The issue of civil-military relations is one of the oldest subjects of political science. Plato’s Republic discusses the difficulties inherent in creating a guardian class who would at once be “gentle to their own and cruel to enemies,” men who, like “noble dogs,” would serve as the ideal city’s guardians.1 Fear of military dictatorship plagued English and American political philosophers, who saw in both classical and recent history the threats to civil liberty that could arise from large standing armies. As a British parliamentarian put it in the eighteenth century: “[soldiers] are a body of men distinct from the body of the people; they are governed by different laws, and blind obedience, and an entire submission to the orders of their commanding officer, is their only principle … it is indeed impossible that the liberties of the people in any country can be preserved where a numerous standing army is kept up.”2 Despotism often wears a uniform, and even in republics such as early twentieth-century France statesmen urgently pondered ways and means of reducing military autonomy and ensuring adequate civilian control of the armed forces of the state. Despite the relatively small size of the peacetime military establishment of the United States, civil-military relations in this country have experienced periodic crises—most notably during the Civil War, when on more than one occasion President Abraham Lincoln found himself deeply at odds with his generals. The overall record of the American military, however, remains one of complete “subordination and loyalty” to the Constitution.3 For the United States, and indeed for most democracies, the central problem of civil-military relations has not been the most fundamental one—that of preventing a military takeover of the state. For many reasons, including the acculturation of the military itself and the presence of numerous countervailing forces and institutions, that specter has never seriously haunted American statesmen. But the adjustment of relations regarding the preparation and use of force to serve the ends of policy has proven a very different matter.
The notion that if there is no fear of a coup there can be nothing seriously amiss with civil-military relations is one of the greatest obstacles to serious thinking about the subject. The proper roles of the military in shaping foreign policy, in setting the conditions under which it acts, in creating the kind of forces most appropriate for its tasks, in mobilizing civil society to support its activities—these are all contentious issues. The military is almost invariably the largest single element of national government; it claims a vast chunk of its discretionary spending, and it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. There is nothing obvious or inevitable about the subordination of the armed forces to the wishes and purposes of the political leadership.
Almost half a century ago, in what became a classic work of political science, Samuel P. Huntington set out a theory of civil-military relations to guide both civilians and soldiers in their relationships. The Soldier and the State has ever since set the terms of debate about civil-military relations in this country. A simplified secondhand version of the book has come, in fact, to be commonly viewed as the “normal” theory of civil-military relations—the accepted theoretical standard by which the current reality is to be judged.4 Like most classics The Soldier and the State is more cited than read, and many of its subtleties have been lost on those who have admired it most. But extraordinarily influencial it remains.
Huntington begins with an analysis of officership as a profession, much like medicine or the law. Like those vocations, he writes, officer-ship is distinguished by expertise in a particular area of human affairs, a sense of responsibility that lends an importance transcending monetary rewards to one’s work, and corporateness or a sense of community and commitment to members of one’s group.5 For Huntington, the central skill of the soldier is the “management of violence,” the arts of planning, organizing, and employing military force, but not applying it. At least in ground and naval warfare, officers orchestrate and coordinate the use of force: they do not, except in extremis, fight themselves. To be sure, this may mean that “not all officers are professional military officers” in the restricted sense of the term.6 Those who specialize in career areas not directly related to the management of violence are not truly professional according to this admittedly narrow set of criteria. Neither, by implication, are those whose specialty is the direct application of violence rather than its management and planning.
Huntington believes in the distinctiveness of the military mindset. It is, he says in a notable passage, “pessimistic, collectivism historically inclined, power-oriented, nationalistic, militaristic, pacifist, and instrumentalist in its view of the military profession. It is, in brief, realistic and conservative.”7 To be sure, this is an ideal type. But he maintains that it is powerful nonetheless, and that this military ethos is a source of great strength not merely for the military but for society more broadly. In The Soldier and the State’s concluding pages he draws a striking contrast between the appearances and the inner realities of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the neighboring town of Highland Falls, New York—appearances that reflect cultural differences. The austerity and purposefulness of the military order has something to teach, or at least complement, the dazzling heterogeneity and anarchy of democratic society.
Huntington offers a recipe for ensuring civilian dominance over the armed forces, arguing as he does for a sharp division between civilian and military roles. “Objective control”—a form of civilian control based on efforts to increase the professionalism of the officer corps, carving off for it a sphere of action independent of politics—is, in his view, the preferable form of civil-military relations. He contrasts “objective control” with what he calls “subjective control,” which aims to tame the military by civilianizing it, thus rendering it politically aware, or by controlling it from within with transplanted civilian elites. In the contemporary world those who support this latter means of control are “fusionists” who believe that the old categories of political and military matters are difficult to distinguish.8 In a previous age these fusionists would have asserted civilian control by keeping officership the preserve of the ruling social class; in the current era they seek to blur the autonomous nature of military professionalism. “The essence of objective civilian control,” by way of contrast, “is the recognition of autonomous military professionalism.”9 There is good news here: soldiers not only respect the bounds of democratic politics when subject to objective control, they also fight more effectively. When politicians leave purely military matters to officers, and when they draw clear distinctions between their activities and those of civilians, outstanding military organizations emerge. Officers motivated by dedication to a politically sterile and neutral military ideal—“the good soldier,” and “the best regiment”—will turn in a performance superior to those motivated by ideology or merely personal drives such as ambition or vainglory.10
This view has profound implications for strategy. Huntington quotes approvingly a Command and General Staff College 1936 publication:
Politics and strategy are radically and fundamentally things apart. Strategy begins where politics ends. All that soldiers ask is that once the policy is settled, strategy and command shall be regarded as being in a sphere apart from politics … The line of demarcation must be drawn between politics and strategy, supply, and operations. Having found this line, all sides must abstain from trespassing.11
This sharp separation is possible because military expertise is, indeed, definable and isolatable. “The criteria of military efficiency are limited, concrete, and relatively objective; the criteria of political wisdom are indefinite, ambiguous, and highly subjective.”12 Political leaders enhance their control by making the military austerely professional, while reserving to themselves alone the passing of judgments on matters of policy as opposed to technical military matters.
Many democratic politicians and even more of their fellow citizens find the understanding of strategy as craft reassuring. To believe that war is a professional art is to believe that it is not subject to the errors and follies, the bickering and pettiness, the upsets and unpredictabilities that characterize politics. Military expertise, in this view, is a constant.
The peculiar skill of the military officer is universal in the sense that its essence is not affected by changes in time or location. Just as the qualifications of a good surgeon are the same in Zurich as they are in New York, the same standards of professional military competence apply in Russia as in America and in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth.13
Such a belief offers reassurance to perplexed politicians and anxious citizens. As many an injured or sickly patient in desperate straits yearns to trust a doctor with a soothing bedside manner, so too many civilians look to put their reliance in generals who cultivate a calm or dominating demeanor and an attitude of command. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is in matters of life and death that many people become more rather than less trustful of the professionals. And indeed this, in Huntington’s view, is how the United States did so well during the Second World War: “So far as the major decisions in policy and strategy were concerned, the military ran the war.”14 And a good thing too, he seems to add.
A simplified Huntingtonian conception of military professionalism remains the dominant view within the American defense establishment. In the mid-1980s the Congress conducted a debate on military reforms that led to the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which substantially increased the power of the Joint Staff and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the expense of the military services and even, to some extent, that of the office of secretary of defense.15 Not only did the originators of that legislation explicitly endorse Huntington’s reading of American military history; they saw their responsibility as one of providing more and better centralized, autonomous military advice to civilian leaders.16
Huntington’s theory has particular importance in a period during which the United States finds itself chronically resorting to the use of force. The concept of “objective control” offers a way of coping with the dangers that military organizations pose for democracies—what Tocqueville described as “a restless, turbulent spirit” that “is an evil inherent in the very constitution of democratic armies, and beyond hope of cure.17 Objective control offers a simple formula for the guidance of politicians and the education of officers and it promises not merely civilian control and constitutional governance but strategic success.
And yet the theory of objective control does not suffice as a description of either what does occur or what should. Scholarly critics have taken issue with its assumptions about the nature of military professionalism and, as we shall see, these views have some foundation. Furthermore, an examination of recent history—including even the relatively successful Gulf war—suggests that the Huntingtonian model of desirable civil-military relations does not characterize conflict. The most successful cases of wartime leadership in a democratic state—Lincoln’s stewardship of the Union cause in the American Civil War, Winston Churchill’s conduct of British affairs during World War II, or David Ben-Gurion’s skillful handling of Israeli war policy during the country’s struggle for existence—reveal nothing like the rigid separations dictated by the “normal” theory of civil-military relations.
The standard conception of military professionalism, despite its general acceptance, nonetheless attracted criticism from a number of sources. Historian Allen Guttmann contended that Huntington had misinterpreted American history in constructing his argument.18 Rather than being isolated from the American polity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and during the interwar years, Guttmann argued, American officers were in fact quite representative of it. And rather than adhering to a conservative world view at odds with that of the broader society, they shared the pragmatic and democratic views of American society generally. Huntington detects and approves of a deep tension between civil and military values, and asserts the value of military detachment from society. Guttmann rejects that assessment and deprecates Huntington’s endorsement of it.
Huntington’s ideal officer is a well-defined aristocratic type—a Helmuth von Moltke, to take a Continental example—who is at once patriotic and yet, in some fashion, almost above patriotism in his sense of membership in the brotherhood of arms. Where Huntington noted and celebrated the honor of soldiers as a central aspect of the military way, Guttmann points out the stubborn pragmatism of American generals. Guttmann observes that such quintessentially American figures as Stonewall Jackson had little sense of the punctilious chivalry that European officers admired, and that (in his view) characterize Huntington’s theory.19 When a Confederate colonel reporting on the successful and bloody repulse of a Yankee attack expressed his admiration for the enemy’s bravery and his regret at having to kill such courageous foes, Jackson replied, “No. Shoot them all. I do not wish them to be brave.”20 Other observers of the American military, taking a somewhat different tack but arriving at a similar conclusion, note the conventionality of its officer corps, which is solidly middle class in its values and aspirations and thus firmly anchored in the society from which it emerges.21 Huntington’s hopes for creative tension between civilian and military values find no resonance in a military that watches the same television programs and listens to the same music as society at large.
Sociologist Morris Janowitz and others have made a similar if more contemporary argument. The traditional notion of professionalism has weakened, they contend, as war itself has changed. “As a result of the complex machinery of warfare, which has weakened the line between military and nonmilitary organization, the military establishment has come more and more to display the characteristics typical of any large-scale organization.”22 While Huntington’s concept of “objective control” may have made sense in the age of the World Wars, the nuclear revolution gave birth to “a convergence of military and civilian organization.” Janowitz proposes what he calls a “constabulary concept” of officership—one dedicated to the limited use of force in carefully defined circumstances.23 He draws a distinction between “heroic leaders, who embody traditionalism and glory, and military ‘managers,’ who are concerned with the scientific and rational conduct of war.”24 There is little doubt in his mind that it is the modern military managers who are winning out, and a good thing too, he seems to believe. Janowitz thus appears to have accepted Huntington’s definition of military professionalism but to have smoothed off its rough edges: where Huntington anticipates—indeed welcomes—a divergence between civilian and military values as a byproduct of professionalism, Janowitz sees no such necessity.
Other military sociologists have gone even further. In 1977 Charles Moskos suggested that the military had begun a slow, but steady transformation from an institution—“legitimated in terms of values and norms”—to an occupation—“legitimated in terms of the marketplace, i.e., prevailing monetary rewards for equivalent competencies.”25 The increasing harmonization of military and civilian pay scales, the reduction of special military perquisites (e.g., the PX and the commissary) seemed to him to weaken the distinctiveness of the military way of life. Implicitly, at any rate, all militaries exist under some form of what Huntington would call “subjective control.” Indeed, one optimistic scholar proposes a theory of “concordance” in which “the very idea of ‘civil’ may be inappropriate.”26 It is a theory of “dialogue, accommodation, and shared values or objectives among the military, the political elites, and society.”27 In some ways, this practically defines away the problem of civil-military relations.
Disagree as they might, Huntington and these critics of his ideas both deliver reassuring if conflicting messages. For Huntington the good news lies in his discovery that those elements of the military persona and outlook that liberal America finds unsettling (indeed, he contends that “liberalism does not understand and is hostile to military institutions and the military function”)28 are, in fact, not merely functional but desirable. For Guttmann, Janowitz, and Moskos the good news was just the reverse: the military resembles America, shares its élite’s values and, increasingly, parallels its social origins and way of life. As the all-out conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave way to more limited struggles, the military internalized civilian views of how it should conduct military operations. The stark differences between the military and civilian mind, so central to Huntington’s theory, have blurred.
For neither Huntington nor his critics, however, is there anything intrinsically problematic about combining civilian control and military effectiveness, in peace or in war. Indeed, for more than one writer the term “civilian control” is a faintly absurd echo of dark popular fantasies like the 1964 film Seven Days in May, in which the military tries to take over the government.29 “The concept of civilian control of the military has little significance for contemporary problems of national security in the United States,”30 wrote one author in 1961—a dubious assertion, it now appears, at the beginning of a decade that spawned some of the most destructive tensions between civilians and soldiers the United States has ever seen. Similarly, in 1985 Congressional staff drawing up legislation aimed at enhancing the power of the military declared that “instances of American commanders overstepping the bounds of their authority have been rare.… None of these pose any serious threat to civilian control of the military.”31
Neither Guttmann nor Janowitz nor Moskos, we should note, delve into civil-military relations in wartime. They accept much though not all of Huntington’s characterization of America’s military history in war. Indeed, some of the most influential writings on civil-military relations criticizing Huntington barely mention warfare at all.32 And, in fact, most of the civil-military-relations literature, with the exception of Huntington, has somewhat oddly steered away from close examination of what happens during wartime.
An exception is British scholar S. E. Finer, whose critique of Huntington is very different from his American counterparts’. He argues that Huntington has severely underestimated the problem of civilian control. Blessed with the advantages of centralized command, hierarchy, discipline, and cohesion, and embodying virtues (bravery, patriotism, and discipline, for example) that civil society finds attractive, the military can resist civilian control effectively.33 Noting that one of the armies that Huntington has praised as the most professional—the German—has repeatedly intervened in politics, Finer suggests that military professionalism could in fact incline militaries to engage in politics rather than not.34 And in wartime in particular civilians are often too insecure about their knowledge, too fearful of public opinion, and too overawed by their military’s expertise to exercise much control at all. “‘War is too important to be left to the generals.’ Few civilians seem to have agreed with this and still fewer generals,” Finer writes.35 A difference in national experience may have been at work here as well. In the United States the archetypal civil-military conflict was between the imperious general Douglas MacArthur and the doughty president Harry Truman, a confrontation crisply decided by the dismissal of the former by the latter. For British authors, the Curragh mutiny (or, as some would prefer, “incident”) of 1914, in which a group of cavalry officers (fifty-seven out of seventy in one brigade) offered their resignations rather than suppress Ulster loyalists determined to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom, presents a more typical and a more disturbing threat to civilian control.36 More instructive yet in the British experience is the struggle between civilian and military leadership during World War I. Prime Minister David Lloyd George believed himself thwarted and even endangered by a military clique resting on an alliance between the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, and the commander of British forces in France, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, aided by docile civilian politicians and journalists.37 Finer contends that by construing civilian control too narrowly, as the formal subordination of the military to the civilian power, and particularly in peacetime, one may underestimate the difficulty of controlling the use of military power in wartime. Precisely because, unlike most other students of civil-military relations, Finer has looked at war, he has a considerably more pessimistic view of the prospect for civilian control.
There is yet another school of thought, rarely taught in war colleges or countenanced in the corridors of power, which rejects the normal theory root and branch. If believed, this view would undermine the very possibility of civilian war leadership, because it is a doctrine of strategic nihilism, which denies the purposefulness of war, and of anthropological determinism, which substitutes an understanding of the officer as warrior for that of the officer as professional. Huntington and his critics understand the use of force as an activity subject to rational control: they disagree about the importance of professionalism understood as isolation from civil society and the nature of controlled violence in the nuclear age. This third school of thought actively rejects the premise of rationality.
The most famous of strategic nihilists is Leo Tolstoy. Although many of his readers have found his philosophy merely a diversion from his tale of the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs, his masterwork, War and Peace, represents a serious and coherent meditation on war by one who had witnessed it close up and studied it at length.38 When Tolstoy’s heroes encounter battle they learn that it has none of the regularity and form that they had expected. Pierre Bezukhov, his hero, comes to the field of Borodino and is baffled: he “could not even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.”39 As he soon learns at first hand, actual fighting is infinitely more chaotic than even the preliminary chaos of these initial deployments suggests.
Bezukhov’s friend, the doomed Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, is a professional soldier whose dreams of high command wither as he learns the truth about war. After aspiring to imitate, in some measure, his hero and his country’s enemy Napoleon, Andrei gradually realizes that military genius is a fraud. He declares that “there was not and could not be a science of war, and consequently no such thing as military genius.” When asked why, he replies:
What theory or science is possible where the conditions and circumstances are unknown and cannot be determined, and especially where the strength of the active forces cannot be ascertained? … You can’t foresee anything. Sometimes—when there is not a coward in front to cry: “We are cut off!” and start running, but a brave, spirited man who shouts “Hurrah!”—a detachment of five thousand is worth fifty thousand, as at Schöngraben, while at other times fifty thousand will flee from eight thousand, as at Austerlitz. What science can there be in a matter in which, as in every practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment, and no one can tell when that moment will come?40
Tolstoy, at times, dispenses with his characters and lectures his readers directly on this score, telling them that Napoleon and Alexander of Russia had no real control of the unfolding of the terrible war between France and Russia, “because their will depended on that of millions of men who actually had to do things.… A king is the slave of history.…”41 The notion that millions of soldiers were killed or maimed because of politics is absurd, in Tolstoy’s view, in part because the causes are so trivial and the actual events so monstrous.42 Shortly before his death Prince Andrei learns that generals are only called geniuses because of the prestige of their positions, and because of mankind’s overwhelming propensity to flatter those in power. “The best generals I have known were, in fact, stupid or absent-minded men,” Prince Andrei concludes. And, indeed the most successful general of them all, Kutuzov, is notable in Tolsoy’s account chiefly for his unwillingness to act in any way like a conventional, purposive strategist.
For Tolstoy the falsehood of military history lies in its necessary reductionism, its deceitful attempt to merge a myriad of actions by individuals or very small groups into larger coherent aggregates. There is, he observed bitterly, “the necessity of lying” when one discusses the actions of thousands of fearful men spread over several miles of ground.43 The account of the course of a battle, and no less of the course of a campaign as described by the military historians, is nothing more or less than a fraud, imposed by rationalists on a world that escapes understanding.44 Yet historians and contemporaries alike regard battles as the building blocks statesmen and generals use to build a strategic edifice. By showing the essential component of strategy—the battle, with its unities of time, place, and action—to be a tissue of lies, Tolstoy calls into question the very notion of strategy itself.45
One might say that a novelist’s account of war is bound to underplay the role of strategy, if only because his story focuses so keenly on the individual rather than the collective predicament. Yet Tolstoy’s views resonate in the writings of formidable military historians as well. Gerhard Ritter, the great German historian of civil-military relations and war planning; Russell Weigley, one of the foremost American military historians of the last half century; and John Keegan, perhaps the most widely read of late-twentieth-century military historians; each in different ways questions or even repudiates strategy in our sense of harnessing war to political ends. By so doing they make the problem of civilian wartime leadership out to be insuperable. Theirs is a counsel of despair, but worth examination nonetheless.
Ritter, in his crowning work The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, sympathizes with the Clausewitzian desire to subordinate war to politics, but argues that the Prussian theorist substantially underestimated the difficulty of doing so. Ritter agrees with Finer in this, saying, “In wartime, politicians always have a hard time gaining and maintaining authority against successful generals.”46 He attributes some of the intrinsic tension between soldiers and statesmen from Moltke to Bismarck to a difference in perspective, with the former seeking to achieve the maximum possible with the means at hand, the latter to build and preserve order, albeit through the use of military means.47 The problem of civil-military relations lies in harmonizing “the military stance and the principle of constructive peace,” which are intrinsically at odds. Ritter makes a narrower and more empirical observation as well. The harmonization of war and politics runs afoul of human nature, which is considerably less lofty and disinterested than Clausewitz assumes.
Clausewitz’s theory of war predicates statesmen whose characters are utterly pervaded by impulses of grandeur, heroism, honor, national power, and freedom, men who are motivated by calm political reason far above petty intrigue or advantage rather than by blind hatred. He further presupposes soldiers accustomed to regard themselves as loyal servants of their supreme commander, never in danger of being ruled by political ambitions or jealousies, military men to whom the thought does not even occur that they might oppose their sovereign warlord or exploit popular support for their own purposes. Not in a single line does Clausewitz even so much as hint that the situation might be very different.48
Here is an argument quite different from Huntington’s ascription to the officer corps of a conservative, and to (democratic) politicians, a generally liberal outlook—different world views to be sure, but both serious and coherent intellectual positions and moral commitments. In Germany’s master concept for the opening stages of the First World War, the Schlieffen Plan, Ritter saw a tragic and more typical case of strategy dragging policy along with it.49 Politicians had a vague concept of what the plan entailed (although the German Foreign Ministry did not learn of it from the General Staff until December 1912—at least seven years after its inception), but were unable or unwilling to deal with its political implications.50 As appalling a case as the Schlieffen Plan was, the course of German civil-military relations throughout World War I was even more dramatic testimony to the difficulty of forging strategy. Mediocre statesmanship and a blinkered, aggressive military class are the norm, Ritter seems to say, which means that Clausewitzian strategy is unlikely to succeed.
Weigley, following Ritter, rejects strategy as a near impossibility. Indeed, he cites with approval Ritter’s conception of “the essentially demoniac character of power,” as a nearly insuperable obstacle to the practical implementation of political control in war.51 Weigley believes that “the logic that drives war toward remorseless revolutionary struggle” almost prevents it from being usable as an implement of policy.52 Indeed, in the twentieth century “warfare sets its own purposes.”53 No regime, he argues, be it democratic, monarchical, or totalitarian, has been able to make war “a disciplined tool of policy rather than an autonomous force.”54 To be sure, there have been exceptional civilian leaders like Lincoln who came close to the classical ideal of a statesman who could make war serve political ends. But even he was stretched to the limit, too burdened with responsibilities “to spend much of his time practicing the art of military strategy.”55 More typical is the sinister tendency of war to militarize civilians, to make them succumb to the logic of military operations, forfeiting long-range political calculations for the imperatives of campaigning today. Thus, even cases of apparently effective control by civilian politicians over the exercise of military force are deceiving: statesmen serve as no more than spokesmen for the gods of battle.
Ritter and Weigley do not necessarily deplore the attempt to forge and implement strategy. For Weigley the search for strategy in the eighteenth century reflected an understandable but futile desire to avoid the calamities of chronic warfare that had bedeviled seventeenth-century Europe. “The quest for decisive battle was the educated soldier’s rationalist effort to make war cost-effective, the promptness of the decision through battle promising to prevent an inordinate drain upon the resources of the state.”56 Yet this eighteenth-century quest, which persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth, failed. Attrition and exhaustion, not harmonious adjustment of ends and means, have decided war’s outcomes. War may conceivably avert some developments—it could block the French or German attempts to achieve Continental hegemony, for example—but it can achieve no positive purpose.57 It is the crudest of the tools that statecraft has at its disposal. Carl von Clausewitz once said that war has its own grammar (combat) but not its own logic (politics). In the strategic nihilist’s view, that grammar overwhelms all but the simplest logic.
John Keegan rejects the possibility of strategy based on a Huntingtonian relationship of ends and means for yet a third reason, namely, that strategy is incompatible with the nature of the men who wage it. He is, if anything, more acerbic and definitive than his fellow antistrategists. “I am increasingly tempted towards the belief that there is no such thing as ‘strategy’ at all.”58 Or, “Politics played no part in the conduct of the First World War worth mentioning.”59 But his reasons for rejecting strategy differ from those of Tolstoy or Ritter and Weigley. “War is wholly unlike diplomacy or politics because it must be fought by men whose values and skills are not those of politicians or diplomats.”60 Keegan contends that there is a distinctive military way, one that in many respects transcends cultures (“there is only one warrior culture”) and is inimical to politics. Profoundly ambivalent to soldiers themselves, Keegan argues that societies have attempted to tame warriors by putting them in the mold of what he calls “the regimental soldier.” These “artificially preserved warrior bands” have served important roles in modern states, but Keegan believes that their day is waning—and he has said as much for some time. In his first and best known book, The Face of Battle, he suggested that classic battle, and with it, the classic warrior, was heading down the path to obsolescence. The last sentence of that work, in fact, has it that “the suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself.”61
Keegan rejects what he terms the Clausewitzian model of war—one which involves the rational control of violence to serve political ends—because he believes that the human implementers of strategy, and not simply the instrumentality of battle, are intrinsically unsuited to their task. The warrior spirit is ineluctably opposed to politics and will take war in directions that make no political sense. Keegan recognizes the admirable qualities of the warrior, and would seek to retain the best of his virtues, but believes that this can be done only by transforming the traditional military function. In making this argument Keegan falls back on a long tradition that celebrates the martial virtues while deploring their manifestation in war, an urge that seeks to retain such values as courage, fidelity, and audacity but to redirect them. William James calling for the “moral equivalent of war” in strenuous public service or modern students of the martial arts celebrating “the new warrior” each, in different ways, have attempted to carry through Keegan’s project.62
Keegan would regard both Huntington’s and Janowitz’s conception of military professionalism as naïvely optimistic. Much of Keegan’s argument rests on an attack on—one might almost say a visceral detestation of—the classical Clausewitzian view of the relationship between war and politics. “War … need not imply politics, since the values of many of those who make war—warriorism and warriors respectively—reject deterrence and diplomacy for action.”63 According to Keegan, Clausewitz views military power as a mere scalpel in the hand of a statesman-surgeon, but fails to understand that “warrior values can and do supplant those of politics.”64 Strategic nihilists, like nihilists generally, do not offer practical prescriptions, of course, but the implications of their views—not altogether unfounded—further undermine the assumptions required to make Huntington’s prescription for sound civil-military relations work.
Despite these various rebuttals of Huntington’s argument, his general concept still stands and retains its popularity. Military life has witnessed many changes, but it nonetheless remains a way apart—a point brought home to the Clinton administration in 1993, when the president attempted to lift the US military’s ban on homosexuals serving in uniform. Journalist Tom Ricks may have said it best when he described life in today’s military as “what Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society could have been.… It is almost a Japanese version of America—relatively harmonious, extremely hierarchical, and nearby always placing the group above the individual.”65 With its distinctive way of life on self-contained bases, a perhaps anachronistic commitment to service, discipline, and honor continue to pervade an institution that, for example, will still penalize a senior officer for adultery—a sin usually overlooked by the civilian society around it.
Those who predicted a mere constabulary role for the military, hence its transmutation into a kind of heavily armed police force, have also been proven wrong. Two real wars—Vietnam and the Persian Gulf—have been fought between the time those predictions appeared and the present day. The rarity of large wars is not, of itself, an indication of the obsolescence of the military profession understood as the management of large-scale force. There are other explanations including the configuration of international politics in which one country, the United States, dominates all others, and the possession of overwhelming power by the status quo dominant nations. Even so, Keegan’s curious declaration that “the suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself”66 rings hollow, followed as it has been by conventional conflicts such as the Falklands, Lebanon, Persian Gulf, and Yugoslav wars, to name only the larger ones.
Furthermore, and contrary to what proponents of the “constabulary function” of the military suggest, the minor interventions, demonstrations of force, and peacekeeping operations of today do not diverge from the norms of the past. Soldiers and Marines of a bygone era suppressed hostile Indians and Nicaraguan rebels; their counterparts today have returned to Haiti, invaded Grenada, overthrown a Panamanian dictator, dueled with Somali tribesmen, and suppressed Serb paramilitaries. The differences do not look all that great. As intellectually intriguing as the arguments of the strategic nihilists might be, they too have proven ultimately unconvincing. Some wars and lesser uses of force clearly achieved their objectives (for example, Egypt’s October 1973 campaign which broke the Arab-Israeli peace deadlock, or the Gulf war). Beyond this, nihilism is ultimately a doctrine of irresponsibility that provides no standards of conduct for either statesman or soldier. Even Finer’s dispute with Huntington seems to be confounded by the apparent deference of military leaders to their civilian superiors. With the sole exception of the MacArthur controversy, and perhaps not even that, the Western world has not recently witnessed the kind of virulent antipathy between “brass hats” and “frocks” that in 1914-1918 characterized civil-military relations in both Britain and France.
There is, however, another possible critique of Huntington’s theory, and that rests on his and his critics’ conception of professionalism. Put simply, it is that although officership is a profession, it differs in many respects from all others: in some of the most important respects it does not, in fact, resemble medicine or the law. Indeed, the Huntingtonian construct represents a concept of professionalism prevalent in the 1950s, but since challenged in many spheres as unrealistically pristine; “incomprehensibility to laymen, rather than rationality, is the foundation of professionalism,” in the acid words of a scholar writing in the more cynical 1970s.67 Officership differs in a number of important ways from other professions. Unlike law, medicine, or engineering, it binds its members to only one employer, the government, and has only one fundamental structure—the large service branch. But other differences are more important, in particular those bearing on the goals of the professional activity and the nature of the expertise involved.
All professional activities present difficulties of moral choice and ultimate purpose to those who practice them. The wrenching choices involved in the treatment of terminally ill patients are well known; so too are the ethical dilemmas of a lawyer who becomes privy to knowledge of the criminal activities of his client. But by and large in the professions of law and medicine, on which the classic conception of professionalism is based, the ultimate goals are fairly straightforward. They are, for the doctor, to cure his patients of their diseases, or at least to alleviate the pain they suffer. Occasionally, of course, these two imperatives conflict. For the lawyer they are, at least within the American legal system, to achieve the best possible result (be it acquittal, or, in civil cases, maximum financial and other forms of redress) for his clients.
The soldier’s ultimate purposes are altogether hazier: they are, as Clausewitz and others insist, the achievement of political ends designated by statesmen. But because political objectives are just that—political—they are often ambiguous, contradictory, and uncertain. It is one of the greatest sources of frustration for soldiers that their political masters find it difficult (or what is worse from their point of view, merely inconvenient) to fully elaborate in advance the purposes for which they have invoked military action, or the conditions under which they intend to limit or terminate it. The “professional” concept of military activity, moreover, depicts political purpose in war as purely a matter of foreign policy; and yet in practice the “high” politics of war is suffused as well with “low” or domestic politics. President Lincoln wants a victory at Atlanta in the summer of 1864 in order to crush the Confederacy—but also to boost his own chances of reelection, which in turn is necessary for the ultimate victory of the Union. President Roosevelt dismisses professional military advice and orders an invasion of North Africa in 1942 rather than a landing in France in 1943—this, he explains, in order to engage American public opinion in the fight in the European theater, rather than in hopes of achieving an early end to the war. President Johnson limits air attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong in 1965–1968 in part to preserve his ability to launch the Great Society, but also to limit the chances that China will enter the war.
The traditional conception of military professionalism assumes that it is possible to segregate an autonomous area of military science from political purpose.68 In many ways one can. Frequently, however, a seemingly sharp separation crumbles when it encounters the real problems of war. Consider the question confronted by the Allies in the late summer and fall of 1944 in France: whether to advance on a wide front or to concentrate scarce logistical resources behind a northern thrust along the French, Belgian, and Dutch coasts (directed by a British general) or a southern thrust into central Germany (directed by an American general). One might say that there was a military “best answer,” assuming that the ultimate objective was simply the defeat of Germany—which in turn incorrectly assumes that the word “defeat” lends itself to a simple definition. But in fact the political objectives of even the Second World War were far more complex than that; they involved questions of cost in lives and treasure, minimization of damage to Allied civilian populations (including Londoners under threat from V-2 missiles launched in Holland), and matters of national prestige. These were not political modifications to a “military” objective of defeating Germany, but essential to it. “The distinction between politics and strategy diminishes as the point of view is raised. At the summit true politics and strategy are one.”69 Careless readers of Huntington have missed his awareness that these kinds of mixed political-military decisions do indeed occur; in truth, they occur even more frequently than the “normal” theory would suggest.
That the good military officer requires technical expertise no one would deny. But is it indeed true that “the peculiar skill of the military officer is universal” across time, nationality, and place? The qualifications of a good North Vietnamese infantry officer in Indochina in 1965 would surely have differed in some important respects from those of a good American officer opposing him. The Vietnamese would have needed a ruthless disregard for his own men’s suffering and casualties that would have rendered an American not merely morally unfit to command, but a likely candidate for “fragging”—assassination—by his own men. He could have easily remained ignorant of large areas of technical knowledge (for example, the employment of close air support, or planning procedures for heliborne movements) that the American required. More than one author has suggested that the Vietnam failure stemmed at least in part from the stubborn resistance of American officers to adapting their conception of professionalism to the war before them. And American bafflement when facing unconventional opponents like Somalia’s Muhammad Farah Aideed reflects, in part, the American military’s reluctance to walk away from an essentially conventional conception of what it is to be “a professional.”70
Huntington’s assertion that, in the modern age at any rate, professional armies are better armies may require at least some revision, although it is a belief in which many regular armies take comfort.71 The more research is done on one of the most formidable fighting machines of all time, the German Wehrmacht, the greater the role of its ideology appears to be.72 For a generation after World War II scholars attributed the fighting abilities of the Germans in World War II to neutral, professional characteristics: small-unit cohesion and careful practices of officer and noncommissioned officer selection and recruitment.73 More prolonged and careful investigation, however, has revealed that the permeation of the German army by Nazi ideology made it a better fighting force.74 Not only did it instill in a large proportion of its men a fanatic determination to fight—it also contributed indirectly to the maintenance of tactical effectiveness. The ruthlessness of the Nazis allowed for the harshest possible repression of dissent or doubt. The Germans, who had executed forty-eight of their own men during World War I, shot somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 during World War II; the comparable numbers for the British army were 356 in World War I and 40 in World War II.75 At the same time, the Hitler Jugend provided a reserve of junior officers and leaders while Nazi ideology reinforced the central virtues of military leadership, including selflessness, physical courage, and initiative.76 Perhaps the greatest proof of the contribution of ideology lies in the record of the units of the Waffen-SS, which by war’s end constituted no less than a quarter of Germany’s army, and which repeatedly turned in an outstanding fighting performance. Of Theodor Eicke, the leader of one of the most successful of the Waffen-SS divisions, the Totenkopf (Death’s Head), one historian notes: “Eicke’s style of leadership differed little in practice from the methods he had used to administer the prewar concentration camp system.… What he lacked in formal training, imagination, and finesse, he attempted to overcome through diligence, energy, and a constant effort to master the baffling technical intricacies of mechanized war.”77 Eicke was a successful military leader not in spite of those characteristics that would have earned him a trial for his numerous crimes against humanity had he survived the war, but because of them.
Nor is the German experience unique. Ideological armies—the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and the preindependence Palmach in Palestine are all examples—have often turned in superior tactical performances against larger and better equipped regular forces. The ideologically motivated fighter may make a good junior officer—he often embodies the self-sacrifice, integrity, and drive the leaders of soldiers in battle require. More than a few higher-level commanders as well have—like Eicke, albeit in very different causes—demonstrated high orders of ability.78
If the content of military professionalism is, as Huntington contends, the “management of violence,” that is a definition that excludes large areas of military activity (logistics, for example) which often have considerable civilian analogues and yet are indispensable to military operations.79 Many of these skills are readily transferable to or from the civilian world. It is no accident that the US Army’s chief logistician in the Persian Gulf, Lieutenant General Gus Pagonis, became, immediately upon retirement, an extremely successful executive at Sears, in the same way that the military rapidly promoted civilian executives to high military rank during the World Wars. Moreover, although all serious modern military organizations devote a great deal of effort to schooling and training, history is filled with examples of soldiers taken up from civilian life who very quickly master the essentials of military affairs. The World Wars offer examples of great soldiers who spent only brief peacetime periods of their life in regular military organizations, and then flourished in times of actual war. General Sir John Monash, one of the best generals of World War I, was a civil engineer whose prewar experience consisted solely of militia duty. Yet he rose to command perhaps the most formidable of all Allied units, the Australian Imperial Force.80 There are hardly any accounts, even a century ago, of self-taught or part-time doctors and engineers performing nearly so well.
Military professionalism is job-specific, much as business management is. Brilliant entrepreneurs may prove utterly unable to cope with the problems of running the corporations their creative genius brought into the world. Skilled managers of a long-established high-technology firm like IBM would probably find it difficult to assume equal responsibilities in an entertainment company like Disney. There is, to be sure, enough commonality in management experience to make it plausible to put a former manufacturer of repeating rifles in charge of a large ice cream company (Ben & Jerry’s), but that does not guarantee success. The ruthless churning of higher management in many companies reflects what might be thought of as “wartime” conditions—a ceaseless turnover of executives who, though qualified by training and experience for the highest office, nonetheless prove unfit for their tasks, exhausted by their previous work, or merely, but fatally, unlucky. In this above all they resemble generals in an intense war. This should not surprise us, for in some sense businesses fight their “wars” every day, unlike military organizations.
This observation suggests a deeper problem with the notion of expertise in the management of violence as the essence of the military profession. Where lawyers continually appear in court or draw up legal instruments, where doctors routinely operate or prescribe medication, where engineers build bridges or computers, soldiers very rarely manage violence, or at least not large-scale violence. They prepare to manage violence; they anticipate its requirements; they study past uses of violence, but they very rarely engage in the central activity that defines their profession. In the words of one British general writing after World War I:
Imagine an immense railway system, created but not in use, held in reserve to meet a definite emergency which may emerge on any indefinite date, a date certain (with the British) to be fixed by the Directors of another, and a rival, system, instead of by its own. Once a year, and once a year only, the railway is allowed to be partially opened to traffic for a week (maneuvers): for the remaining fifty-one weeks not only are there no train services, but the locomotives are stripped, many of their essential parts being stacked in out-of-the-way parts of the Kingdom. Yet, let the signal be given, and in four days’ time the parts of the engines have to be assembled, wheels have to be fixed to dismantled trucks, cushions have to be fixed to the first-class carriages, the personnel must be at their posts, the coal—mountains of it—has to be on the spot, and a huge, complicated, most rapid and crowded process of transportation and movement comes straightway into being—provided—the rival company has not sandbagged the manager or dropped a few bombs upon the terminus.81
Many, perhaps most, officers spend entire military careers without participating in a real way in war. And even those who do fight in wars do so for very small portions of their careers, and very rarely occupy the same position in more than one conflict. A lawyer may try hundreds of cases, or a doctor treat hundreds or even thousands of medical problems, of an essentially similar type during the course of several decades; a soldier will usually have only one chance to serve in a particular capacity. There are few generals who have had the experience of being divisional or corps commanders—let alone theater commanders or chiefs of general staffs—in more than one war. As a result then, particularly at the beginning of a war, a country’s most senior leaders—nominally the most seasoned veterans—are in a professional position as close to that of the novice lawyer or doctor as to that of the senior partner in a law firm or the chief surgeon in a hospital.
The lack of practice military people have in their profession at the highest level is only one factor in the astounding, and by no means infrequent, catastrophic errors made by supposedly competent military organizations.82 The errors of the Schlieffen Plan were not merely political but logistical: those who concocted it had assumed away problems of supply and marching endurance that made it nearly impossible of execution. The highly skilled tacticians of Germany launched in March 1918 the ruinous MICHAEL offensive, which shattered the German army and made inevitable their country’s defeat. The pioneering air generals of the US Army Air Forces in World War II embarked upon a ruinous, unescorted daylight precision-bombing campaign against Germany that collapsed in the Schweinfurt débacles of 1943. The Israelis in 1973 adhered to a doctrine of tank warfare that proved utterly unsuited against modern hand-held anti-tank weapons, and as a result suffered heavy losses in the first days of fighting against Egyptian infantry armed with portable missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. The United States Army in Vietnam, led by experienced and able veterans of World War II, adopted a strategy of “search and destroy” predicated on entirely false assumptions about its ability to control the loss rates of the Vietnamese Communists.83 These and other calamities stem not from incompetence as normally understood, but from the features that make the waging of war different from other professions: the distorting psychological effects of fear, hatred, and the desire for glory; the nature of a reacting opponent; and the absence of rules that bound the activity concerned. As Clausewitz observed, “every war is rich in unique episodes. Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs.”84 Each age has its “own theory of war, even if the urge has always and universally existed to work things out on scientific principles.”85 War is too varied an activity for a single set of professional norms.
One should not carry such arguments against a rigid division of “professional” and “political” too far. Clearly, no one fresh from the office or the classroom can command an aircraft carrier or an armored division, much less pilot a fighter plane or repair an infantry fighting vehicle. The politician who plans his own commando operation will almost surely regret it. More than one group of revolutionary leaders, from Bolshevik commissars in 1919 to Iranian mullahs over half a century later have, willy nilly, turned to officer experts whom they may not have trusted but whose services they required. Enough of the officer’s code survives, despite the allure of a materialistic culture, to make concepts like honor distinguishing characteristics of the military way. “The officer’s honor is of paramount importance,” write founding members of the Army’s Center for the Professional Military Ethic.86 That a profession of arms exists—even though a more amorphous one than one might at first think—cannot be doubted. Even at the height of the Cold War an eminent British officer could detach the purposes of warfare from professionalism: “I suppose there are some, in Western countries, who have become professional fighting men to fight Communism, though I hope not.”87 It is a remark instantly comprehensible to other professional soldiers, if not perhaps to most citizens.
Besides, a repudiation of “objective control” carries with it grave risks. To reject Huntington’s idea of sequestering issues of policy from those of military administration or operations is to open the way to a military that is politicized and, by virtue of its size and discipline, a potentially dominant actor in the conduct of foreign and internal affairs. In states with less-established democratic traditions such changes would open the path to direct military intervention in politics. Huntington is correct in his contention that such partisanship will eventually diminish military proficiency.
But the “normal” theory still requires emendation in its understanding of the military profession and hence in its understanding of civilian control. If, as argued above, officership is a unique profession, military expertise is variable and uncertain, and if the boundaries between political ends and military means are more uncertain than Huntington suggests, civilian control must take on a form different from that of “objective control,” at least in its original understanding.