry may not be directly involved in drawing up the bargain, the bargain cannot be sustained without their acquiescence. For instance, during the period of the Early US Republic, important political and military leaders would have preferred a larger regular establishment, but strong opposition to the idea of a standing army rendered such a preference moot (Cress 1982 ).

This is not to say that in a liberal democracy, the parties to the bargain are equal. The liberal democratic civil–military bargain is the outcome of an “unequal dialogue.” It is “a dialogue, in that both [the civilian and military] sides expressed their views bluntly, indeed, sometimes offensively, and not once but repeatedly – and unequal, in that the final authority of the civilian leader was unambiguous and unquestioned” (E.A. Cohen 2002 :247). In liberal democracies, the military, despite having a monopoly on coercive power, generally accepts its position relative to the other parties.

In authoritarian states, conversely, the role of the people at large is greatly curtailed. In the extreme case, the military may be coeval with the government, subject to the distinction made above. As has been said about Prussia, most states have an army but, in the case of Prussia, the army had a state.

From time to time throughout the history of a polity, certain circumstances – political, strategic, social, technological, etc. – change to such a degree that the terms of the existing civil–military bargain become obsolete. The resulting disequilibrium and tension lead the parties to renegotiate the bargain in order to restore equilibrium.

There are five sets of questions that lie at the heart of the civil–military bargain at a given time (Owens forthcoming). The first category concerns the issue of who controls the military , and how. In authoritarian or praetorian states, the question is largely moot. On the other hand, liberal societies often take civilian control for granted, but doing so begs several further questions: does civilian control refer simply to the dominance of civilians within the executive branch – the president/prime minister or the secretary/minister of defense? What is the role of the legislative branch in controlling the military instrument? Is the military establishment “unified,” that is, does it speak with anything like a single voice vis-à-vis the civil government? What is the nature of military advice? Should military leaders “insist” that their advice be heeded? What courses of action are available to military leaders who believe the civilian authorities are making bad decisions?

The second question is closely related to the first. What degree of military influence is appropriate for a given society? To what extent does or should the military intervene in domestic affairs? The extreme form of military influence is a coup d’état. Another form of military intervention in domestic politics is praetorianism. How does the government avoid or limit military intervention? For the most part, advanced liberal societies have avoided these forms of military intervention. But even in the case of a liberal society, it is appropriate to ascertain the proper scope of military affairs. To what extent should the military influence domestic or foreign policy? Should active duty officers lobby for programs and policies?

The third question concerns the appropriate role of the military in a given polity. Is it to fight and win the nation's wars or engage in constabulary actions? What kind of wars should the military be preparing to fight? Should the focus of the military be foreign or domestic? States have answered this question differently at different times and under different circumstances. For example, throughout most of its history, the United States Army was a constabulary force. It oriented itself toward large-scale conflicts against foreign enemies only in the 1930s. The end of the Cold War and the attacks of 9/11 have suggested new answers, e.g. a focus on “irregular warfare” (counterinsurgency and counterterrorism) as well as an openness to the use of the military in domestic affairs. What impact do such issues have on civil–military relations?

Fourth, who serves? Is military service an obligation of citizenship or something else? How are officers accessed and promoted? Is the accession and promotion of officers based on merit and achievement or political affiliation, social class, ethnicity, or religion? Obviously, such questions have been answered differently from state to state and even differently within a state at different times under different circumstances. Through most of its early history, the United States maintained a small regular peacetime establishment that mostly conducted limited constabulary operations. During wartime, the several states were responsible for raising soldiers for federal service, either as militia or volunteers. Conscription was the norm in the United States from World War II until the 1970s. Today the US military is a volunteer professional force. But even this force continues to evolve, as debates over such issues as women in combat and service by open homosexuals make clear (Moskos et al. 2000 ; Miller and Williams 2001 ). Other states pursue different approaches.

Finally, how effective is the military instrument that a given pattern of civil–military relations produces? All of the other questions mean little if the military instrument is unable to ensure the survival of the state. If there is no constitution, the question of constitutional balance doesn't matter. Does effectiveness require a military culture distinct in some ways from the society it serves? What impact does societal structure have on military effectiveness? What impact does political structure exert? Is the effectiveness of militaries in some developing states degraded as a result of their primary role in ensuring domestic security and regime survival? What impact does a given pattern of civil–military relations have on the effectiveness of strategic decision making processes (Brooks 2008 ; Desch 2008 )?

In general, there are two lenses through which to examine these questions. The first is the institutional lens, which focuses on how the actors in a polity, including the military as an organization, interact within the institutional framework of a given polity's government. The most influential institutional theory of civil–military relations was advanced fifty years ago by Samuel Huntington in his seminal work, The Soldier and the State ( 1957 ). The primary concerns of institutional theorists are control of the military, the proper sphere of the military, and the ability of the military to maintain its effectiveness in protecting the interests of the state – in the face of a “social imperative” that may be hostile to the military “way.”

The second lens is sociological or cultural . This lens focuses on the broad question of military culture vs. liberal society; the role of individuals and groups, e.g. women, minorities, enlisted servicemen and women within the military and the relationships among them; the effectiveness of individual service members in combat; small unit cohesion; the relationship between military service and citizenship (to include the civic republican tradition); the nature of military service (occupation, profession, etc.); and the relationship of militaries and the societies from which they stem. The origins of the sociological perspective on military affairs can be traced to Morris Janowitz ’s 1960 book, The Professional Soldier (Burke 1993 ; 1998 ).

A variation of this perspective is “concordance theory,” which rejects the idea that “healthy” civil–military relations necessarily require a distinct separation between the civilian and military realm. Israel, for instance, has little separation between the two and yet civil–military relations seem stable (Schiff 1995 ; 2009 ).

Questions of civil–military relations are complex. It is unlikely that one analytical approach will provide anything close to the whole picture. A “central task of the political sociology of the military is to look at both the military institution and the political system and to determine how the special institutional characteristics of a particular military establishment shape its response to influences coming from the political system” (Stepan 1971 :55).

Of course, an important reason for studying civil–military relations is to determine what constitutes “good” and “bad” relations. Such a determination is of more than merely academic interest. It has implications for the very survival of a polity. As the civil–military problematique would suggest, the worst-case consequences of dysfunctional civil–military relations would include catastrophic failure on the battlefield leading to the defeat of the state in a war or the seizure of the government by the military itself.

But dysfunctional civil–military relations may generate other adverse outcomes short of the catastrophic ones. For example, poor civil–military relations may lead to failures in strategic assessment (Brooks 2008 ). This is true during both war and peacetime. In the case of war, poor strategic assessment may contribute directly or indirectly to defeat on the battlefield because strategic leaders, both political and military, fail to share information or cooperate in other ways (Snyder 1984 ; Brooks 2008 ). A case in point is the US war in Iraq. Many observers have contended that most of the problems the United States faced in this conflict were the result of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's management style (Herspring 2008 ), the insulated nature of the Bush administration, or Rumsfeld's penchant for simply overruling advice that did not support his preferences. However, Brooks argues persuasively that these problems, especially with regard to post-conflict planning, resulted from civil–military pathologies created by earlier debates over “transformation” in the Pentagon between Rumsfeld and the uniformed military. These pathologies resulted in oversight mechanisms that weakened strategic coordination (Brooks 2008 :226–55).

In the case of peacetime, poor strategic assessment may lead to an overestimation of an adversary's capabilities, resulting in the wasting of resources on defense. On the other hand, underestimating adversaries’ capabilities leads to the allocation of too few resources to defense.

Criteria for judging the health of civil–military relations might include: (1) relative harmony between civilians and the military; (2) the effectiveness of the armed forces in executing their missions; and (3) constitutional balance. “Good” civil–military relations would seem to exhibit some combination of the following: (1) comity and a low number of disagreements between civilian and military decision makers; (2) success in war and peace and the absence of policy–strategy “mismatches”; and (3) a lack of encroachment by either party on to civil–military decisions on the “turf” of the other.

Some authors dispute the notion that harmony and comity necessarily make for “good” civil–military relations, arguing that tension between civilian authorities and the military is healthy. For instance, a low number of disagreements between civilian and military decision makers may simply mean that the civilians have appointed “yes men” who can always be expected not to “rock the boat” (E.A. Cohen 2002 ). This charge was frequently leveled against former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld .

Unfortunately, “except for the most obvious cases, there is no consensus in the recent literature as to what constitutes ‘good’ civil–military relations or ‘effective’ civilian control of the military” (Snider and Carlton-Carew 1995 :16). In the case of liberal democracies, the absence of coups would seem to set the bar too low. Most scholars focus on the extent to which civilian preferences prevail when there are differences between the civilians and the military (Huntington 1957 :83–5; Feaver 1996 ; Desch 1999 :4–5; Kohn 2002 ). Others equate healthy civil–military relations with the maintenance of civilian values and the lack of military domination of society (Millett 1979 ). Of course, a critical measure of good civil–military relations is success in war. Paradoxically, this may require civilian intervention in military affairs, generating significant civilian–military friction (E.A. Cohen 2001 ).

Determining “bad” civil–military relations is less difficult. The two polar extremes of bad relations are militarism and de-bellicization . The former is the dominance of military institutions, values, prerogatives, attitudes and practices, etc. within society (Ekirch 1956 ; Vagts 1959 ). The latter is the denigration or even complete extirpation of military virtues from a society (Huntington 1957 ; Guttman 2000 ; Sheehan 2008 ), the most dangerous consequence of which is defeat in war. While some have suggested that the United States is moving toward one extreme or the other (Lasswell 1941 ; Ekirch 1956 ; Bacevich 2005 ), the evidence to support such claims is weak. The real civil–military relations issues for most polities, including developing states, concern the mutual influence of the civilian and military sectors of society. “The problem of the modern state is not armed revolt but the relation of the [military] expert and the politician” (Huntington 1957 :20; Welch 1992 ).

Influences on Civil–Military Relations

A number of factors influence the civil–military relations of a state. The first of these are its history and culture. All too often, students of civil–military relations treat history and culture as peripheral issues, “intervening variables” that lie between the “real” factor to be studied – the independent variable, whatever it may be – and the dependent variable, the state or pattern of civil–military relations (Desch 1999 :11). But the substantial differences in patterns of civil–military relations between Prussia and Great Britain in the nineteenth century and between the United States and Israel today are directly attributable to differences in culture and history (Craig 1955 ; Strachan 1997 ; Schiff 2009 ).

The political institutions of a state also exert a strong influence on its civil–military relations by allocating relative power to civilian and military leaders. Clearly, different regime types will exhibit different patterns of civil–military relations (Janowitz 1964 : Perlmutter 1970 ; S.P. Cohen 1984 ; 2002 ; Avant 1994 ; Millett and Maslowski 1994 ; Bland 2000 ; Peri 2003 ; Lewis 2006 ; Schiff 2009 ). The military may be dominant, subordinate to civilian control, or share power (Brooks 2008 :33–4). Even in highly militarized regimes, the military may only be one constituent part. For example, in the Soviet Union, the military had to compete against the Communist Party apparatus and the state security system, the KGB, for influence (Nichols 1993 ). The People's Liberation Army (PLA) faces similar challenges in China.

In liberal democracies, civil–military relations are affected by the constitution of the state and the statutes and practices arising therefrom. In such polities, civil–military relations are complicated by the vast array of players in both the civilian and military realms.

The former consists of the executive and legislative branches of government, both of which are further divided. The executive branch includes the president or prime minister, the appropriate cabinet officers, especially the secretary/minister of defense, advisory committees, e.g. the National Security Council in the United States, and non-cabinet civilian appointees such as the service secretaries. The fact that the interests of political appointees and career civil servants are not always the same and that the interests of both may differ from those of the uniformed military has an important impact on civil–military relations. Nor are legislatures monolithic, consisting as they do of members from a number of political parties. Structure matters as well. The national legislature of the United States is bicameral. In the United States, as in most liberal regimes, the legislative branch does most of its business in committees.

The same goes for the military realm, which usually includes a number of uniformed services. For many years in the United States, the services were the main players on the military side. The result was often a high degree of interservice rivalry, which reached its peak in the United States during the “defense unification” debates after World War II. This extreme manifestation of interservice rivalry played out not only within the newly formed Department of Defense, but also in Congress and the press (Caraley 1965 ; Keiser 1982 ; Boettcher 1992 ). While competition among separate services for mission and resources may contribute to civil–military pathologies, such competition may also have some beneficial effects, e.g. division of labor, a prudent focus on planning future forces, and innovation (Sapolsky 1997 ; Owens 2006 ). But since the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Act in 1987 , power has flowed from the services to the commanders of the “unified commands,” the joint regional and functional organizations that are tasked with the actual conduct of operations and deployments.

Nonetheless, the individual services still exert a great deal of influence on US policy. As Huntington observed, each military service is built around a particular “strategic concept […] which defines the role of the service in national policy, public support which furnishes it with the resources to perform this role, and organizational structure which groups the resources so as to implement most effectively the strategic concept” ( 1954 :483). These paradigms, which the late Carl Builder called “masks of war” (Builder 1989 ), have shaped the services’ institutional approaches to influencing policy, especially in Congress.

The power of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) was also enhanced by Goldwater-Nichols (Locher 2002 ). Previously, CJCS was merely the spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a corporate body consisting of the four service chiefs, who in their collective capacity were the source of military advice to the president. But Goldwater-Nichols made the Chairman, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a whole, the primary military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense. Along with the large Joint Staff, the Chairman per se has become a major player in civil–military affairs, despite the fact that he is not in the chain of command. Precedent is also important. In the case of the United States, the principle of military subordination to civilian authority seems to have been internalized by each generation of officers based on the precedent set by George Washington at the end of the American Revolution. Most analysts agree that the likelihood of a coup d’état in the United States is low, but others wonder if the power of this precedent has been weakened over the past few years. But the low likelihood of a coup in the United States does not mean that military actors cannot still find other ways to undermine balanced civil–military relations.

However, precedent is not always determinate. The military establishments of India and Pakistan were both shaped by the British military tradition, but the civil–military relations of the two countries are vastly different (Schiff 2009 ).

Changes in the international security environment also influence civil–military relations, although writers have disagreed about the direction of that influence. Harold Lasswell contended that a greater level of external threat would move civil–military relations in the direction of a “garrison state” (Lasswell 1941 ). Michael Desch , on the other hand, has argued that states facing high external threats and low internal threats have the most stable civil–military relations (Desch 1999 ).

Technology has an impact on patterns of civil–military relations. For instance, the destructive power of nuclear weapons not only increased the role of civilians in the development of strategy, but also reduced the leeway of the military in operational and even tactical matters (Feaver 1992 ). The proliferation of information technology increases the potential for civilian involvement in operational details. Social forces play an important role as well in shaping civil–military relations, as illustrated by debates over racial integration, women in combat, and open homosexuals serving in the military (Moskos et al. 2000 ; Miller and Williams 2001 ; Williams 2008 ).

The character of conflict affects civil–military relations. Changes in the kinds of war the military is expected to fight have potential implications for the process of strategic decision-making, the composition and operations of military organizations, and the interagency cooperation process during the course of a conflict. Patterns of civil–military relations during traditional interstate war may well differ from those during the conduct of a counterinsurgency. Heavy reliance on special operations forces has implications for congressional oversight and the increasing reliance on contractors will continue to complicate civil–military relations.

Finally, there is the changing concept of “soldier-hood.” In the case of the United States, the idealized model for military service throughout most of American history was the “citizen-soldier.” A civilian most of the time, he answered his country's call in times of emergency, returning to civilian pursuits once the emergency had passed. Since the end of the draft in 1973 , the citizen-soldier has given way to the long-term professional, a soldier akin to the Roman legionnaire (Abrams and Bacevich 2001 ; E.A. Cohen 2001 ). Other countries face similar issues (S.P. Cohen 1984 ; 2002 ; Gal 1986 ; Haqqani 2005 ).

Theories of Civil–Military Relations

As the Prussian “philosopher of war,” Carl von Clausewitz, observed: “theory exists so that one need not start afresh each time sorting out the material and plowing through it, but will find it readily to hand and in good order” (Clausewitz 1976 :141). A theory seeks to illuminate comprehensively and systematically the link between cause and effect.

At a minimum, a theory must be able to describe usefully the phenomenon or phenomena under investigation and explain it. This is the empirical function of theory. But theories often are employed to do two other things. First, based on its description and explanation of the phenomenon under examination, a theory may be used to predict , at least in a general way, what might happen under similar conditions in the future. A theory may also serve as the basis for prescribing policy, for translating “is” to “ought.” This normative function links the descriptive and predictive qualities of the theory to the policy of the state.

Applied to civil–military relations, a workable theory would meet the minimum requirement to describe and explain the nature and characteristics of different patterns of civil–military relations. But most theories of civil–military relations are also used to specify general conditions either conducive or detrimental to healthy relations (Desch 1999 :11). Finally, a theory of civil–military relations may prescribe what steps a state must take in order to achieve or maintain healthy relations.

Clearly this meaning of theory is less formal than that found in the physical sciences. It is more based on intuition, experience, and an understanding of the rules arising out of practice. What Michael Handel observed with regard to theory in war applies with equal force to theories of civil–military relations: “the development of the study and theory of war is (and probably will remain) in a pre-Newtonian, pre-scientific, or non-formal stage” (Handel 2001 :xvii).

The need for a theory of civil–military relations is driven by the aforementioned civil–military problematique (Feaver 1996 ). In order to ensure its security, society delegates the authority for the use of force to a subgroup within society. How does society ensure that this subgroup does what it is supposed to – protect society from its enemies, both foreign and domestic – without turning on society itself?

The problematique implies that there are two polar dangers for a society when it comes to civil–military relations. If the military is weakened in order to ensure that it will not turn on society itself, it may face defeat on the battlefield. But if the military is given everything it needs to ensure that it will prevail on the battlefield, it may be in a position of political dominance, able to dictate policy to the civilians. These correspond to de-bellicization and militarism.

The extreme case of military dominance is a coup. But even short of a coup, there is always the possibility that the military will not do what civilian authorities want it to do. For instance, in the United States the uniformed military has often employed such techniques as leaks to the press, lobbying the public and Congress, “foot-dragging,” and “slow-rolling” to thwart the policy goals of civilian authorities (Feaver 2003 ; Owens forthcoming).

Samuel Huntington: An Institutional Theory of Civil–Military Relations

The theory of civil–military affairs prevalent in most Western liberal polities is based on a distinction between the civil and military realms. This approach can be traced to the practice of eighteenth and nineteenth century European states and to the theory of war advanced by Clausewitz. Rebecca Schiff calls this approach “separation” theory (Schiff 2009 ).

Although the Prussian state that Clausewitz served is often seen as the exemplar of militarism, his formulation of war as a continuation of politics or policy ( politik ) by other means (Clausewitz 1976 :87) implies a distinction between political decision makers and the military. “No one starts a war – or rather no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter its operational objective” ( 1976 :579).

Actual war as opposed to war in theory (absolute war) “is only a branch of political activity” that “is in no sense autonomous” (Clausewitz 1976 :605). “The character and general shape of any war should mainly be assessed in light of political factors and conditions” ( 1976 :607). Since “absolute” war is theoretically unlimited, driven by its own logic to the extreme of violence and exhaustion, it is the political purpose of war that makes war “rational,” providing war with a purpose beyond its own logic.

The most influential theory of civil–military relations in the West in general and the United States in particular is the institutional theory advanced half a century ago by the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington in his book, The Soldier and the State ( 1957 ). The Soldier and the State has had a great and lasting effect on American thinking about the way the military interacts with civilian society, especially within the uniformed military. Indeed, the US military has come to endorse many of its general conclusions and has made it central to its civil–military relations education.

Huntington's main descriptive or empirical claim was that American civil–military relations were shaped by three variables: first, the external threat, which he called the functional imperative ; and two components of what he called the societal imperative , i.e. “the social forces, ideologies and institutions dominant within the society” (Huntington 1957 :2–3).

The first component of the societal imperative is the constitutional structure of the United States, the legal-institutional framework that guides political affairs generally and civil–military affairs specifically. The second is ideology , the prevailing worldview of a state. Huntington identified four ideologies: conservative pro-military, fascist pro-military, Marxist antimilitary, and liberal antimilitary ( 1957 :89–94). He argued that the fourth was the dominant ideology of the United States ( 1957 :143).

Huntington contended that both components of the societal imperative – the constitutional structure and the American ideology of antimilitary liberalism – had remained constant throughout American history. Accordingly, the entire burden of explaining any change in civilian control or level of military armament would have to rest with the functional imperative, i.e. the external threat ( 1957 :2, 156).

Huntington further contended that liberalism was “the gravest domestic threat to American military security” ( 1957 :457). “The tension between the demands of military security and the values of American liberalism,” Huntington continued, “can, in the long run, be relieved only by the weakening of the security threat or the weakening of liberalism” ( 1957 :456). Thus the requisite for military security is a shift in basic American values from liberalism to conservatism. Only an environment that is sympathetically conservative will permit American military leaders to combine the political power which society thrusts upon them with the military professionalism without which society cannot endure ( 1957 :464).

According to Huntington, America's antimilitary liberal ideology produces “extirpation” – the virtual elimination of military forces – when the external threat is low, and “transmutation” – the refashioning of the military in accordance with liberalism, which leads to the loss of “peculiarly military characteristics” – when the external threat is high. In Huntington's view, the problem for the United States in a protracted contest such as the Cold War was that while transmutation may work for short periods of time during which concentrated military effort is required, e.g. a world war, it would not assure adequate military capability over the long term.

In the context of the Cold War, Huntington argued that the ideological component of America's societal imperative – liberal antimilitary ideology – would make it impossible to build the forces necessary to confront the functional imperative in the form of the Soviet threat to the United States and to permit US military leaders to take the steps necessary to provide national security. Thus the predictive element of Huntington's theory held that without a change in the societal imperative, the United States would never be able to build the military forces necessary to confront the USSR.

The prescriptive or normative element of Huntington's theory was to suggest a way for the United States to deal with the dilemma raised by Feaver's civil–military problematique : how to minimize the power of the military and thus make civilian control more certain without sacrificing protection against external enemies. His prescription, which he called “objective civilian control,” has the virtue of simultaneously maximizing military subordination and military fighting power. Objective control guarantees the protection of civilian society from external enemies and from the military themselves.

In Huntington's prescriptive or normative theory, the key to objective control is “the recognition of autonomous military professionalism,” i.e., respect for an independent military sphere of action. Interference or meddling in military affairs undermines military professionalism and so undermines objective control ( 1957 :83).

This constitutes a bargain between civilians and soldiers. On the one hand, civilian authorities grant a professional officer corps autonomy in the realm of military affairs. On the other, “a highly professional officer corps stands ready to carry out the wishes of any civilian group which secures legitimate authority within the state” (Huntington 1957 :84). In other words, if the military is granted autonomy in its sphere, the result is a professional military that is politically neutral and voluntarily subordinate to civilian control. Of course, autonomy is not absolute. Huntington argues that while the military has responsibility for operational and tactical decisions, civilians must decide matters of policy and grand strategy.

While objective control weakens the military politically, rendering it politically sterile or neutral, it actually strengthens the military's ability to defend society. A professional military obeys civilian authority. A military that does not obey is not professional.

At the opposite pole from objective control lay Huntington's worst-case situation, “subjective control,” which constituted a systematic violation of the autonomy necessary for a professional military and produced transmutation. Huntington argued that subjective control was detrimental to military effectiveness and would lead to failure on the battlefield by forcing the military to defer to civilians in the military realm ( 1957 :80–3).

Morris Janowitz: The Sociological Response to Huntington

Morris Janowitz offered an early critique of Huntington from the standpoint of sociology (Janowitz 1960 ). The sociological perspective does not ignore the central civil–military relations question of institutional theory: civilian control. However, it focuses most of its attention on the relationship between individuals in the military and civilian society. With regard to Huntington's civilian–military divide, Janowitz argued that the distinction between the civilian and military roles that lay at the heart of Huntington's theory had been blurred by the emergence of nuclear weapons and limited war. For Janowitz, this state of affairs was only the latest manifestation of the way in which emerging technologies and the political interaction between civilian and military elites were causing the two spheres to converge.

Like Huntington, Janowitz focused on the meaning of a professional officer corps. But while Huntington saw military professionalism as a fixed standard, an “ideal-type” based on a strict division of labor between the uniformed military and civilians, Janowitz conceived professionalism as dynamic, changing in response to new sociological conditions. Janowitz argued that, given the central place of the US–Soviet rivalry in both international and domestic politics, even a professional military could not avoid some degree of politicization.

With regard to Huntington's functional imperative, Janowitz contended that in the nuclear age the military needed to adopt a new military role and military selfconception – that of a constabulary force. According to Janowitz, “the military establishment becomes a constabulary force when it is continuously prepared to act, committed to the minimum use of force, and seeks viable international relations, rather than victory” ( 1960 :418). Obviously, the constabulary concept blurs the distinctions between peace and war. Accordingly, the soldier comes to resemble a police officer instead of a warrior. This leads to politicization of the military and raises a challenge to civilian supremacy, as the military attempts to use the political system to resist unwelcome policy direction.

Janowitz's solution to the new problems created by the constabulary concept was to reject Huntington's concept of objective control of the military. Instead of autonomy, he prescribed greater civilian oversight of the military at all levels. He pointed out that civilians possess three main mechanisms for controlling the uniformed military: the budget process; the allocation of roles and missions; and advice to the president concerning the use of the military to advance US interests in the international realm. But the military, Janowitz argued, had found ways to undermine civilian control ( 1960 :363–7).

Although Janowitz proposed a number of external mechanisms for strengthening civilian control, he, like Huntington, ultimately fell back on professionalism. But unlike Huntington's professional officer who eschewed politics altogether, Janowitz's officer corps would be politically aware and possess functions and expertise that overlapped with those of its civilian counterpart.

Janowitz's heirs have taken military sociology far beyond his own conclusions, generating a vast and rich literature that examines how the military and civil society have shaped each other. But when it comes to the critical issue of ensuring civilian control of the military, Janowitz did not really go much beyond Huntington. He merely concluded that to ensure civilian control, Huntington's “self-imposed professional standards,” the basis of objective control, needed to be supplemented by a “meaningful integration” of military and civilian values (Janowitz 1960 :420).

Despite Janowitz's sociological challenge to Huntington's institutional theory of civil–military relations, the latter still dominates the field. The reason for this continued dominance is its elegance as an ambitious treatment of civil–military relations and the fact that his prescriptions for how best to structure civil–military relations continue to find a very receptive ear within the American officer corps (Feaver 2003 :7).

Most recent attempts to reconstruct the theoretical edifice of civil–military relations constitute refinements of Huntington and Janowitz rather than providing a new theoretical alternative (Avant 1994 ; Desch 1999 ). Exceptions include Peter Feaver , who has offered a civil–military relations theory based on a “principal–agent” framework; Rebecca Schiff , who argues on behalf of a theory of concordance that takes issue with the “separation” theory that she attributes to both Huntington and Feaver (Schiff 2009 ); and Risa Brooks , who, while maintaining the civil–military distinction, has usefully modified aspects of existing theories to create a “distributional approach” that aids in understanding how various patterns of civil–military relations influence strategic assessment (Brooks 2008 ).

Peter Feaver: Agency Theory and Civil–Military Relations

Feaver argues that although Huntington's theory is “elegant,” it doesn't fit the evidence of the Cold War. For instance, one of Huntington's testable hypotheses was that a liberal society (such as the United States) would not produce sufficient military might to survive the Cold War. But in fact, the United States did prevail during the Cold War despite the fact that the country did not abandon liberalism (Feaver 2003 :27). The continued divergence between civilian and military preferences during the Cold War casts doubt on the predictive power of Huntington's empirical theory.

The same problems affect Huntington's prescriptive theory. During the Cold War, the military became more “civilianized,” the officer corps more politicized, and civilians habitually intruded into the military realm (Feaver 2003 :37). Feaver concludes that the disjunction between Huntington's theory and the available evidence requires another theory. To provide such an alternative, Feaver turns to “agency theory.”

The problem that agency theory seeks to analyze is this: given different incentives, how does a principal ensure that the agent is doing what the principal wants him to do? Is the agent “working” or “shirking”? The major question for the principal is the extent to which he will monitor the agent. Will monitoring be intrusive or non-intrusive? This decision is affected by the cost of monitoring. The higher the cost of monitoring, the less intrusive the monitoring is likely to be.

The agent's incentives for working or shirking are affected by the likelihood that shirking will be detected by the principal and that the agent will then be punished for it. The less intrusive the principal's monitoring, the less likely that the agent's shirking will be detected. Feaver argues that shirking by the military takes many forms: the most obvious is disobedience, but it also includes “foot-dragging” and leaks to the press designed to undercut policy or individual policy makers.

Feaver posits four general patterns of civil–military relations: (1) civilians monitor intrusively, the military works; (2) civilians monitor intrusively, the military shirks; (3) civilians monitor unintrusively, the military works; and (4) civilians monitor unintrusively, the military shirks. He then shows that Huntington's postulated outcomes are in fact special cases of his own more general agency theory of civil–military relations: Huntington's “objective control” corresponds to pattern (3); his “subjective control” corresponds to pattern (1) (Feaver 2003 :119).

Feaver uses the Cold War to test Huntington's prescriptive theory. Huntington had argued that the best way to ensure both military effectiveness and subordination to civilian control was through pattern (3) – objective control (Feaver 1996 :33). However, it turns out that the civil–military relations pattern during the Cold War that most corresponds to the evidence is pattern (1) – Huntington's nightmare civil–military scenario – subjective control (Feaver 2003 :178). Indeed, agency theory predicts that pattern (1) will prevail when there is a wide gap between the preferences of the civilians and the military, when the costs of intrusive monitoring are relatively low, and when the military thinks the likelihood of punishment for shirking are fairly high. Feaver argues persuasively that the evidence from this period supports these hypotheses. Yet according to Huntington's own criteria for professionalism – expertise, responsibility, and corporateness (Huntington 1957 :8–10) – the US military remained highly professional despite extensive civilian intervention.

Of critical importance in establishing Cold War civil–military relations was the firing of a popular military hero (MacArthur) by an unpopular president (Truman). This dramatic action shaped the expectations of the military concerning the likelihood of punishment for shirking during the Cold War period (Feaver 2003 :129).

Feaver explains the post–Cold War “crisis” in civil–military relations in a way that integrates a number of features that arose in the 1990s – the end of the Cold War, a growing gap between civilian and military elites, the personal history of President Clinton , the creation of a powerful chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Act of 1986 , and the occupation of this office by a popular, politically savvy general – Colin Powell (Feaver 2003 :180–233).

Feaver argues that civil–military relations pattern (2) prevailed during the 1990s: civilians monitored intrusively, the military “shirked.” The cost of intrusive monitoring went down. The preferences of civilian and military elites diverged in many important ways, increasing incentives for the military to pursue its own preferences. Finally, the expectation of punishment for shirking decreased as a result of the election of Bill Clinton , whose equivocal relationship with the military made punishment unlikely. Combined with a powerful and popular military leader and an absence of consensus regarding security affairs across the executive and legislative branches, the civilian principals were in a relatively weakened position vis-à-vis the military agents (Feaver 2003 :190–210).

Feaver observes that civil–military relations are obviously better when there are good civilian leaders and worse when civilian leadership is bad. One issue is how to hold civilians accountable to the same or greater degree than the military is held accountable. Bad policy, after all, presumably comes from civilian principals.

But Feaver's focus is on the military institution in a democratic polity.

[E]ven when the military is right, democratic theory intervenes and insists that it submit to the civilian leadership that the polity has chosen. Let civilian voters punish civilian leaders for wrong decisions. Let the military advise against foolish adventures, even advising strenuously when circumstances demand. But let the military execute those orders faithfully. The republic would be better served even by foolish working than by enlightened shirking. (Feaver 2003 :302)

After all, the claim that the military should not do what civilians want because what they want is bad for the country shapes the rhetoric of every coup leader who justifies his seizure of power as the rescue of a state from the consequences of an inept government.

Concordance Theory

Rebecca Schiff has argued on behalf of a theory that questions the assumptions that underlie both Huntington and Feaver: that a theory of civil–military relations should be based on the physical and ideological separation of the military from the political institutions of a state (Schiff 2009 :32). Concordance theory is concerned with predicting and preventing military intervention in the domestic affairs of a state. Schiff contends that the best way to avoid such an occurrence is to achieve concordance among three “partners” within a polity – the military, the political elites, and the citizenry – on four issues: the social composition of the officer corps; the political decision-making process; the method of recruiting soldiers; and “military style.” Such a cooperative relationship may involve separation but does not require it.

According to Schiff, concordance theory resolves two problems associated with separation theory, as explicated by Huntington and Feaver. The first is the tendency of separation theorists to treat the particular institutional arrangements arising from the experience of the post–World War II United States as universal, applicable to all states regardless of their particular historical conditions and culture. This is especially relevant to the cases of developing states because it means that they “need not adopt the traditional Western model of civil–military relations in order to achieve greater political maturity (Schiff 2009 :33).

The second problem is methodological. Separation theory's institutional analysis alone “fails to take into account the cultural and historical conditions that may encourage or discourage civil–military separation. We can see this deficit, for example, in the post-revolutionary US example – a stark contrast to the post–World War II United States from which separation theory is derived” (Schiff 2009 :33).

Criticism of concordance theory includes the charge that it is merely a variation of Huntington's concept of “fusion,” the demand “that military leaders incorporate political, economic, and social factors into their thinking” (Huntington 1957 :351) and that “military leaders assume non-military responsibilities” ( 1957 :353). Critics also claim that the predictive aspect of concordance theory falls short with regard to the correlation between agreement among the three partners and military intervention on the one hand and to the likelihood of coup d’état on the other (Wells 1996 ).

But, according to Schiff, these objections ask concordance theory to be something it is not: a theory capable of analyzing all facets and problems in the realm of civil–military relations. Its causal objective is more limited: to predict the likelihood of military intervention in domestic affairs, which, Schiff claims, it does successfully (Schiff 1996 :42–3).

Civil–Military Relations and Strategic Assessment

Risa Brooks argues that patterns of civil–military relations affect national security because of their impact on strategic assessment. Brooks identifies two variables that determine the pattern of civil–military relations: (1) the intensity of preference divergence between political and military leaders with regard to corporate, professional, and security issues; and (2) the balance of power between political and military leaders (political dominance, shared power, military dominance). These two variables interact, generating “logics” that affect the institutional features of strategic assessment (Brooks 2008 :2–34).

Next she identifies four sets of institutional processes that constitute the element of strategic assessment. The first is the routine for information sharing. The second is strategic coordination regarding the assessment of strategic alternatives, risk and cost, and the integration of political and military policies and strategies. The third is the military's structural competence in conducting sound net assessment. The fourth is the authorization process for approving or vetoing political-military actions (Brooks 2008 :34–42).

Brooks then hypothesizes how the various configurations of power and preference divergence affect the quality of strategic assessment, using case studies to illustrate the relation between various patterns and strategic assessment. She hypothesizes that the combination of political dominance and low preference divergence leads to the “best” strategic assessment. The combination of shared power and high preference divergence leads to the “worst” strategic assessment. Other combinations lead to “poor” or “fair” strategic assessment (Brooks 2008 :42–54).

Of course, the quality of a state's strategic assessment is not the only determinant of a state's success or failure in the international arena. The competing strategies of other states and other exogenous factors may well trump even the best strategic assessment. Michael Desch has employed a similar methodology to show that the alleged military advantage of democratic states in international relations is overstated (Desch 2008 ).

Problems with the Contending Theories and Suggestions for Further Research

There is no more important question facing a state than the place of its military relative to civil society and the roles that the military exercises. The coercive power that a military institution possesses always makes it, at least theoretically, a threat to the regime. Clearly, there are many possible patterns of civil–military relations that provide different answers to the five questions posed at the beginning of this essay.

As the survey of contending theories of civil–military relations suggests, there is no “general” or “unified field” theory that successfully explains all of these patterns (Bland 1999 ). Nor, given the variety and complexity of civil–military patterns is one likely or desirable.

Institutional theory and agency theory focus on control of the military and the military's role. Sociology usefully investigates the question of who serves. For a variety of reasons, Huntington's institutional theory remains the dominant paradigm for examining civil–military relations. First, it deals with the central problem of such relations: the relation of the military as an institution to civilian society. Huntington was the first to attempt a systematic analysis of the civil–military problematique . Second, despite the claims of many of those who look at US civil–military relations through the lens of sociology, analytically distinct military and civilian spheres do appear to exist.

But as the discussion above of Feaver's critique of Huntington makes clear, there are many problems with Huntington's argument. In 1962 , S.E. Finer argued that Huntington had severely understated the problem of civilian control (Finer 1962 :7–10). He contended that a professional military does not necessarily keep officers out of politics, but indeed might incline them to engage in politics ( 1962 :207 ff.). He also observed that differences in national experience limit the applicability of Huntington's theory.

Schiff agrees, arguing that Huntington's theory is particular to the American experience and is therefore not applicable to other countries (Schiff 2009 : chs. 5–7). Indeed, she argues that it does not even apply to the United States during all historical periods ( 2009 : ch. 4).

In addition, empirical studies have not confirmed some of Huntington's key assertions or predictions. It is also the case that some of Huntington's historical arguments are questionable. For instance, the US Army in the late nineteenth century was not nearly as isolated as Huntington contended it was (Gates 1980 ; Owens 2007 ). This particular problem illustrates the importance of keeping historical context in mind when examining civil–military relations. Historians such as Russell Weigley , Richard Kohn , and Lawrence Cress have made significant contributions to the study of civil–military relations (Kohn 1975 ; Cress 1982 ; Weigley 1993 ). Finally as Eliot Cohen , perhaps Huntington's most accomplished student, has pointed out, some of the most successful democratic war leaders have paid very little attention to the divide that Huntington's objective control demands (E.A. Cohen 2002 ).

When it comes to the question of civilian control of the military, Feaver's agency theory corrects some of the flaws in Huntington's theory. Agency theory seems to do a better job of describing the problem of civilian control than Huntington's theory. It is also does better with regard to the predictive aspect of the theory. One reason for this is that agency theory does not depend on the non-rigorous and therefore problematic concepts of professionalism and autonomy to predict how and under what circumstances civilians will best be able to control the military instrument.

Finally, it follows that if agency theory fulfills both the descriptive and predictive functions of a theory better than Huntington's institutional theory, its prescriptive element will also be more useful than what Huntington laid down. Nonetheless, critics argue that as applied to civil–military relations, agency theory achieves analytical rigor by severely limiting its scope. The theory is too parsimonious; it fails to explain enough in the world.

Janowitz and the military sociologists also provide useful insights, especially regarding the question of “who serves?” and related issues. The writers who take their bearings from Janowitz have indeed moved the question of demographics, ethnicity, and recruitment to center stage in a way that transcends the American experience (Moskos et al. 2000 ; Williams 2008 ; Schiff 2009 ). But even as they argue that the concept of separation between the two spheres is theoretically and empirically flawed, these writers still maintain the analytical distinction between the military and civilians.

In the case of concordance theory, critics charge that the definition of military intervention sets the bar too low to be meaningful. The cooperative relationships that are necessary to avoid military intervention themselves look like intervention unless the standard for civilian control is merely the absence of a military coup. The utility of the idea of “concordance” is somewhat in question as it is not clear that the degree of harmony among civilian and military leaders is a “good” or “bad” thing in terms of either political control or military effectiveness.

In many respects, the current state of theorizing about civil–military relations brings to mind the story of the three blind men examining an elephant. Since each can only sense what he is touching (the trunk, a leg, and the tail) and has no concept of the elephant as a whole, each concludes that the beast is something different from what it really is. Despite the lack of an overarching framework for analyzing civil–military relations, the various areas of the field offer many rich “pastures” in which researchers may graze.

Research agendas might well include: additional examination of the emerging civil–military patterns of such emerging powers as China, Russia, and Iran; ascertaining a theory of civil–military relations of Muslim states; follow-up work to Risa Brooks ’s excellent study of the impact of civil–military relations on strategic assessment; the civil–military implications of the expanded roles of contractors on the battlefield and increased reliance on special operations forces; the civil–military implications of the increased utilization of airstrikes by unmanned aircraft; the impact of popular will on effectiveness in various sorts of warfare, e.g. counterinsurgency; and further research into the impact of an increasing “civilianization” of the military on military effectiveness.

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Links to Digital Materials

The Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (IUS). At www.iusafs.org/ , accessed Jul. 14, 2009. IUS provides a forum for the interchange and assessment of research and scholarship in the social and behavioral sciences dealing with the military establishment and civil–military relations.

The Center for Civil–Military Relations at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. At http://ccmr.org/public/ , accessed Jul. 14, 2009. This site provides outreach to states and the civil–military issues arising from democratization, defense transformation, stability and security, and terrorism.

The Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of the Armed Forces. At www.dcaf.ch/ , accessed Jul. 14, 2009. DCAF provides in-country advisory support and practical assistance programs designed to promote democratic norms with regard to armed forces, especially in the areas of security sector reform (SSR) and security sector governance (SSG).

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Andy Bacevich of Boston University for his suggestion that the essence of civil–military relations constitutes a “bargain” between the civilian leadership of a polity on the one hand and the military on the other. He did so in commenting on my proposal for a book tentatively titled Sword of Republican Empire: A History of US Civil–Military Relations . I have expanded the concept to include the citizenry.

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Introduction

Civil-military relations are the vital connections between a government, its military, and the society that it seeks to protect and encompass a broad range of relationships that occur at distinct levels and in discreet timeframes, including control of the military, military roles, military service, interagency cooperation, military effectiveness, and operational challenges. They also vary greatly depending on the specific civilization within which they exist. Therefore, civil-military relations are distinctive within a particular culture. An individual nation’s ideology, political system, social fabric, historical traditions, norms and values, and government structure, among other factors, all influence its civil-military relations. For example, US civil-military relations differ significantly from those in Russia. Such a situation has led to the related notion of strategic culture in which the way that a certain state tackles a global security studies issue assumes unique...

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Taylor, W.A. (2023). Civil-Military Relations. In: Romaniuk, S.N., Marton, P.N. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74319-6_13

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Introduction, civil-military relations and military missions, operational experience as a key determinant of civil-military relations, role conception, connecting the dots: operational experiences, role conceptions, and civil-military relations, perspectives on operational experiences and civil-military relations: the contributions, conclusion and avenues for future research, operational experiences, military role conceptions, and their influence on civil-military relations.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2021

A considerable amount of research within security studies has explored the military's increasingly diverse and multifaceted tasks. However, this debate has been disconnected from the literature on civil-military relations to the effect that we still lack knowledge about how and why these operational tasks have consequences for the relations between the armed forces, civilian authorities, and society at large. In order to provide for a better understanding of these effects, this introduction to the Special Issue debates the concept of operational experiences to capture how the military's routine activities affect the equilibria, logics, and mechanisms of civil-military relations. The article then provides an overview of the Special Issue's six contributions, whose diverse and global perspectives shed light on different aspects of the relationship between military missions and the military's roles in society and politics. Among other factors, they highlight role conceptions – the military's shared views on the purpose of the institution – as crucial in shaping the dynamic relation between what the military does and what place it occupies within the state and society. The article concludes by describing potentially fruitful areas of future research.

It is well known that militaries today do much else and much more than fighting interstate wars. Despite the trope that soldiers were mostly trained to ‘break things and kill people’, Footnote 1 armed forces across the globe engage in a range of different missions including community support, fighting organised crime and terrorism, peacekeeping, policing, infrastructure development, as well as humanitarian aid and disaster relief. More recently, militaries have also been widely active in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by setting up mobile hospitals, enforcing containment measures, fabricating face masks, and in some cases even engaging in epidemiological research. Footnote 2 Scholars have widely acknowledged the multidimensionality of militaries’ tasks as well as the tensions and difficulties arising from it, mainly from an organisational perspective. Footnote 3 Already in the classical work of Morris Janowitz and Charles C. Moskos, the idea of the combat-oriented, total and greedy institution – understood as an organisation that puts high demands on its members in terms of time, allegiances and commitment – clashed with the notion of a constabulary multifaceted organisation. Footnote 4 In other words, operations of various kinds have been acknowledged to have direct effects on the military organisation and its members.

Notwithstanding the recognition that militaries do much more than combat, how those different kinds of missions shape civil-military relations has remained either underspecified or understood in a deterministic way. In general, the dominant distinction has been between external and internal missions. Footnote 5 External military missions have usually been portrayed as beneficial for civilian supremacy as they prompt civilians to exercise control and keep the armed forces occupied outside a state's territory. This argument has been developed based on evidence from operations regarding national defence, combat, as well as UN peacekeeping. Footnote 6 Similarly, military sociologists have mostly understood external combat as a ‘conventional mission’. Accordingly, the armed forces are suitably prepared for combat but would have to learn to adapt to other tasks. Footnote 7 Conversely, internal missions are typically seen as problematic for civil-military relations, since they allow military leaders to interfere in domestic politics. Footnote 8 Yet, the focus on conventional military missions and the dichotomous understanding of external vs internal operations do not capture accurately what the military actually does and consequently, how this affects civil-military relations. Footnote 9 Additionally, a sprawling literature on military learning and adaptation examines operations and conditions for organisational change. While these studies often acknowledge political conditions as important for military learning, their focus lies on perfecting doctrine and tactics during military operations rather than on the consequences these operations have for civil-military relations. Footnote 10

We see potential in bringing together the literature about military missions and tasks, on the one hand, and about civil-military relations, on the other. This Special Issue asks an overarching question: how does the experience of and in military missions shape civil-military relations? The contributions adopt diverse approaches to explore and develop arguments on the logics, mechanisms, and processes that connect specific operational experiences to civil-military dynamics. They deal with several related questions, such as: How does the military adapt or refuse to adapt to missions it is reluctant about? To what extent do missions that are highly visible to the public change the military's role within the state and society? How does the military change its self-image vis-à-vis civilian authorities and society due to different missions?

To answer these questions, this introductory article lays out an analytical approach with two conceptual components: operational experiences and role conceptions. Operational experiences are the social processes of militaries experiencing and giving meaning to a variety of tasks and activities during military missions that are conducted over a certain amount of time with a given stated objective by a significant share of its personnel. The understanding of operational experience builds on recent work that has problematised how new types of operations shape specific kinds of civil-military relations. Footnote 11 Specifically, we use the concept of operational experiences to capture how the military deals with diverse and multifaceted operations. Operational experiences potentially shape the military's direct preferences for certain types of missions in various ways. For instance, successful combat operations will reinforce the use of those strategies and tactics that led to victory. Similarly, operations that enhance public prestige (as in disaster relief) and other possibilities to claim additional resources may receive greater military support. In turn, experiences of defeat or other negative consequences from operations can convince commanders that certain types of missions are undesirable and should therefore be avoided. Footnote 12

In less immediate ways, operational experiences are also likely to shape the military's identity, culture, and professional ideals, which all affect how the military positions itself vis-à-vis the civilian ‘other’. Some operational experiences turn into memories deeply ingrained and transmitted across generations of soldiers. Footnote 13 Other, more recent ones will define how members of the military collectively continue to navigate the organisation they belong to. Footnote 14 Uniformed personnel continuously live operational experiences by putting orders into practice and by making sense of them both individually and collectively. From this perspective, analysing operational experiences allows us to better understand what the military makes of formally assigned roles and core functions and how it adapts to them as they develop. As this Special Issue demonstrates, operational experiences matter in terms of how the military understands its relationship with decision-makers and society at large.

As the second conceptual component, the Special Issue highlights the concept of role conceptions as an analytical tool to study the relationship between operational experiences and civil-military relations. A role conception is the ‘shared view, shared within one service or shared by all the services, regarding the proper purpose of the military organization and of military power in international relations’. Footnote 15 Role conceptions are contingent on a military's historical experience and therefore vary significantly. To illustrate, armies with a strong focus on external defence and/or significant experience in expeditionary warfare might consider it inappropriate to use scarce resources for secondary tasks such as internal law enforcement. To other militaries, however, a historical engagement in socioeconomic development, or even the political affairs of their country, lead to role conceptions in which internal involvement is conceived as the military's proper purpose. Seen within the wider context of civil-military relations, variations in historical experience also lead to diverging preferences regarding the operational profiles of the armed forces among politicians and citizens. By bringing together contributions from different parts of the globe, the Special Issue underlines the value of role conceptions for studying civil-military relations.

Building on military sociology scholarship, the concept of role conception is nested within the broader concept of military professionalism. Its value lies in that role conception is more precise, concrete, and able to capture a fundamental constitutive component of military life. It refers to the self-understanding of the military's core roles only as opposed to an understanding held by a more diffuse group including different national elites and the population as a whole. As such, role conceptions allow us to trace – in a more focused way – both the different logics and mechanisms through which operational experiences are made sense of by the military and, in turn, whether and how these experiences then affect role conceptions. While a range of factors potentially influences how operational experiences shape civil-military relations – history, culture, material resources, and recruitment considerations, among others – the generally little-used concept of role conception emerged inductively as a key and recurring common denominator across the contributions to this Special Issue. The authors allude to role conceptions from different perspectives and to different degrees, though taken together their findings promise new insights and ways for future analysis.

In the remainder of this article, we discuss key concepts and debates on the drivers of civil-military relations and reflect upon how the Special Issue contributes to ongoing academic debates. We then present the core argument of the Issue and introduce the six contributions, which together represent a plurality of theoretical, methodological, and geographical perspectives on the connections between different kinds of operational experiences, role conceptions, and civil-military relations. In a last step, we outline avenues for future research.

This Special Issue adopts a broad view on civil-military relations that captures the complex relationships between three actors: the military, civilian elites, and society. These relationships are understood as a dynamic phenomenon negotiated in day-to-day interactions and policymaking. Although this conceptualisation is now fairly well established in the literature, Footnote 16 it is worth reflecting on its analytical leverage by contrasting it with the long dominant, narrower focus on the position of civilian authorities vis-à-vis the military leadership.

The view on civil-military relations as a rather static distribution of power between civilian and military elites underlies most studies that focus on visible military interventions in politics, predominantly coups. Footnote 17 For instance, some theories explain civil-military relations with the nature of threats facing a particular state. Accordingly, external threats reduce military involvement in domestic politics and likewise the risk of coups. Footnote 18 Conversely, high levels of internal threats or intrastate conflict increase the likelihood of the military playing a prominent political role. Footnote 19 Michael C. Desch argues that the most stable type of civil-military relations with the strongest civilian control is precisely when the level of external threat is high and the level of internal threat is low. Footnote 20 Along parallel lines, large-N quantitative studies have examined the effect of international conflict on the risk of coups. Footnote 21 For instance, Curtis Bell and Jun Koga Sudduth find that ongoing civil war makes coup attempts more likely and that this likelihood is greatest when the fighting is close to the capital. Footnote 22 Still, it is now widely acknowledged that the exclusive focus on coups fails to grasp the far more nuanced reality of civil-military relations. Footnote 23 As one scholar of coups puts it: ‘given the uncertainty of success, both sides [the military and government] have an incentive to avoid a coup’, which makes its absence hardly an indicator of military subordination to civilian control. Footnote 24 While easy to code for statistical analysis, ultimately this rather rare, exceptional, and extreme form of intervention tells us little about the varied and complex interactions of the military with politics and society.

The military's agency and political influence beyond visible interventions such as coups are well documented. As early as in the 1960s, Samuel E. Finer argued that the armed forces have a range of subtler options at their disposal to influence government policies that do not require taking over power. For instance, they can simply refuse to obey orders. Footnote 25 Others have demonstrated how the armed forces can exercise tutelary power and contest democratic governance by means of institutional prerogatives. Footnote 26 The military can find numerous ways, overt and covert, to influence and contest political decision-making to the extent that it can significantly constrain the options of democratically elected politicians. Footnote 27 Even in the United States, the country that is widely seen as having achieved Samuel Huntington's ideal of objective civilian control with a clear division between a subordinate, ‘professional’ military, on the one hand, and the civilian sphere, on the other, Footnote 28 heads of military service branches have frequently exercised veto powers and compelled governments to compromise with the armed forces. Footnote 29 An important reason for this, in Peter D. Feaver's view, is that the military as agent often has different preferences than their civilian principals. Footnote 30 Processes of contestation and bargaining – in both democratic and autocratic systems – thus shape civil-military relations. Footnote 31 However, only recently scholars have begun to examine what civilian control and military autonomy means on a daily basis. Footnote 32

The implications of new missions on civil-military relations have been addressed in the literature in a rather compartmentalised form according to the internal/external dichotomy described above. However, dividing missions according to the location of deployment is too simplistic and fails to capture important variances. Literature drawing on experiences from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia has highlighted that the military's involvement in internal missions has in fact varying effects on civilian control. Footnote 33 After all, it must be assumed that the military's internal use to fight crime or insurgencies by means of force has different effects on civil-military relations than domestic humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations. Studies on peacekeeping further illustrate the problem. Reflecting the traditional reasoning, some postulate that sending the military abroad to serve in the interest of collective security positively affects civil-military relations. Footnote 34 Others have argued against this view, Footnote 35 pointing to the paradox that peacekeepers often perform exactly those functions the military is not meant to perform in their home state if a healthy civil-military relations equilibrium is to be maintained, such as guarding internal order and public security. Recent studies have highlighted how the similarities between domestic counterinsurgency missions and peace enforcement tasks in UN peace operations have increased the role of some militaries in guaranteeing public security, together with their political power. Footnote 36 It thus appears that certain kinds of operational experiences magnify pre-existing conditions in civil-military relations. By-and-large, the consequences of operational experiences vary according to different contexts of civil-military relations.

In order to provide a more suitable analytical understanding of changes in civil-military relations that were brought about by military missions, we introduce the concept of operational experience. As we describe in the next section, this entails a move in two steps. First, we unpack the general categories of internal vs external missions into the broader sets of tasks, roles, and operations. Footnote 37 Secondly, these are understood not only as operations or tasks and roles in practical terms, but also in terms of how the military experiences and draws lessons from them.

A focus on the ordinary, recurring aspects of civil-military relations should also include examinations of what the military is routinely doing and how these activities are understood and reflected upon by members of the armed forces. In line with recent efforts of ‘putting the military back into civil-military relations’, Footnote 38 the Special Issue therefore places particular emphasis on understanding how operational experiences shape interactions between society, political elites, and the armed forces.

To say that missions affect civil-military relations is all but a novel claim. Scholarship within comparative politics, security studies, as well as strategic and military studies has explored the paradoxes of military organisations traditionally devoted to combat and yet often tasked with other missions. Footnote 39 However, most existing studies have either sought to explain how militaries adapt and innovate to perform new tasks or examined the implications of new missions for national and international security, as well as for the military's combat-readiness. Footnote 40 By contrast, much less attention has been paid to the consequences of these ordinary tasks and roles for civil-military relations. Footnote 41 Examples of the latter are Eyal Ben-Ari and Eran-Jona Meyyal, who explore different kinds of military ‘institutional logics’, such as an anti-terror logic, one of border policing and humanitarian assistance, and how these influence the military's relations with local civilians. Footnote 42 Cornelia Baciu's work, too, highlights the importance of studying military activities and their ramifications for both the military's self-understanding and civil-military relations. Identifying a set of military functions that can be observed in hybrid orders where democratic and non-democratic actors coexist, Baciu explores how international donors and non-governmental organisations can drive a shift in ‘cultural conceptions about the military's role in society’, which may then trigger an unwanted military response. Footnote 43 Set aside these more recent examples, the role played by the experience of operations is dealt with in scholarship from the 1990s, which debated the link between what were then new missions for the US military and a supposed crisis in US civil-military relations. Footnote 44 This Special Issue differs from these earlier studies in that it introduces and explicitly focuses on the concept of operational experience as an analytical tool. This allows us to assess how the armed forces make sense of their missions and roles and what types of lessons they draw from experiencing consequences such as success or defeat, impact on the military's status, how these affect its core missions, produce clashes with elites and social groups, or the extent of the public's appreciation as a result from military behaviour in operations. Footnote 45 As a whole, this Special Issue is therefore meant to pave the way for further improvement of the analytical, conceptual, and theoretical tools to understand the complex relationship between military missions and civil-military relations.

A focus on operational experience can shed light on sense-making and lesson-drawing processes at different levels of the military organisation. At the individual level, rank-and-file soldiers and tactical commanders are typically experiencing the direct consequences of new types of missions: they are in touch with the population in different types of missions, often take decisions with political consequences, suffer most casualties in missions that involve confrontations, and their skills are needed in logistical support operations. While they are assumed to obey orders, it is well known that unrest often originates among the rank-and-file because of negative experiences in missions. Footnote 46 Military leaders thus have an interest in keeping lower ranks content. Yet achieving this in the context of missions that are seen as appropriate by soldiers is considerably easier than in missions that are not. For instance, soldiers are likely more willing to accept casualties in missions that are related to defending their country against external enemies than in missions that fall beyond the core tasks of their respective military. In other words, context factors and pre-existing conditions turn lived facts into different experiences. Likewise, with increasingly compressed command structures and a greater range of tasks in many missions it is more likely that the behaviour of individual servicemembers – Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) and junior officers – has political implications. Footnote 47 This can lead to different operational experiences for military units and even individual soldiers and officers since being publicly exposed and blamed for failures can have damaging consequences for individual careers. Footnote 48

The importance of individual behaviour becomes evident when mismatches between political guidelines, public expectations regarding the military's appropriate behaviour, and operational pressure on the ground affect civil-military relations. Examples for this include the order of an airstrike by a German officer in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which caused the largest number of civilian fatalities caused by the Bundeswehr since its foundation and subsequently caused a political crisis and a heated debate about the military's appropriate role. Footnote 49 Mismatches between operational experiences and how missions and roles are narrated ‘back home’ can have negative consequences and might even be detrimental for military performance itself. Before deploying to Afghanistan, the Italian military expected to find a peacekeeping context; yet, when deployed, the military was often exposed to combat. As a result, soldiers experienced ‘frame disputes’ and displayed low levels of perceived cohesion, performance, and legitimacy. Footnote 50 Somewhat similar mismatches can also have negative and traumatising consequences when service members return home as amply illustrated by Elin Gustavssen in her study about Norwegian veterans. Footnote 51 In addition, depending on how governments deal with misbehaviour by individuals during missions ultimately also has consequences for civil-military relations: for instance, if soldiers feel treated unfairly by the public and the government for committing mistakes during operations, the civil-military gap might become larger. Taken together, mismatches between individual and collective expectations and interpretations of operational experiences may influence civil-military relations.

At a more strategic level, military leaders might draw different lessons from new operational experiences. In order to protect the institution's prestige, they might decide to punish individual soldiers or officers for wrongdoings. This obviously comes at the risk of sparking discontent among troops. If military leaders perceive that potential failure in operations threatens the institution's prestige or harm its interests, it is their choice to either adapt to new missions or to try and refocus the military's operational profile. While individual service members develop distinct interpretations about operational experiences in a specific way, we expect these to coalesce around a consolidated view, often pushed by the officer corps and which typically remains relatively stable over time. Footnote 52 These consolidated interpretations fundamentally depend on how and why the armed forces make sense of their operational experiences and how they match with what they consider as their appropriate role, which is the focus of the next section.

In order to grasp how and why operational experiences matter, we need an understanding of the military as an organisation that has agency and constantly makes sense of its lived experiences. The contributors to this Special Issue were asked to explore different possible pathways through which operational experiences shape civil-military relations. Among these, one idea stands out from their studies: how the military views its own purpose and reason of being mediates the effects of operational experiences on civil-military relations. To capture this idea, we adopt the of term role conception, which refers to the previously mentioned definition of the ‘shared view, shared within one service or shared by all the services, regarding the proper purpose of the military organization and of military power in international relations’. Footnote 53 Role conception thus belongs to the complex of ideational variables that have been shown to influence important aspects of the military, notably behaviour, restraint, and force posture. Footnote 54 We expect the same complex of ideational factors to matter also for civil-military relations, as suggested by the literature on democratic transitions as well as earlier debates about what the military thinks it should be doing and what it actually does in the context of US civil-military relations. Footnote 55

Role conceptions have varying effects and causal weight for the different authors of the issue. Based on their mapping of contemporary missions in industrialised, democratic countries, Nina Wilén and Lisa Strömbom suggest that new operational experiences may render officers more prone to see themselves as policy advocates rather than policy advisors. For Risa Brooks and Peter Michael Erickson, Anit Mukherjee, Christoph Harig and Chiara Ruffa, role conceptions have a direct impact on how the military reacts to civilian orders and whether servicemembers will resist or undermine these. For Yagil Levy as well as Nicole Jenne and Rafael Martínez, role conceptions constitute part of the background conditions against which the effects of the respective operational experiences they study play out. In the latter cases – Israel and Latin America – the military readily accepted or even pushed for new operational experiences precisely because of its particular self-image.

Role conceptions are related to neighbouring concepts such as military professionalism, military culture, and identity. The concept also captures ideas that have remained underdeveloped but have been influential nevertheless, such as Deborah Avant's ‘standard way of thinking’ when referring to the US Army's professional ideas of operation and purpose. Footnote 56 Another take is Samuel J. Fitch's, which highlighted the importance of ‘ideas’ and ‘belief systems’ that come close to the ‘shared views’ that describe role conceptions:

Ideas provide the cognitive frame of reference within which boundedly rational actors – including military officers – interpret the options available to them and calculate the advantages and disadvantages of alternative courses of action. Belief systems contain implicit and explicit conceptions of proper values, correct behavior, and beliefs about ‘the way the world works’. Military beliefs thus structure military behavior. These beliefs do not exist in a vacuum. They reflect perceptions of the national and international context and learning from experience. Footnote 57

Others use the ‘identity’ of the military as supposed predictor for soldiers’ skills in certain tasks and their ability to cope with new missions. However, as this identity is often referred to in terms of ‘culture, attitudes, values, and motivation’, Footnote 58 it remains hard to grasp empirically. In contrast to ‘ideas’ or ‘culture’, the concept of role conceptions is narrower as it is more closely related to operational experiences and consequently, more easily operationalisable since it centres on the purpose of the military organisation. Role conception, therefore, includes both how the military understands its own role towards decision-makers as well as society and towards past, present, and future missions. In the remainder of the section, we explain how role conception offers distinctive insights and advantages for empirical research.

Role conception is nested within the broader concept of military professionalism, which has largely framed debates about whether and under which conditions militaries are predisposed to interfere in politics. In Huntington's classic, highly influential understanding, a ‘professional’ military is one that is separate from politics and tasked with the preparation and conduct of combat operations. While this clear boundary is considered necessary to maintain the separation between the military and the centres of political power, Footnote 59 a wealth of literature from military sociology and security studies has challenged both what professionalism means and whether the military as an institution can adequately be assumed to be separate from politics and as homogeneous as it was being depicted by Huntington. Footnote 60 First, militaries, just like other institutions, bring together different views within the officer corps and across services, units, and specialties, which occasionally disobey and exercise control from within. Footnote 61 While Huntington referred only to the officer corps when writing about military professionals, it is in fact all servicemembers, irrespective of rank, who develop a role conception, which is also shared collectively. Second, the paradigm of a ‘politically sterile and neutral’ military Footnote 62 appears to be an ideal type rather than a reality, including in the United States. Footnote 63 Furthermore, as Theo Farrell has argued, the two international norms ‘shared by military professionals – norms of conventional warfare and norms of civilian supremacy’ Footnote 64 are spatially and temporally contingent. For instance, as Jenne and Martínez remind us in this Special Issue, in Latin America professionalism has historically legitimised interventionism in politics. Officers saw running their respective country themselves as the best solution to what they perceived as impending crises civilians were unable to solve. Footnote 65 Hence, the concept of Latin American military professionalism ‘stimulated, rather than precluded, political action’. Footnote 66 Also in other contexts like Pakistan, professionalism can be an intermediary variable of military intervention in politics. Footnote 67

Taken together, the classical concept of professionalism has limited value as an analytical tool for the purpose of this Special Issue because it is at the same time too vague, too broad, and too closely modelled upon a supposed Western liberal ideal. Alternative, sociological perspectives on professionalism do not match our purpose either as they shift the focus away from the military and what it thinks it does and should be doing toward military expertise and technical knowledge. Footnote 68 Instead, the contributions to this Special Issue demonstrate how the concept of role conception and its focus on the military's perceptions and reactions can make sense of the connections between operational experiences and civil-military relations.

Having defined civil-military relations, operational experiences, and role conception and having explained the analytical leverage of each of them, the aim of this section is to draw the different elements together into the central argument of the Special Issue. To be clear, our objective is not to provide a new theory on civil-military relations but to propose a new focus and set an agenda for studying the diverse relationship between operational experiences and interactions between society, political elites, and armed forces.

The relation between civil-military relations and role conceptions is circular and dynamic. To begin with, a specific civil-military relations equilibrium sets the context for role conceptions and operational experiences. If civilian control and defence management is strong, then it is civilian authorities who define what the military does in practice and therefore have considerable influence on role conceptions. Conversely, greater military autonomy leads to role conceptions that are comparatively less clearly defined by civilians but more so by the military's own history, narratives, and memory.

Civil-military relations and role conceptions influence both the existence and the type of effects stemming from operational experiences. First, in extreme cases role conceptions may prevent that the military assumes new tasks as demanded by civilians. Typically, we expect tensions in civil-military relations when governments seek to use the armed forces in missions that stand against the latter's role conceptions, as evident in Brooks and Erickson's contribution on the US military. It is an empirical question whether the military's eventual refusal to do something that clashes with its baseline role will be successful or whether civilians maintain the upper hand. Similar to other powerful political actors, Footnote 69 the military might enter into bargaining processes in which they make demands in exchange for carrying out undesired tasks. Depending on the outcome of the political bargain, the civil-military relations equilibrium is altered as the armed forces might change their predisposition to interfere in political decision-making processes and ultimately be able to gain greater political influence. Footnote 70

Second, once the military engages in new operational experiences, role conceptions mediate how these are interpreted, lived, and made sense of. A new mission might be carried out successfully in the sense that it accomplishes its objectives and yet, if it contradicts what the military believes to be its proper purpose, the mission might not actually be experienced as a success by the institution. Conversely, failure in new missions might reinforce dismissive attitudes towards following demands to repeat such operations. Apart from issues of success or failure, militaries might seize the opportunities arising from new operational experiences: for instance, disaster relief operations potentially lead to greater public appreciation and other types of operations, such as UN peacekeeping, can increase the military's bargaining power in pushing for renewal of military equipment. Still, changes in role conceptions due to operational experiences are not a given. Militaries might succeed in steering civilian governments away from insisting on demands for unwanted operations, or governments themselves conclude that military deployments in certain circumstances must remain exceptional. Only if new and eventually even undesired missions – understood as ‘specific tasks’ Footnote 71 – are carried out to such an extent that they become part of the military's role – understood as ‘broad and enduring purpose’ Footnote 72 – armed forces might slowly change their role conceptions accordingly. Such changes in role conceptions may manifest themselves in organisational reorientations that aim to prepare dedicated military units or the military as a whole for these new missions. For instance, this includes modified military education and training, reformulations of military doctrine, or budget realignments with the goal of purchasing appropriate equipment. Such change may entail role expansion, as in the case of the Israeli military that increased its range of tasks and function through its involvement in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by taking on roles as epidemiologists, among others. Footnote 73 Other examples include the Brazilian military, which reacted to an increasing demand for public security operations by drafting a doctrine and creating a specialised training centre for ‘Guaranteeing Law and Order’ operations. Footnote 74 Changes in role conceptions can also include exclusively non-material modifications of the military's orientation. In its most consequential form for civil-military relations, this is related to military leaders’ predisposition to interfere in politics. More indirectly, shifts in role conceptions may lead to forms of organisational decoupling, in which parts of the military adapt to the shift and others do not. Decoupling could lead to a decline in cohesion and accountability of the military towards civilian authorities. Footnote 75

With a change in role conceptions, the military recalibrates its positioning vis-à-vis civilians, both authorities and society at large, since the civilian ‘other’ is key in the construction of military identity, which in turn encapsulates views about its purpose. Footnote 76 Militaries might adapt to new operational challenges and modify their role conceptions accordingly, but still might demand benefits in return or feel empowered to become involved in decision-making processes regarding the circumstances of their deployment. When armed forces change their role conceptions and thus develop new operational capabilities, civilians are likely to reposition themselves in relation to a military with different conceptions and missions, thus resulting in a new civil-military relations equilibrium. In extreme cases, this can be harmful for civil-military relations if civilian governments make themselves dependent upon the military fulfilling essential state services. Hence, they increase the armed forces’ bargaining power, which commanders can then use to extract concessions.

The contributions to the Special Issue bring together a plurality of theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives to shed light on the dynamics between operational experiences, role conceptions, and civil-military relations. While some take a comprehensive look at civil-military relations, others delve into specific parts of the tripartite relation between the military, civilian elites, and society. In the following, we provide an overview of the individual studies and how they deal with the operational experiences of armed forces and their consequences for role conceptions and civil-military relations.

Nina Wilén and Lisa Strömbom start by mapping contemporary military roles and tasks in industrialised democracies. As the authors note, there is little academic and practical consensus about the core roles of military institutions in democratic societies. The fact that terms such as ‘mission’, ‘role’, and ‘task’ are often used sloppily further adds to the confusion. Relying on the understanding that roles are social constructions about the ‘broad and enduring purpose’ of the military, Footnote 77 the authors identify three core roles based on the analysis of defence policy documents of the 37 member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in combination with an extensive review of academic texts: (collective) defence, collective security, and aid to the nation. These policy documents can be assumed to reflect the collective views by the military, civilian authorities and society, given that the OECD countries are, by way of membership admission, democracies. Each of the roles has a number of subroles and tasks. Wilén and Strömbom argue that during the past decade, new operational experiences have brought the military closer to society due to its internal and more visible tasks while, at the same time, the relation has grown more distant due to the end of conscription in many states. Yet altogether, the new tasks and organisational changes have increased both trust in the military and its popularity. While this comes with potential risks for democratic civil-military relations, the authors highlight that militaries have been forced to adapt to a rapidly changing security environment and popular demands, which has constrained their organisational power. The conceptual article by Wilén and Strömbom is followed by five articles that delve deep into either single case studies or comparative designs.

Turning to the contemporary United States, Risa Brooks and Peter Michael Erickson explore the military's reluctance to engage in what can be considered ‘unconventional’ missions in the context of its usual operational profile. The authors ask why and how the US military leadership contested political decisions over different missions and analyse implications for civil-military relations. In a detailed analysis of military resistance to involvement in humanitarian interventions in the 1990s, the ‘War on Drugs’ in the 1980s, and the expansion of the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, Brooks and Erickson identify several sources of dissent as well as tactics used by the military for exercising political pressure. Operational experiences, in particular failures in warfare, have shaped the role conceptions of the military and are one among several interlinked sources of military dissent. Their argument underlines the circular relationship between operational experiences, role conceptions and civil-military dynamics. Role conceptions were significantly shaped by operational experiences that were brought about by political choices. In turn, these experiences were a major factor for motivating military leaders to contest decisions made by democratically elected governments. The contestation by military leaders then changed civil-military dynamics, as it altered the decision-making process regarding military operations and constrained politicians in their choices.

Further analysing how military missions shape civil-military relations, Nicole Jenne and Rafael Martínez adopt a broader conceptualisation of civil-military relations in democracy. They argue that conceiving of civil-military relations in terms of democratic governance across different sectors provides additional insights into how the military's use in different functions affects their position within the state and society. The authors demonstrate how Latin American governments have used the military as a wildcard for a wide range of tasks whenever civilian capacities have been of short supply, including urban and border patrols, literacy campaigns and to collect garbage, among many others. Such widespread use of the military, according to Jenne and Martínez, has maintained alive long-standing role conceptions of the military as the ultimate guardian of the state and la patria with negative effects for civil-military relations. From a democratic governance point of view, falling back on the military for multiple internal tasks challenged the rule of law in several cases, led to a lower quality of basic public services democratic states ought to provide, including defence, and perpetuated undemocratic tendencies.

Christoph Harig and Chiara Ruffa explore the phenomenon of democratically elected governments that are ‘pulling’ the military into potentially problematic roles. Their conceptual contribution unpacks the civil-military dynamics at different stages of two types of ‘pulling’: political pulling and operational pulling. In political pulling, the government asks the military to become involved in partisan conflicts, for instance in disputes between government branches or in large-scale protests. They argue that the military's reactions to such demands fundamentally depends on how much they value non-partisanship in their role conception. Operational pulling is more subtle as it implies politicians drawing the military into missions with blurry political connotations. With case studies of operational pulling into public security missions in France and Brazil, the authors show how operational pulling can be a crucial factor for changes in military role conceptions. In both cases, military leaders made political demands in exchange for providing public security. As a result, the French military's visible political involvement is the highest in decades. In Brazil, operational pulling made the military increasingly confident to make political demands and thus contributed to the generals’ influential role in the government of current president Jair Bolsonaro.

Yagil Levy explores the case of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which were amply and extensively deployed to combat the coronavirus during 2020–1. Ostensibly, the military's engagement is instrumental to fighting the pandemic due to its resources and hierarchical discipline, and especially given its centrality in Israel. Assuming that military deployment can be seen as part of the ‘securitisation of coronavirus’, as a policy regime, Levy argues that securitisation augments the endeavour to use state-centralised mechanisms to handle the crisis, with the resulting deployment of the military. In turn, the deployment, constitutive of the discourse of securitisation, further legitimises securitisation. Levy argues that the IDF's political bargaining power did not necessarily increase as a result of its involvement in Israel's Covid response. Still, the IDF made its support conditional on financial support and more resources. Moreover, securitisation has challenged Israel's deliberative democracy as it narrowed the scope of the debate about the handling of the pandemic, thus privileging short-term security measures over longer-term social and economic considerations. The IDF being involved is a further case of clearly established civilian control leading to militarisation.

Anit Mukherjee examines the effects of combat casualties on role conceptions and democratic civil-military relations. In such context, Mukherjee argues that militaries which incur combat casualties gain a stronger hand in the civil-military equilibrium. This is because casualties affect domestic political opinion and give prominence to the views expressed by military officials. Civilians are then more deferential to professional military advice. In turn, the military obtains considerable operational freedom, and can pick and choose missions which they find desirable. Based on the case of India, Mukherjee finds that a military's role conception, an important determinant of military missions, is shaped most prominently by its combat experience. Militaries sustaining casualties obtain leverage vis-à-vis civilians and based on their institutional preference, they either prioritise or avoid non-traditional missions. The study illuminates the mechanism through which operational experiences and casualties affect civil-military relations and role conceptions, which partly accounts for the persistence of the combat role conception among militaries across the globe.

This Special Issue seeks to develop an analytical toolkit for studying the connections between operational experiences and civil-military relations. Providing a set of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical investigations of the relationship between military missions and the military's place in society and politics, the research collection follows Brooks' call to go beyond simplistic notions of civilian control and military autonomy that obscure the military's political role in everyday politics but instead recognise that ‘the military is akin to other powerful constituencies in the state in how it derives power and impacts distributional and policy outcomes’. Footnote 78

To a large extent, the theoretical underpinnings of civil-military relations scholarship were developed upon standards that either derived from case studies of militaries from industrialised democracies or focused on very visible military interventions in politics in the form of coups. In the approach presented here, we problematise some recurring assumptions such as the depiction of combat operations as the only and most important ‘conventional mission’ of the armed forces, the overemphasis on the geographical locus of missions while neglecting closer analysis of what militaries are actually doing in a given operation, as well as the idea that undemocratic civil-military relations are the necessary consequence of military leaders pushing for greater influence. The prevailing focus on the institutional dimension of civilian control, particularly in research on transitional and consolidating democracies, cannot account for instances in which democratic governments draw their armed forces into roles that have the potential to upend democratic politics. As the contributions of Brooks and Erickson, Jenne and Martínez, Levy, as well as Harig and Ruffa show, there are many ways in which politicians deliberately choose to increase the military's social and political roles. In these instances, it is the existence of institutions of civilian control that are the very source for an increase in the military's political power if politicians pull the military into new political or operational roles. Whether they succeed depends essentially on the military's reaction to political demands.

What could drive a military's reaction that can be so important for the future of civil-military relations? The contributions to the Special Issue demonstrate that the operational profile and the respective experiences in missions are crucial for understanding military leaders’ willingness to become involved in politics. All else being equal, role conceptions can even be a decisive factor: if institutions for civilian control are in place and democratic governments order the military to become involved in partisan disputes, it is up to military leaders to decide whether to obey critical orders or to find ways to extricate themselves from demands that threaten the military's self-understanding. How military commanders solve such a dilemma fundamentally depends on their role conception. Although the case studies in this Special Issue represent democracies at different stages of consolidation, we expect that the circular relationship between the military's operational experiences and civil-military relations equally exists in authoritarian contexts. Further research on the effects of missions on civilian control in authoritarian states may build on this Special Issue to probe the relevance of role conceptions and their consequences for governance across different regime types.

To further the research agenda on operational experience, role conceptions, and the military's role in routine politics, we identify six avenues for future study. First, more conceptual work is needed to systematically categorise and classify different kinds of missions other than combat, particularly in relation to its potential implications on role conceptions and civil-military relations. Footnote 79 After all, the operational experience in highly different tasks, for instance in disaster relief as opposed to public security, varies significantly. The same applies to the military's perceptions regarding success or failure in these kinds of operations. Still, the current state of civil-military relations in a given country might trigger different consequences for role conceptions. If armed forces have not internalised an acceptance of civilian supremacy and rather see themselves as guardians of the nation, even seemingly harmless deployments such as disaster relief can lead to greater political intrusion by the military. For instance, military leaders could become more prone to overthrowing governments they consider to be in some way responsible for the disaster. It is more likely, though, that military leaders seek to increase their political influence in less overt manners. In this regard, it would be worthwhile to explore intra-military deliberations as well as ways in which armed forces seek to negotiate role conceptions and their position in society. It would be particularly interesting to explore how retired military officers often act as unofficial spokespersons for military institutions, which in many countries are legally banned from openly participating in political debates.

Second, future studies may analyse how different factors other than operational experiences lead to change in role conception, among them strategic, economic, and technological change. The end of the Cold War gives us an example for changes in role conceptions that were triggered by a modification of perceived threats in many European countries. Likewise, these studies may explore the possibilities of civilians to engineer change in role conceptions. This may be done by redirecting the military's missions, shifting the military education system, or by changing the social composition of the officer corps.

Third, there are potential benefits in delving deeper into to the ideational complex where role conceptions, professionalism, securitisation, culture, and other concepts overlap to examine how these interact and constitute one another. Footnote 80 One could systematically explore how distinct role conceptions may emerge within a particular military culture. The French army culture, for instance, traditionally revolved around staying out of politics as much as possible. Within that culture, the role conception of the French military deployed in expeditionary operations emerged and consolidated because it ‘made sense’ and was coherent.

Fourth, there is still a need for more fine-grained mechanisms exploring variation in civil-military relations over time. Civil-military equilibria are inertial but not static and we still do not quite know how they change. Alterations in civil-military equilibria may occur when civilian authorities redirect the military to other roles, or when military leaders actively seek to shape politics. However, shifts in role conceptions and civil-military relations are also possible due to generational change among the officer corps and attitudinal developments in society. Such phenomena occur without any deliberate actions being taken and are hard to grasp with institutionalist perspectives on civil-military relations. Therefore, closer analysis of the social composition of armed forces and attitudinal commonalities and differences to the general population could provide fruitful avenues for further research on endogenous military change processes. Fifth, future research should also investigate the processes through which a consolidated and shared interpretation of role conceptions and of operational experiences emerge. Of particular promise for theory development are distinct role conception interpretations within the same military and the examination of what changes and shifts may entail for civil-military relations. For instance, the Swedish military has had, since the early 1990s, two services with different role conceptions: a navy with a domestic defence role and an army with an expeditionary focus. With the recently announced return to domestic territorial defence, the army will have to shift dramatically in role conceptions, while the navy will only have to make minor adjustments. The officer corps in the two services are currently positioning themselves differently towards its civilian principals – one adapting, the other pushing for more autonomy – with distinct consequences for civil-military relations at least in the short term.

Sixth and last, further research could explore how militaries across the world expand their role conceptions to include tasks and functions from other professions of experts they are co-operating with, such as epidemiologists in the case of Israel, or police in the case of Brazil and France. Pushing this line of research further is crucial to ultimately understand what kind of organisation a state military is and how it navigates the civil-military environment it is part of.

Acknowledgements

The authors contributed equally to this article. They wish to thank Risa Brooks, Yagil Levy, Lindsay Cohn, Muhammad Haripin, Anit Mukherjee, Pascal Vennesson, Nina Wilén, and the unicorn federal union for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript. Chiara Ruffa gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Royal Swedish Academy of History, Letters and Antiquities. Nicole Jenne acknowledges financial support from the Chilean Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID), Fondecyt Regular No. 1210067 (2021). Open Access funding was kindly provided by Technische Universität Braunschweig.

Christoph Harig is Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany.

Nicole Jenne is Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.

Chiara Ruffa is Associate Professor and Academy Fellow at the Swedish Defence University.

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47 Chiara Ruffa, Christopher Dandeker, and Pascal Vennesson, ‘Soldiers drawn into politics? The influence of tactics in civil–military relations’, Small Wars & Insurgencies , 24:2 (2013), pp. 322–34.

48 Ofer Fridman and Beatrice Heuser, ‘Deadly dilemmas: Problems of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism in three documentaries’, RUSI Journal , 158:6 (2013), pp. 92–8.

49 Constantin Schüßler and Yee Kuang Heng, ‘The Bundeswehr and the Kunduz air strike 4 September 2009: Germany's post-heroic moment?’, European Security , 22:3 (2013), pp. 355–75.

50 Chiara Ruffa and Ralph Sundberg, ‘Breaking the frame: Frame disputes of war and peace’, Acta Sociologica , 61:3 (2018), pp. 317–32.

51 Elin Gustavsen, ‘The construction of meaning among Norwegian Afghanistan veterans’, International Sociology , 31:1 (2016), pp. 21–36.

52 For different perspectives about how the military allows for homogenous vs heterogenous views, see Joseph L. Soeters, Donna J. Winslow, and Alise Weibull, ‘Military culture’, in Caforio (ed.), Handbook of the Sociology of the Military , pp. 237–54.

53 Vennesson et al., ‘Is there a European way of war?’, p. 630.

54 Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Jeffrey W. Legro, Cooperation Under Fire: Anglo - German Restraint During World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Cornelius Friesendorf, How Western Soldiers Fight: Organizational Routines in Multinational Missions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Austin Long, The Soul of Armies: Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Military Culture in the US and UK (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Chiara Ruffa, Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

55 Richard H. Kohn, ‘Out of control: The crisis of civil-military relations’, The National Interest , 35 (1994), pp. 3–17; Richard H. Kohn, ‘First priorities in military professionalism’, Orbis , 57:3 (2013), pp. 380–9; Peter D. Feaver, ‘Crisis as shirking: An agency theory explanation of the souring of American civil-military relations’, Armed Forces & Society , 24:3 (1998), pp. 407–34.

56 Deborah Avant, ‘Political institutions and military effectiveness: Contemporary United States and United Kingdom’, in Risa Brooks and Elizabeth Stanley (eds), Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 80–105.

57 Samuel J. Fitch, ‘Military attitudes toward democracy in Latin America: How do we know if anything has changed?’, in David Pion-Berlin (ed.), Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 61–87 (p. 84).

58 Rino Bandlitz Johansen, Jon Christian Laberg, and Monica Martinussen, ‘Military identity as predictor of perceived military competence and skills’, Armed Forces & Society , 40:3 (2014), pp. 521–43.

59 Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

60 Risa Brooks, Michael Robinson, and Heidi Urben, ‘Huntington, Janowitz, or none of the above? Conceptions of professional norms by future army officers’, APSA Preprints , available at: { https://doi:10.33774/apsa-2020-6dhv6-v3 }; Tobias Böhmelt, Abel Escribà-Folch, and Ulrich Pilster, ‘Pitfalls of professionalism? Military academies and coup risk’, Journal of Conflict Resolution , 63:5 (2018), pp. 1111–39; Risa Brooks, ‘Paradoxes of professionalism: Rethinking civil-military relations in the United States’, International Security , 44:4 (2020), pp. 7–44.

61 Segal , Wechsler , ‘ The military and the family as greedy institutions ’; Moskos, Williams, and Segall (eds), The Postmodern Military ; Fabrizio Battistelli, ‘Peacekeeping and the postmodern soldier’, Armed Forces & Society , 23 : 3 ( 1997 ), pp. 467 –84 Google Scholar ; Yagil Levy, ‘Control from within: How soldiers control the military’, European Journal of International Relations , 23:1 (2016), pp. 192–216; Hundman , Eric and Parkinson , Sarah E. , ‘ Rogues, degenerates, and heroes: Disobedience as politics in military organizations ’, European Journal of International Relations , 25 : 3 ( 2019 ), pp. 645 –71 CrossRef Google Scholar .

62 Huntington, The Soldier and the State , p. 84.

63 See Brooks and Erickson, ‘The sources of military dissent’.

64 Theo Farrell, ‘Transnational norms and military development: Constructing Ireland's professional army’, European Journal of International Relations , 7:1 (2001), pp. 63–102 (p. 73).

65 McCann , Frank D. , ‘ Origins of the “new professionalism” of the Brazilian military ’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , 21 : 4 ( 1979 ), pp. 505 –22 CrossRef Google Scholar ; Stepan , Alfred , ‘ The new professionalism of internal warfare and military role expansion ’, in Stepan , Alfred (ed.), Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future ( New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 1973 ), pp. 41 – 65 Google Scholar .

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70 Christoph Harig and Chiara Ruffa, ‘Knocking on the barracks’ door: How role conceptions shape the military's reactions to political demands’, European Journal of International Security , this Special Issue.

71 Shemella , Paul , ‘ The spectrum of roles and missions of the armed forces ’, in Bruneau , Thomas C. and Tollefson , Scott D. (eds), Who Guards the Guardians and How: Democratic Civil-Military Relations ( Austin, TX : University of Texas Press , 2006 ), pp. 122 –44 (p. 123) CrossRef Google Scholar .

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80 For an interesting discussion on cultural complexes, see MacKenzie , Megan , Gunaydin , Eda , and Chaudhuri , Umeya , ‘ Illicit military behavior as exceptional and inevitable: Media coverage of military sexual violence and the “bad apples” paradox ’, International Studies Quarterly , 64 : 1 ( 2020 ), pp. 45 – 56 CrossRef Google Scholar .

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• Volume 7, Special Issue 1
• Christoph Harig (a1) , Nicole Jenne (a2) and Chiara Ruffa (a3)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2021.29

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March 14, 2020 by The Nation

Democracy is better than military rule – Rate Your Leader counsels Senator Adeyemi

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2001 WAEC English Language Theory You are a speaker in a debate on the topic “Civilian rule is better than...

You are a speaker in a debate on the topic “Civilian rule is better than military." Write your contribution for or against the motion. 

Explanation

Good morning Mr. Chairman, panel of Judges, accurate time-keeper, co-debaters, ladies and gentlemen. I am here to support the motion which says: "Civilian rule is better than military rule."        Firstly, I would like to take the pains to enlighten some of the younger ones here about what civilian rule and military rule are actually all about. Civilian rule can be likened to a democratic rule. Democracy, in the opinion of the layman, is government for the people, of the people and by the people. From the definition, it can be noted that civilian rulers are actually chosen by the people and they work for the benefit of the people who choose them.        On the other hand, military rule can be likened to an autocratic rule where the people are instructed to go and comes without any argument from anyone. It is like a do or die affair. Let me now get down to the motion.        First and foremost, in every democratic dispensation, there is freedom to vote and be voted for, which is not present in the military rule. The civilians only rule when they have been elected by the people. They do not impose themselves on anyone. Meanwhile, the people have no say when the military is ruling. Military rule is imposed on the people and military heads of state rule without the consent of the people. Because military men have guns, the people can not protest, they just have to accept them. Moreover, when civilians rule, the people enjoy freedom of speech and of the press. An indigene can criticise a civilian leader either in the newspaper or on television without any fear of molestation. Nowadays, it is very common to see people criticising or admonishing the civilian president of Nigeria on the television. Everybody is believed to be equal under a civilian dispensation. However, in military rule, no one has the guts to talk against a ruler even in the enclosure of his room because walls are believed to have ears.        Furthermore, in military rule, some innocent citizens, being victims of circumstances, are shot down accidentally. This often occurs in a military dispensation. There is little respect or regard for human lives and the military can be likened to armed robbers because instead of using their guns for security purposes, they maim innocent lives. However, in civilian rule, the intimidating guns are not present and this actually brings a sense of security to the citizens.        Lastly, civilian rulers execute good and popular projects which are aimed at ameliorating the suffering of the people they rule. They know that the people who vote them into power would judge them by their performance. Therefore, they execute good projects and provide infrastructural facilities that could speak for them when they are called to render account of their stewardship in governance. On the contrary, military rulers are not guided by the wishes and demands of the people they rule when it comes to project execution. This is because they are not accountable to the people.        I believe that I have been able to convince you that civilian rule is better than military rule. I thank you for your patience. 

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