Content uploaded by Thomas Crosbie
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Thomas Crosbie on Feb 13, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
Article
The Virtues of Military
Politics
Damon Coletta
1
and Thomas Crosbie
2
Abstract
Sociologists and political scientists have long fretted over the dangers that a politi-
cized military poses to democracy. In recent times, however, civil–military relations
experts in the United States accepted retired or indeed still serving generals and
admirals in high-ranking political posts. Despite customary revulsion from scholars,
the sudden waivers are an indicator that military participation in momentous
national security decisions is inherently political without necessarily being partisan,
including when civilian authority defers to a largely autonomous sphere for objective
military expertise. Military politics is actually critical for healthy civil–military colla-
boration, when done prudently and moderately. Janowitz and Huntington, founders
of the modern study of civil–military relations, understood the U.S. military’s inev-
itable invitation to political influence. Here, we elaborate on two neglected
dimensions, implicit in their projects, of military politics under objective civilian
control based on classical virtues of civic republicanism: Aristotle’s practical wisdom
and Machiavelli’s virt´
u.
Keywords
civil–military relations, defense policy, democracy, professionalism/leadership
This article advances a heterodox idea. While it is a truism that American military
leaders engage in a wide variety of ways with domestic American political pro-
cesses, we think that certain manifestations of such “military politics” are a good
1
U.S. Air Force Academy, CO, USA
2
Royal Danish Defence College, Forsvarsakademiet, Kobenhavn, Denmark
Corresponding Author:
Damon Coletta, U.S. Air Force Academy, 2354 Fairchild Drive, Suite 6L116, CO 80840, USA.
Email: damon.coletta@usafa.edu
Armed Forces & Society
1-22
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X19871605
journals.sagepub.com/home/afs
thing.
1
For most supporters of democracy, by contrast, “military politics” is at best
an oxymoron and at worst an atavistic threat to civilian control that should be
avoided. This conforms to the wisdom of both sociologists and political scientists
who have long fretted over dangers that a politicized military poses to democracy.
Leading civil–military relations scholars have agreed not only that military politics
should be avoided but also how it should be avoided, namely through some combi-
nation of a professional military culture that disavows political meddling and a
sufficiently robust external oversight regime to make sure no such meddling occurs
(Shields, 2017; Snider, 2008; Ulrich, 2015).
It seems surprising, then, that many of these same civil–military relations scho-
lars accepted the increasingly common practice of placing recently retired or indeed
still serving generals and admirals in high-ranking political posts in the United
States. We argue that as an important reason why so many senior officers are
expected to navigate the transition links to a general misunderstanding. Contrary
to the focus of attention within the prescription for avoidance, military politics is in
fact a central feature of civil–military affairs. American military leaders are more
politically engaged at the nexus of national security decision-making than is ever
admitted. We claim this is good and ought to be studied. In our view, military
politics, when practiced with the ancient republican virtues in mind, facilitates
healthy democratic civil–military relations. It is a fact of life, one that should no
longer be dreaded or brushed aside but fully appreciated and fit for purpose.
2
In order to advance our argument, we reexamine hypotheses offered by Janowitz
(2017) who established the field of military sociology with his 1960 classic The
Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait and who provided perhaps the
most robust theory of military politics. Now is a propitious time to reexamine
Janowitz who is experiencing a resurgence of interest.
3
Notably, Janowitz was in
part reacting to his political science colleague, Samuel Huntington (1957), who
likewise founded a specialty a few years before in “The Soldier and the State: The
Politics of Civil–Military Relations” but who was famously averse to military lead-
ers engaging in partisan politics.
While the military politics dilemma was clear to both Huntington and Janowitz,
we note its gradual disappearance from work of their interpreters and from the two
fields they spawned, civil–military relations and military sociology. Nevertheless,
military politics evolved in the absence of scholarly attention, giving rise to new
forms of both virtuous and vicious military maneuvers at senior levels of policy-
making. Drawing inspiration from Roennfeldt’s (2017) recent study of military
practical wisdom, but also departing from that framework in key respects, we con-
clude this article by exploring intersecting concepts of civic republicanism, Aristo-
telian practical wisdom and Machiavellian virtu
´. We reflect on when and how
military officers under civilian authority should engage their domestic political
arenas, and ultimately ask, Can American military leaders in the rush of politics
learn to “whisper” their full and frank advice?
2Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
Janowitz With Huntington on Military Politics
The United States, today, wrestles with anxiety and self-doubt that on its surface
appears opposite to sociological and political challenges presenting themselves in
Janowitz’s time. Today, the United States reels from geopolitical setbacks and
financial failures while holding senior members of the profession of arms in high
regard. Seventy years ago, at the height of its country’s relative power, the American
public saw career officers tasked with managing the citizen army as little more than
schoolmasters (Janowitz, 2017, p. xl). Even so, cultivating military expertise and
harnessing it for decision-making on national security remain crucial for navigating
global politics. Janowitz’s “fifth hypothesis” of military sociology on increasing
political indoctrination of general officers, though crafted in 1960, applies to mili-
tary dissent in 2020 as the ailing American superpower seeks to preserve its influ-
ence under shifting conditions in the international system.
Although Janowitz disputed Huntington’s portrayal of a yawning gap between the
profession of arms and American civilian leadership, the two nevertheless supported
a pattern of civil–military relations in which officers develop self-awareness to
contemplate political consequences of their actions as they deliver candid counsel.
When the United States faces its next national security gauntlet, keeping Janowitz’s
fifth hypothesis in mind means, consistent with Huntington’s civil–military prescrip-
tions, a military profession inside the halls of republican political power learning to
whisper its wisdom in a treacherous partisan atmosphere.
Within the study of politics, Huntington’s thesis flowed from the concern that, for
the first time in its comparably short history, American democracy dueled an implac-
able great power rival in the Soviet Union. America’s new standing army, in order to
defeat Soviet conventional aggression in Europe, would be organized around an
illiberal ethos—what Huntington termed the military mind—at the same time that
its budget and force of arms would guarantee domestic political influence. How
could such political energy, distinct from liberal society, be controlled at home
without destroying it like some sort of cancer and hollowing out the army’s effec-
tiveness abroad?
Although Huntington in the 1950s did not employ the language of contemporary
principal–agent economic theory, his answer reflected its insights. Military agents’
expertise could be tapped to help secure liberal democracy; it could also be chan-
neled within the political framework of a state. This was based on two conditions:
First, that military elites, when advising civilian authority and managing organized
violence on behalf of the state, adhered to high standards of professionalism; and
second, that civilians rewarded responsible officers with ample trust and autonomy
inside the military sphere of competence. The modern question, for both Huntington
and Janowitz, of democratic control over a powerful military fell within the broader
issue of how any free society under conditions of increasing complexity could
harness rising professions in law, medicine, engineering, and other fields without
undermining long-term growth and development.
4
Coletta and Crosbie 3
Huntington’s conceptualization of America’s Cold War challenge brought his
study in close proximity to the concerns of American sociology. In the context of
critical reaction to the Soldier and the State, Morris Janowitz’s capstone report on
the Professional Soldier was interpreted as a competing alternative, even an anti-
dote, to Huntington’s institutional prescriptions (Burk, 2002; Cohen, 2009; Feaver,
1996). The truth is more complicated, and it leads directly to our rediscovery of
military politics, classic virtues of republicanism that both Janowitz and Huntington
would have urged for senior American officers. Janowitz and Huntington had after
all been workshop collaborators across disciplinary lines on the question of demo-
cratic control over the world’s most powerful military before either author com-
pleted their seminal work.
5
When Janowitz (2017) declared his five sociological
hypotheses, laying the foundation for Professional Soldier, he had politics, policy,
and Huntington’s contribution very much in mind (pp. 5, 13).
Indeed, Huntington’s assumptions concerning natural separation of military cul-
ture and ways of viewing the world from liberal society were correct. The problem of
channeling professional officers’ contribution for defense of the nation without
succumbing to their vast potential for political interference was real, and Hunting-
ton’s solution—professional autonomy in exchange for socially responsible ser-
vice—would work as far as it went (Janowitz, 2017, pp. 15–16). Yet Huntington’s
astute political analysis did not go far enough. Systematic study of the military as a
profession using tools of American sociology showed trends in the career trajectory
of military elites that Huntington’s study largely ignored. These trends formed the
basis of Janowitz’s five hypotheses that birthed a new field, military sociology.
Drawing from a rich pool of data which included both 761 responses to an earlier
survey conducted by Masland and Radway (2015) and 113 structured interviews he
conducted himself, Janowitz proposed five lines of accelerating convergence
between military and civilian culture. The preliminary hypotheses identified patterns
of authority, professional skill sets, promotion tracks, and recruiting in which mil-
itary ways were adopting more civilian characteristics. Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis
was not presented as such, but in a sense, it was a culminating claim. Officers who
made it to the most senior ranks, where their points of view could directly affect
American national security, more and more underwent political indoctrination, or
socialization, that enabled them to exchange views with civilian policy makers.
Indeed, Janowitz (2017) wrote that “these hypotheses,” meaning all five, were about
politics and policy upon which hung the fate of the United States in its Cold War
competition with the Soviet Union (p. 13).
Emphasizing the quality of democratic decision-making for national security
placed Janowitz the sociologist in line with Huntington the political scientist. Jano-
witz also agreed that the military had its own profession, distinguished from civilian
professions and exemplified by education and career experiences of its senior offi-
cers. Contrary to what has been reported, Janowitz did not offer an institutional
solution for American civil–military relations that opposed Huntington’s balanced
design with an alternative, integrated approach.
6
Instead, Janowitz’s Professional
4Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
Soldier pointed out that, contrary to Huntington’s simplifying assumptions, the
military profession itself was not a constant. Key trends in authority, skill develop-
ment, career progression, recruitment, and political indoctrination did not imply that
elite officers and civilian policy makers would merge into one homogenous foreign
policy council under the president. The civil–military gap in expertise, responsibil-
ity, and outlook would persist as Huntington described. However, these trends,
combined with the nuclear weapon and missile rivalry dawning in the 1960s, would
exacerbate subdivisions among military professionals, dramatically complicating
Huntington’s scheme for democratic civilian control.
Janowitz termed the permanent rival camps within the profession as absolutists
versus pragmatists. Pragmatists responded to the advent of nuclear weapons by
pulling the profession toward new standards of success. Rather than absolute victory
over a rival army, the mission would entail effective political defense of a friendly
government against communist-inspired insurgents. Unlike combat operations dur-
ing World War II, military officers who were not managing the country’s nuclear
deterrent could be working hand in glove with local civil authorities on problems
related to law enforcement or economic development in order to immunize com-
munities against small war tactics. Logically, then, absolutists within the profession
disagreed that strategic momentum of states and armies had so completely changed,
protesting that a military force primed for nuclear strike and occasional small-unit
counterinsurgency operations would leave itself vulnerable to conventional defeat.
The professional watershed of the 1960s, which might have emerged at all events
as officers reacted to revolutionary nuclear technology, was magnified to the extent
that Janowitz’s hypotheses regarding elite officers’ recruitment, promotion, author-
ity, and skill set held true. In crucial respects, highly expert agents seated at the table
of national security policy-making were changing, approaching social equality with
their civilian principals. Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis, that star officers increasingly
acquired a sophisticated understanding of the external and internal political conse-
quences of their best military advice, ensured that healthy friction between policy
views would in future metastasize into something more like destructive collision.
Moreover, just as civilian factions battled over competing ideologies, the new breed
of military elites would be similarly split between absolutists and pragmatists.
Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis, then, pointed the way toward a more complicated and
ominous world than even Huntington portrayed. After 1960, as the Soviet nuclear
threat increased and communist-inspired wars of national liberation multiplied, the
frequency of American civil–military train wrecks would climb. Each test of wills,
though unlikely to prompt an actual coup, would rankle either the absolutists or the
pragmatists. Before long, there would be deeply frustrated officers from both camps,
highly capable, politically aware, and sorely tempted, out of patriotism (a cardinal
virtue) to exploit fissures on the civilian side so as to move defense and national
policy in the “right” direction.
Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis illuminated a nearly impossible problem of profes-
sional military dissent against civilian authority during the Cold War.
Coletta and Crosbie 5
Notwithstanding the absence of coup, there have been waves of concern, around the
time Huntington and Janowitz were writing and during the Clinton–Bush years, that
senior military officers were beginning to exercise their political potential when they
protested the operational consequences of presidential strategy. Before exploring
whether we might be entering another phase of politically charged civil–military
disputes, the next section discusses the spectrum of solutions that have been offered
for preserving democratic control when best military advice dissents from estab-
lished civilian preferences—and how insufficient attention to Janowitz’s fifth
hypothesis prolonged debate, making it difficult for even hybrid or negotiated fra-
meworks to attract working consensus among scholars or practitioners.
Civilian Supremacists Versus Principled Patriots
Two things can happen when there is significant military dissent over policy in the
American system. Either the irresistible will of the commander in chief or the
immovable object of best uniformed advice (reinforced by military science and
centuries of professional experience) must give way. We can imagine a result that
somehow combined elements of competing policy alternatives—deliberation and
negotiation being in the nature of functioning democracy. Yet serious disagreement
between civilian authority and military analysis will often crop up on defense and
national security questions such as how many billions to dedicate toward a new
bomber or how many troops to risk in support of a friendly government overseas. In
these cases, both sides realize halfway compromises are hazardous, raising the
prospect of expending precious resources while national security objectives recede
further out of reach.
Two book-length political science works coming out of the strategic turmoil of
the 1990s—the period between the wars, 11/9 and 9/11—confirm this intuition.
7
Desch (2001) and Feaver (2003) wanted to emphasize different causes, but their
books ultimately offered rival theories for similar results. During the post–1945 era
when the United States led the international system, civilian authority, the Amer-
ican president in particular, trumped dissenting advice from ranking military.
Whether it was reducing the size of the Army under Eisenhower’s New Look,
canceling a new strategic bomber fleet under Kennedy’s Flexible Response, or
(non)deployment of American boots on the ground in the war for Kosovo a decade
after the Cold War, time and again, sooner or later, the American president would
have his way.
With civilians winning in the most salient policy disagreements against the
military and the country prospering after its victory in the Cold War, one could
be forgiven if like Richard Betts of Columbia University, one questioned whether
the turmoil of the Clinton or W. Bush years was not simply the bureaucratic friction
inherent in democratic civil–military relations, natural whenever democratic leaders
encountered dissent from professional experts (Betts, 2009). Yet, Huntington and
Janowitz recognized that this sort of friction could be dangerous.
6Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
First, by democratic principle and customary practice, the American way implied
civilians advising the commander in chief had a right to be wrong about military
decisions vital to national security. Episodic spikes in friction from military dissent
meant there was a distinct possibility that civilians were wrong and senior officers
were protesting to help the country while straining to maintain their professional
subordination. If civilians kept winning these types of disputes, if they were wrong
too often because they refused to genuinely listen or permit themselves to be per-
suaded by best military advice, the friction, then, did not indicate healthy civil–
military relations—or sound national security decision-making (Desch, 2007;
Hoffman, 2008).
Second, Peter Feaver showed in his reading of the cases for Armed Servants that
even though civilians were winning policy disputes, consistent with the microeco-
nomic logic of principal–agent relationships, they had to work hard to do so. Without
monitoring mechanisms and credible threats of punishment for deviating from the
president’s intent, senior military agents at the nexus of civil–military relations were
liable to pursue their own preferences for national security and defense policy
through what Feaver, borrowing from labor economics, called shirking. The gen-
erals, of course, would not go on strike, though they could legally threaten to resign
in the midst of a crisis (Shields, 2017). More likely, they might inflate cost estimates
or slow roll execution of policy options they did not favor while using discretionary
authority to take initiative, fill vacuums, or generate Congressional pressure for
implementation they thought was best.
Feaver’s application of “rational choice” theory to American civil–military rela-
tions generated controversy because it discounted military professionalism, which
had been crucial in the twin analyses that founded the field—Huntington (1957) and
Janowitz (2017, c1960). When critics argued, however, that a professional code of
honor imbued in the thinking of senior officers at every stage of their career would
constrain military shirking, Feaver could cite survey results (supported by the occa-
sional article for professional military education) that showed a significant percent-
age of promotable officers felt duty bound to “insist” as a kind of course correction
for wayward civilians (Feaver, 2003; Milburn, 2010).
Another wave of scholarship responded to concerns that senior military advisers
to the president had surged out of control once the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act
removed some of the control rods of interservice rivalry and the end of the Cold War
created a strategic vacuum for national security and defense policy (Avant, 1996;
Kohn, 1994).
8
These writings might grant that civilians had a “right to be right” or
that any dialogue between professional military elites and civilian authority under
democracy would have to be unequal in favor of civilians (Cohen, 2003; Feaver,
2003, pp. 6, 65, 300). Yet, as the surviving superpower and main underwriter of the
liberal global order, politicians in charge of defense and national security policy
could ill afford to be wrong, repeatedly, simply for refusing to listen. In general, this
group of scholars appreciated the potential for clearer strategic thinking by the
United States. Unlike civilian supremacists, though, they believed U.S. decision-
Coletta and Crosbie 7
making after 9/11 had been flawed in Afghanistan and especially Iraq because
civilian authority had not respected the professionalism of senior uniformed advisors
and consequently did not pay proper attention to military counsel that in retrospect
could have saved American lives and treasure.
In his International Security article on the 2007 Surge strategy for Iraq, Feaver
(2011) labeled the camp who spared the military and aimed criticism squarely at the
ultimate decision makers “professional supremacists.” The moniker was appropriate
in the sense that benefits from respecting the military in the tragedy cases would only
come to fruition when certain advice was accepted—empirically, then, it became
difficult to distinguish who, civilian or military, should be calling the shots during
frequent instances when national security decisions involved matters incident to the
military sphere of expertise.
Still, members of the school rejected the name for themselves. After all, they
acknowledged that language in the American Constitution designated the civilian
president as commander in chief of the armed forces. On this fundamental, they were
also civilian supremacists. Yet only a mortally flawed or foolish president would
disregard military expertise found at the apex of the profession of arms. If not every
piece of advice could be accepted, perhaps we could only feel confident that word
was getting through based on the tone of the civil–military relationship. Rather than
professional supremacy, the scholars advanced a perspective of principled patrio-
tism. For the case of contemporary American civil–military relations, they observed
uniformed professionals tended to respect Constitutional restraints more than the
president and surrounding national security team. While active duty military had
political potential, as described by Huntington and Janowitz, military professional-
ism warned senior officers away from attempting to use their strength against civi-
lians as they were providing best military advice. Civilians, on the other hand,
wielded actual political power. Too often, civilian advisers, or the president himself,
were using their authority to snub the military. For principled patriots, then, civilians
had to alter their own behavior; they, more than ranking officers, had to take the lead
in repairing the civil–military relationship.
9
Both principled patriots and civilian supremacists could point to strong evidence
for their position, selecting from vignettes populating troubled post–9/11 conflicts in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The lack of progress this portended for improving civil–
military relations, and several grim reminders that U.S. military intervention con-
tinued apace, led some who had kept their powder dry during the Clinton and Bush
controversies to suggest, as American presence in the Middle East wound down,
some sort of workable compromise that would involve continuous bargaining
between the military elite and the civilian authority (Moten, 2014; Owens, 2011;
Sewall & White, 2009). Even Feaver, a self-described civilian supremacist, con-
cluded after analyzing the Iraq Surge that the right path lay somewhere between the
visions of Cohen’s hectoring civilian and Milburn’s obstructionist officers—or
Christopher Gibson’s supreme general that subsumed functions of Joint Staff chair-
man and military combatant commander (Gibson, 2008).
8Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
More elaborate specification of what a workable hybrid form of civil–military
relations might look like actually emerged from the line of principled patriots pro-
duced out of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Christopher Gibson, Suzanne
Nielsen, Matthew Moten, Heidi Urban, and Jason Dempsey in their writings hewed
to the approach: Breakdowns in civil–military relations resulting in suboptimal
national security decisions during the age of Afghanistan and Iraq might have been
avoided if responsible civilians had understood their military better and listened
harder to sound advice—present among the professionals if not always obvious in
the political cauldron surrounding the president.
Active duty cavalry officer James Golby followed a postdoctoral fellowship at
Stanford with a featured contribution in a special issue of the Air Force’s Strategic
Studies Quarterly dedicated to new thinking in American civil–military relations
(Golby, 2015). Golby’s approach deviated in important ways from his principled
patriot school. When it came to “practical implications” of Golby’s Clausewitzian
framework, which, along the lines of Huntington’s objective control, demarcated
military from civilian expertise, Golby aimed (2015) his prescriptions “primarily on
the military side of the dialogue” (p. 36, emphasis added). According to the Clau-
sewitzian framework, senior military leaders serving civilian principals should
render advice grounded in the profession’s expertise, not one professional’s view, and
provide the full range of military opinion ...should recognize and articulate the uncer-
tainty and limitations inherent in any military advice ...[and] should provide well-
supported military estimates and provide all information relevant to policymakers’
decisions. (Golby, 2015, pp. 36–41)
10
These three recommendations for “how to render military advice in a political
context” echoed some elements in the literature prior to Golby and with the same
touchstone case in mind: Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s February 2003 sensa-
tional response, before the Senate Armed Services Committee and just before the
March 2003 invasion, on how many U.S. Army troops would have to stay in Iraq
after successful combat operations there (Crosbie, 2015; Golby, 2015, p. 28).
11
Measures relating to range and variability of advice across elite military offices, the
uncertainty surrounding military projections, and presence (or absence) of scientific
support for military advice were proposed, however, in the politically charged,
hothouse environment of 2006–2007. Moreover, the implications emerged from a
civilian supremacist theory of the case, laying blame for the collapse of constructive
civil–military dialogue at the feet of the military and probing what might be done by
senior officers, even in the face of cantankerous future secretaries of defense, to
repair relations for improved national security decision-making (Coletta, 2007;
Crosbie & Kleykamp, 2017, 2018).
By contrast, Golby (2015) preserved important articles of faith with his prede-
cessors among principled patriots. Although Golby’s recommendations reinforced
those of civilian supremacists and urged constraints on the military, his cautionary
Coletta and Crosbie 9
flags unfurled in the context of Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey’s reality
check on the Obama administration plan in 2014 to fight Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria (ISIS) in Iraq without American advisers accompanying local units into com-
bat. Although General Dempsey’s public remarks before the Senate Armed Services
Committee did not reflect Golby’s prescriptions for the military any more than
General Shinseki’s had, General Dempsey weathered his storm. Indeed, there was
no civil–military crisis of the intensity, duration, or political–military fallout that
ensued after the March 2003 use of force. Presumably, while both Dempsey and
Shinseki kept the faith—that is, full and frank advice, same advice to Congress and
the president, and advice that fell within the military sphere of professional expertise
on troop levels and rules of engagement—civilians in the intervening decade shifted.
Consistent with lessons of the principled patriot school, civilians presumably
improved their listening skills and raised their receptivity to objective military
advice. For Golby, then, a Clausewitzian separation of military from civilian com-
petencies acknowledged potential political consequences of senior officer dissent,
but it ultimately relied on civilian administrations muting their reaction when prin-
cipled patriots raised politically charged obstacles to the president’s preferred course
of action.
Janowitz and the New Clausewitzian Framework for American Civil–Military
Relations
Despite hard-won scholarly disposition toward compromise, pragmatism, and
mutual respect in the civil–military dialogue, recidivist civilian supremacists will
not rest easy with military politics as manifested in this new Clausewitzian frame-
work. Although it builds on sound presumptions—civilian principals and military
agents both care about the country, good fences make collaborative neighbors in
formulation of defense and national security policy, and critical decisions inevitably
conjoin professional military judgment with civilian political discretion—the frame-
work for proper civil–military relations still lacks something when it cannot distin-
guish among prior cases of successful and hapless military dissent. Before the
Senate, General Dempsey on Iraq in 2014 and General Shinseki on Iraq in 2003
followed, more or less, strictures in the Clausewitzian framework but with strikingly
different damage sustained to civil–military dialogue and strategic disarray from
civilians exercising their right to decide.
Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis, along with a recent article in the same vein by one of
the present authors, helps resolve this puzzle and supply a supportive amendment to
the Clausewitzian compromise (Crosbie, 2015). Recall that Janowitz’s fifth and final
claim about trends in the military profession, circa 1960, was that leading officers
had “developed a more explicit political ethos” (2017, p. 12), which promoted
military influence on civilian decisions respecting national security policy and mil-
itary judgment on political consequences of military action for the international
balance of power and behavior of foreign states.
10 Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
Interestingly, Janowitz predicted, over time, not the “coup of 2012,” as an award-
winning paper for the Joint Chiefs subsequently warned, but instead a simmering,
“quiet resentment” (Dunlap, 1992; see also Janowitz, 2017, p. 13). What Janowitz
anticipated in 1960, Feaver (2011) found in his case study of the 2007 Iraq Surge:
President Bush hesitated after he decided, moved slower than he might have, on the
new plan to save Iraq, out of healthy respect for brewing skepticism among the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
Feaver’s body of work is appreciated for applying principal–agent logic to
address anomalies from Huntington’s theory of civil–military relations, but at the
conclusion of his acclaimed analysis of decision-making before the successful Surge
in Iraq, his key lessons draw from Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis. Janowitz held that
political sophistication among elite officers, far from consolidating best military
advice, would exacerbate profound differences within the officer corps over appro-
priate theories of victory. In Janowitz’s time, at the dawn of the nuclear age, the fault
line within uniformed opinion separated absolutists from more progressive pragma-
tists. The terms are sufficiently abstract and flexible to suit Feaver’s observations as
well. Today’s absolutists favor a theory of victory aimed at territorial control
through conventional military formations combining lethal fires, maneuverability,
and traditional force protection, while pragmatists are in the mold of innovative
Army generals such as David Petraeus, who designed and oversaw the 2007 Iraq
Surge, showing willingness to armor down and insinuate officers into local politics
as part of counterinsurgency operations.
12
Continued emphasis on professionalization in all the armed services combined
with the realization of Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis implies that the latest chasm
cleaving military opinion will endure, lending form to the challenge of military
dissent against civilian principals.
13
As was the case during Vietnam and again after
9/11, the American president and circle of civilian advisers on the closest decisions
about whether and how to use force—even in administrations where Clausewitzian
allocations of authority are respected—will receive conflicting “best military
advice.” This implies during high-stakes national security decision-making, there
will be, as Feaver found, a professionalized, politically aware military school that is
disappointed—and potentially resentful against civilian judgments.
The out-group will believe the president imbibed poor advice and in the end
chose poorly for the nation. They will understand their political leverage, its limita-
tions and strengths, within a Constitutional system that diffuses power across various
agencies and institutions. It is quite unlikely, therefore, that any civilian policy
clearly absolutist or pragmatic in its orientation can be implemented without con-
cessions—time in Feaver’s (2003) example, perhaps numbers of troops forgone in
the 2009 Afghanistan Surge—unless the commander in chief is willing to pay a
political price (pp. 62, 66–67). All of these, policy concessions, mollification time,
political backlash, proceed independently from the original decision’s strategic
effect on foreign adversaries and regardless of whether the Clausewitzian framework
for constructive civil–military relations is observed.
Coletta and Crosbie 11
Navigating military political expertise is made more difficult by service utopian-
ism. Crosbie (2015) operationalized the concept in his study of the U.S. Army’s
“domestic strategy” between 1945 and 1965, precisely the transitional period when
Janowitz coined his fifth hypothesis and mapped the fault line dividing absolutists
from military pragmatists. Crosbie applied service utopianism as a schema, or cog-
nitive lens, developed in the minds of most elite officers as they mature in their
careers, succeeding at jobs with ever broadening scope of responsibility. In terms of
Golby’s Clausewitzian map, senior officers bring service utopianism with them as
their obligation to supply best military advice draws them closer to the intersection
of a civil–military Venn diagram. This intersection lies just where military and
political spheres of expertise collide on questions such as integration of force with
diplomacy, objections of allies, or risk assessment of crisis escalation (Golby, 2015,
p. 15).
Even a milder version of service utopianism, which Crosbie believes survived the
1986 Goldwater-Nichols attempt to privilege the joint perspective on military prob-
lems, works against natural buffering and ordering properties of Golby’s Clause-
witzian framework. To the extent that Janowitz’s fifth hypothesis and Crosbie’s
service utopianism hold, today, the proposed Clausewitzian solution for proper
civil–military relations will require shoring up if it is to function as hoped.
14
Drawing from the civilian supremacist school as well as literature on civic repub-
licanism and American Political Development, the appropriate supplement
addresses the subordinate, military side of the relationship. If increasing political
indoctrination `a la Janowitz and robust service utopianism are to be checked in order
to prevent them from swamping Clausewitzian institutions, then organic political
vices (from the civilian perspective) must be accompanied by political virtues.
15
Among the most ancient and reliable are Aristotle’s practical wisdom and Machia-
velli’s virtu
´.
Practical wisdom in this context means “to know to do,” and it implies that
officers asked to provide best military advice should, along with their extended
education and professional experience, cultivate a literary sensibility as to their
political situation, a sense of where they fit in the grand political drama directed
by the Constitution. For Roennfeldt, such skills allow officers to achieve organiza-
tional ends in the sociopolitical sphere. This would be a kind of street smarts that
afforded officers the prudence to maintain frank dissent from, say, the defense
secretary’s view—in open testimony before the Senate Armed Services Commit-
tee—without landing themselves in a knife fight with the president that they are
bound to lose.
Knives, of course, played an outsized historical role in the destruction of ancient
republics. Even today, “night of the long knives” stands for political assassination
that rattles a democracy to its core. Machiavelli, who barely survived collapse of the
Florentine republic, was highly attuned to the relationship between violence and the
state. For him, virtu
´was far more valuable than virtue as moral sanctimony. Virtu
´
represented superhuman energy to act boldly outside the rules, when and only when
12 Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
a leader’s individual transgression would benefit the state. If this interpretation of
Machiavelli’s Prince is correct, he would have placed little faith in officers who
would ignite a political firestorm within their home government on the eve of war,
rather than refine an abstract moral to supply full, frank dissent—Golby emphasized
the same advice—regardless of venue in a republican form of government. Ventur-
ing beyond Roennfeldt, we insist that practical wisdom be married with virtu
´as two
entwined threads that together constitute military politics in practice.
Janowitz and Huntington alike understood the value of practical wisdom and virtu
´
as elements of culture among political elites—military and civilian—charged with
operating democratic institutions in general and civil–military relations in particular
for security of the state. Janowitz introduced his fifth hypothesis not to announce that
Clausewitzian separation of army and state were no longer viable but to warn that
such reasonable arrangements would be under intense stress once internal military
contradictions between absolutists and pragmatists became politically charged.
Golby’s latest Clausewitzian framework for guiding American civil–military inter-
actions is also consistent with Samuel Huntington’s objective control and
“balanced” arrangement for civil–military institutions under the Constitution
(1957, pp. 186–192; Huntington, 1957, pp. 186–192). Huntington warned repeatedly
that partisan debate in American democracy made his right answer (which subsumes
the Clausewitzian framework) inherently unstable—unless protagonists caught up in
the civil–military drama acquired awareness of larger political forces, in effect the
horse sense that came with practical wisdom and virtu
´.
Useful qualities as these are devilishly hard for social scientists, either political
scientists or sociologists, to quantify, but Huntington believed they were neverthe-
less definable and on display in the historical record. It is worth noting one of
Huntington’s exemplars in the art of military politics was (absolutist) Army Chief
of Staff Matthew Ridgway, caught between “incessant pressure” from the executive
and his professional obligation to provide best military advice before the Senate
during an unwelcome defense department shift toward President Eisenhower’s prag-
matic, nuclear-based New Look strategy. General Ridgway did not hide his profes-
sional military opinion from Congress. Neither did he undermine politically the
country’s commander in chief. In Huntington’s (1957) rendering, practical wisdom
and virtu
´helped guide this officer to a third way under the Clausewitzian framework
that prudently optimized dissenting military advice for civilian authority.
General Ridgway’s behavior under Senate questioning in 1954 and 1955 reflected an
effort to find the proper path. In both cases, the general emphasized his acceptance of
higher level executive decisions fixing the size of the Army which obviously did not
accordwithhisownjudgment.In1954hegavehisownviewsinexecutive session;in
1955 he presented in public his military opinion on the desirable strength of his
service. The maintenance of this pattern of behavior requires the mutual restraint
and conscious cooperation of military man, legislator, and executive. (pp. 417–418,
emphasis added)
Coletta and Crosbie 13
Such restraint and cooperation under the Clausewitzian framework are far more
likely when habits of practical wisdom and virtu
´among a politically sophisticated
officer corps are in ample supply.
16
When they are lacking, difficulties in the American system of civil–military
relations multiply. The situation recalls political scientist James David Barber’s
(2008) classic work on The Presidential Character. For Barber, and many students
of the presidency who followed, personal qualities of optimism and activism were
fundamental to how leaders coped with challenges of this unique office. Each
president would face problems, unique in their historical detail but familiar in terms
of the psychological stress they imposed. The president’s next crisis was likely to
involve surprise elements, inherently fluid and unpredictable, but the president’s
coping mechanism would remain constant as character. While dilemmas unfolded
within broad categorical outlines encompassing high human stakes, uncertainty,
large bureaucracies, and institutional checks and balances, even before a president
decided specific actions, results of those choices, according to Barber, could be
roughly predicted with attention to the commander in chief’s cognitive map, the
psychological equipment he brought to the process.
A similar social system with somewhat predictable performance is likely to run
just under the surface of presidential decision-making, military politics, at the sup-
port level of military advice to civilian authority. Garden-variety organization charts
for military advising in the national arena are well understood. Yet, within formal
rules, norms, and bureaucratic incentive structures, the impact of different operating
systems among uniformed leaders, how they categorize and sort novel problems, has
not been properly acknowledged in the grand debate between civilian supremacists
and principled patriots. While compromise and hybrid civil–military hardware have
been proposed, Barber’s essential contribution at the level of firmware, in this case,
senior military character and attitude, remains taboo, too sensitive, perhaps, for
polite conversation on civil–military relations.
Herewith, Figure 1 reproduces Barber’s summary table, modified from the pre-
sidency to capture the offices of senior military advisor within American civil–
military institutions.
17
The table suggests a way forward. The names in the chart
are historical figures, exemplars in the literature on American civil–military rela-
tions. We expect that, following a structured, book-length analysis, well-known
cases of top military advisers would break down according to the quadrants shown,
parallel to the way in which historic presidencies landed in the quadrants of Barber’s
character chart. Note how Barber’s crucial qualities of optimism and energy are
swapped, according to our argument, for practical wisdom and virtu
´. After prelim-
inary review of the famous cases, then, we claim, consistent with Roennfeldt (2017),
a promising connection within military politics between individual character and
civil–military outcomes that merit greater scrutiny. When certain psychological
traits, virtues, among the military at the nexus of national security decision-
making are lacking, civil–military relations according to Huntington’s objective
14 Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
control and Golby’s Clausewitzian structure are much less likely to perform as
decision aid for the American Republic.
Toward a Theory of Military Politics
Above, we first sketched the way in which Huntington and Janowitz initially con-
ceived of military politics in relation to the military profession and the democratic
state. We then explored the convergence of factors that led generations of scholars to
downplay the critical role of military politics in military affairs more broadly, giving
rise to what we consider to be an unhelpful taboo against discussing the realities of
military political life. We then turned to consider the ways in which military politics
intersects with practical wisdom and virtu
´. This theoretical distinction is necessary, in
our view, to avoid conflating military politics with Janowitz’s pragmatists within the
military profession or with military shirking from Feaver’s principal–agent approach.
While our predecessor Roennfeldt (2017) argued correctly that successful officers
need practical wisdom, the addition of virtu
´helps illuminate, and we hope will
eventually dispel, scholars’ ritual angst over military politics. Clearly, an institution
the size and scale of the U.S. Department of Defense inevitably interacts in political
systems at many levels. Doing so adroitly rather than clumsily makes all the difference
for applying the Clausewitzian framework of separate but overlapping spheres.
Many ask whether and when senior officers should engage in their domestic
political processes.
18
We reframe this critical discussion around two more targeted
questions. How can officers act with greater practical wisdom within the political
systems they serve? And equally important but less straightforward, how can
þVirt´
u - Virt´
u
þPractical
Wisdom
Effective: Machiavellian consigliere
under objective control; steadying
influence outside limelight.
Early-M. Ridgway
Early-D. Petraeus
R. Myers
Self-possessed: Ego fortified by service
ideals; service cocoon before
Congress or press.
M. Taylor
C. Powell
Late-D. Petraeus
S. McChrystal
- Practical
Wisdom
Ideologic: Insistent to point of pressing
Constitutional constraints;
maneuvering through Congress or
public opinion to reduce presidential
power.
G. McClellan
L. Wood
D. MacArthur
Utopian: Reticent, inflexible service
code anchors opposing view of
national interest; frustration at novel
technology & defense
transformation.
Late-M. Ridgway
A. Radford
E. Shinseki
Figure 1. Military politics ideal types.
Coletta and Crosbie 15
officers act with virtu
´during their inevitable engagement with politics? We identify
in Figure 1 exemplars of all four types (high and low practical wisdom intersecting
with high and low virtu
´), following Barber’s method of charting a course for prof-
itable future research. Notably, those adroit officers with high practical wisdom and
high virtu
´are not the loudest voices in the room. To the contrary, the uniformed
advisors we highlight (the younger Matthew Ridgway and the younger David Pet-
raeus as well as Richard Myers) are to our minds masters of the art of the military
whisper, speaking to their civilian masters with equal parts clarity and prudence to
convey best military advice regardless of parochial biases or careerist political
calculations.
Like it or not, at least from the time of Janowitz’s culminating fifth hypothesis in
the Professional Soldier, the military is political. There is no escape, no abdication
from political life. Denial, silence, and total subservience on the part of military
leaders will simply mean the institution can be paraded about at will for the political
gains of the reigning party (often literally). On the other hand, a strident military can
hijack policy, crippling American grand strategy, democracy, or both. Between the
extremes, we confront the difficult realities of military politics. Let us then work
toward understanding not simply the vices of military shirking but equally important
the virtues of military effectiveness in American civil–military relations.
Acknowledgments
This paper is academic work, an earlier version of which was prepared for the Inter-University
Seminar on Armed Forces & Society Biennial Meeting, Reston, VA, Nov. 2–5, 2017. It does
not represent official opinion of the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Government. We would
especially like to thank Jim Golby (U.S. Army), Peter Feaver (Duke University), and James
Burk (Texas A&M, IUS President). Golby and Burk commented on an early draft, and Feaver
has mentored both of us, one of us over many years. These three influential voices in the field
will not agree with everything herein but opening up this discussion of military politics would
not have been possible without their previous work and present encouragement.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
ORCID iD
Damon Coletta https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2039-3617
Notes
1. Although it boasts a long history (e.g., Huntington, 1962), the term “military politics”
remains poorly defined and is frequently used to encompass the many ways in which
16 Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
military leaders do political things within their own domestic contexts. In this sense, it is
inclusive of but more expansive than civil–military relations (which refers to relations
between military leaders and their civilian counterparts). On the other hand, the term does
not overlap with civil–military cooperation (since this refers instead to relations between
military leaders and foreign governments). Still, the flexibility of the term makes it useful
for the present purpose. Our goal is to carve out a new research area that focuses on the full
spectrum of political (not simply partisan) engagement by military leaders with their
domestic political processes (and not only with their elected civilian counterparts). Readers
will have noticed that almost all previous uses of the term “military politics” in the pages of
this journal refer to militaries of nondemocratic or quasi-democratic states. Examples
include research articles by Trafzger (2001) on Guatemala, Ruhl (2003) on Nicaragua, and
Lee (2005) on China and Indonesia. Our use of the term “military politics” conforms to
these previous uses but applies it to the American case. Here, we follow Tama (2015) and
Coletta (2007), both of which use the term (albeit briefly) to refer to American military
leaders’ engagement in political processes. Essential to our argument is the recognition that
military politics is an appropriate descriptive term for the behavior of senior American
officers who engage variously in domestic American political processes (whether this is a
good thing or a bad thing) and the recognition that scholars of military affairs seem
exceptionally reluctant to identify and describe American military politics.
2. To clarify, military politics is used throughout as a descriptive category. It is neither good
nor bad, just as military policing, for example, is neither good nor bad. We argue that
some officers engage virtuously and others viciously in military politics, just as some
military police virtuously uphold their oaths while others viciously betray them.
3. Signs of resurging interest in Janowitz include the reissue of The Professional Soldier,
several recent conference panels dedicated to Janowitz’s life and work, and the Army
Research Institute’s funding of Crosbie’s ongoing replication of The Professional Sol-
dier. See also Travis (2017, 2018) and Crosbie and Kleykamp (2017, 2018).
4. On the sociology of professions, see Parsons (2010, c1939, Chapter 2), Mills (2000,
c1956), Abbott (1988), and Johnson (2016). See also Crosbie and Kleykamp (2017) and
Crosbie and Kleykamp (2018). Feaver (1996, 2003) reframed the question in terms of
Huntington’s apparent failure to predict favorable resolution of the Cold War. For the
previous authors, military professionalism was a critical explanatory factor in making
sense of why the American military’s uniformed leaders did not do what the framers of
the Constitution feared they might, namely use the means of violence concentrated in
their hands against other elements of state and society.
5. Correspondence between the two during the 1950s makes clear their mutual respect and
collaborative approach to their respective projects. In a letter to Janowitz written on
November 9, 1955, for example, Huntington remarked upon the “high convergence in
our thinking.” Janowitz’s comments on the early draft of The Soldier and the State were
well received and appear to have led Huntington not only to focus on the theory rather
than historical material but also to adopt the eventual subtitle, “The Theory and Politics of
Civil–Military Relations” (Morris Janowitz Collection [Box 2, Folder 10], Special Col-
lections Research Center, University of Chicago Library).
Coletta and Crosbie 17
6. Schiff (2008) did do this after the Cold War for a related but distinct dependent variable in
comparative civil–military relations—propensity of military officers to interfere domes-
tically with civilian rule. If senior military professionals and civilian authority could
achieve “concordance” on four sociological principles relating uniformed leaders and
society under their protection, the overarching democratic bargain would hold. This
covered one of Huntington’s imperatives for civil–military relations—keeping military
political potential contained within societal bounds. The second, simultaneous imperative
that brought Huntington and Janowitz together was sustaining functional capacity for
defeating the nation’s external competitors.
7. On strategic turmoil of the 1990s, see Chollet and Goldgeier (2008).
8. For a perspective after the 2003 Iraq War, see Burk (2009).
9. Among principled patriots would appear many authors who appeared in Feaver’s list of
professional supremacists. Professor Richard Kohn’s views do not fit easily in either
category, having criticized Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell’s public remarks under
Clinton but defended Army Chief Shinseki’s more explosive testimony under Bush
before the Senate as sacrosanct. His combination might be considered historical Consti-
tutionalism, with Powell’s dissent skirting the Charter and Shinseki’s observing it. How-
ever, all sides in this debate over how to optimize military advice, even Lt. Col. Milburn
and General MacArthur, believe themselves to be applying principles of the Constitution.
10. Order of these recommendations is shifted in order to reflect the sequence appearing in
Coletta (2007, pp. 117–118). Note that Golby’s and Huntington’s interpretation of Clau-
sewitz has been vigorously challenged. Binkley (2016) argued in the pages of this journal
that Clausewitz would have endorsed a civil–military relations concept closer to subjec-
tive control!For the moment, we disagree, unless Huntington’s “subjective” concept is
substantially rehabilitated from the partisan notion formulated in Soldier and the State.
We focus, here, with Golby, on refining Huntington’s objective control, showing the
inevitability of military politics and the real necessity of practicing such with ancient
republican virtues close at hand.
11. The vague and unsupported figure, offered under glare of the Senate Armed Services
Committee spotlight, was “several hundred thousand,” defenestrating norms that would
become Golby’s recommendations. Historian of the principled patriot school Col. Mat-
thew Moten (2009) shifted the onus for breakdown of unequal dialogue from military
advice to the toxic environment cultivated by civilian authority, primarily the then Sec-
retary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Civilian supremacist recommendations in Armed
Forces & Society coming out of the Shinseki case were not addressed, justifying Golby’s
subsequent claim that they never were.
12. Travis (2018) expands on the relationship between pragmatists and absolutists and type of
war (limited or large scale).
13. New York Times analysis of the U.S. National Defense Strategy (January 2018) pointed at
the U.S. military losing its global edge due to difficulties in addressing both unfinished
insurgent wars of the last 17 years and rising threats from regional powers China and
Russia. It appears the cleavage Janowitz observed between professional military absolu-
tists and pragmatists cannot be entirely resolved while military security threats to the
18 Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
United States assume a complex form, encompassing conventional, state-on-state mod-
ernization and asymmetric, irregular warfare (Schmitt, 2018).
14. Donnithorne (2018) employs a somewhat broader concept than service utopianism,
“service culture,” to explain how leading professionals of the four military service
branches, decades after Goldwater-Nichols, frame and resolve national security chal-
lenges using systematically different modes of analysis. A body of literature has recently
sketched metastasizing debates within established American foreign policy communities.
Glennon’s (2015) celebrated discussion of the American “double government” provides
one rich perspective on political feuds among entrenched bureaucracies largely invisible
for the mass public. Walt (2018) argues that energies dedicated to quelling bureaucratic
contests knocked American foreign policy from its realist perch of maintaining the
international balance of power, a claim that intriguingly echoes Huntington’s conclusion
in 1957.
15. We are largely consistent, here, with former Air Force pilot Janine Davidson’s (2013)
prescription after her civilian experience as deputy assistant secretary for Plans at the
Pentagon. In her analysis, Davidson did not feature tertiary fault lines within the military
advising complex that we highlight, here, using Crosbie’s service utopianism. Our pre-
scription, like Golby’s and Feaver’s, is less symmetric than Davidson’s in that it leans on
the military side for making change, that is, working to attain our ancient political virtues.
16. Note that our two-by-two model allows for four ideal types (effective, self-possessed,
ideologic, and utopian) of military political behavior. This superficially resembles the
two categories of professional outlook (absolutist and pragmatist) that interested Janowitz
(and more recently Travis, 2018). Accordingly, any given officer may be characterized by
Janowitz as absolutist in general military outlook and yet in a particular moment (our
focus) may display both high levels of practical wisdom and of virt´
u, making that officer
“effective” in military politics and civil–military relations.
17. Multiple images of Barber’s summary table from Presidential Character are available
online, and the value of the chart, over 40 years later, is still addressed in contemporary
textbooks (e.g., Barbour & Wright, 2014).
18. As noted above, the question has been asked by various scholars over the years. Most
recently, the question was posed by Roennfeldt (2017) in Aristotelian terms, by Travis
(2017) in pragmatic terms, and by Rapp (2016) and Golby (2015) in professional terms.
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Avant, D. D. (1996). Are the reluctant warriors out of control? Why the U.S. military is averse
to responding to post-cold war low-level threats. Security Studies,6, 51–90. doi:10.1080/
09636419608429306
Barber, J. D. (2008). The presidential character: Predicting performance in the white house
(4th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Barbour, C., & Wright, G. C. (2014). Keeping the republic: Power and citizenship in Amer-
ican politics: The essentials (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Coletta and Crosbie 19
Betts, R. K. (2009). Are civil–military relations still a problem? In S. C. Nielsen & D. M.
Snider (Eds.), American civil–military relations: The soldier and the state in a new era
(pp. 11–41). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Binkley, J. (2016). Clausewitz and subjective civilian control: An analysis of Clausewitz’s
views on the role of the military advisor in the development of national policy. Armed
Forces & Society,42, 251–275.
Burk, J. (2002). Theories of democratic civil–military relations. Armed Forces & Society,29,
7–29. doi:10.1177/0095327X0202900102
Burk, J. (2009). Responsible obedience by military professionals: The discretion to do what is
wrong. In S. C. Nielsen & D. M. Snider (Eds.), American civil–military relations: The
soldier and the state in a new era (1st ed., pp. 149–171). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Chollet, D., & Goldgeier, J. (2008). America between the wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (1st ed.).
New York, NY: Public Affairs.
Cohen, E. A. (2003). Supreme command: Soldiers, statesmen, and leadership in wartime
(Reprint ed.). New York, NY: Anchor.
Cohen, E. A. (2009, January 28). The soldier and the state: The theory and politics of civil–
military relations; The professional soldier: A social and political portrait. Foreign
Affairs (September/October 1997). Retrieved from https://www.foreignaffairs.com/
reviews/capsule-review/1997-09-01/soldier-and-state-theory-and-politics-civil-mili
tary-relations
Coletta, D. (2007). Courage in the service of virtue: The case of general Shinseki’s testimony
before the Iraq War. Armed Forces & Society,34, 109–121. doi:10.1177/
0095327X07304191
Crosbie, T. (2015). The US army’s domestic strategy, 1945–1965. Parameters,44,
105–118.
Crosbie, T., & Kleykamp, M. (2017). Fault lines of the American military profession. Armed
Forces & Society. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0095327X17715437
Crosbie, T., & Kleykamp, M. (2018). Ethical lapses and the military profession: Three
problems and a solution. Armed Forces & Society. Advance online publication. doi:10.
1177/0095327X17752900
Davidson, J. (2013). Civil–military friction and presidential decision-making: Explaining the
broken dialogue. Presidential Studies Quarterly,43, 129–145.
Desch, M. C. (2001). Civilian control of the military: The changing security environment.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Desch, M. C. (2007, May 1). Bush and the generals. Foreign Affairs (May/June 2007).
Retrieved from https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2007-05-01/bush-
and-generals
Donnithorne, J. (2018). Four guardians: A principled-agent view of American civil–military
relations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dunlap, C. J., Jr. (1992). The origins of the American military coup of 2012. Parameters,22,
2–20.
20 Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
Feaver, P. D. (1996). The civil–military problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the ques-
tion of civilian control. Armed Forces & Society,23, 149–178. doi:10.1177/
0095327X9602300203
Feaver, P. D. (2003). Armed servants: Agency, oversight, and civil–military relations (Rev.
ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Feaver, P. D. (2011). The right to be right: Civil–military relations and the Iraq surge decision.
International Security,35, 87–125. doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00033
Gibson, C. P. (2008). Securing the state: Reforming the national security decisionmaking
process at the civil–military nexus. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
Glennon, M. J. (2015). National security and double government. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Golby, J. (2015). Beyond the resignation debate: A new framework for civil–military dialo-
gue. Strategic Studies Quarterly,9, 18–46.
Hoffman, F. G. (2008). Dereliction of duty redux? Post-Iraq American civil–military rela-
tions. Orbis,52, 217–235. doi:10.1016/j.orbis.2008.01.004
Huntington, S. P. (1957). The soldier and the state: The theory and politics of civil–military
relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Huntington, S. P. (Ed.). (1962). Changing patterns of military politics: International yearbook
of political behavior research (Vol. 3). New York, NY: Free Press.
Janowitz, M. (2017, c1960). The professional soldier: A social and political portrait. New
York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Johnson, T. J. (2016). Professions and power (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Kohn, R. H. (1994). Out of control: The crisis in civil–military relations. The National
Interest,35, 3–17.
Lee, T. (2005). Military cohesion and regime maintenance: Explaining the role of the military
in 1989 China and 1998 Indonesia. Armed Forces & Society,32, 80–104.
Masland, J. W., & Radway, L. I. (2015). Soldiers and scholars: Military education and
national policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957)
Milburn, A. R. (2010). Breaking ranks: Dissent and the military professional. Joint Force
Quarterly,59, 101–107.
Mills, C. W. (2000). The power elite. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Moten, M. (2009). A broken dialogue: Rumsfeld, Shinseki, and civil–military tensions. In S.
C. Nielsen & D. M. Snider (Eds.), American civil–military relations: The soldier and the
state in a new era (1st ed., pp. 42–71). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Moten, M. (2014). Presidents and their generals: An American history of command in war.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Retrieved from http://www.hup.harvard.edu/
catalog.php?isbn¼9780674058149&content¼reviews
Owens, M. T. (2011). US civil–military relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the civil–military
bargain (1st ed.). New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
Parsons, T. (2010). Essays in sociological theory. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Rapp, W. E. (2016). Ensuring effective military voice. Parameters,46, 13–25.
Roennfeldt, C. F. (2017). Wider officer competence: The importance of politics and practical
wisdom. Armed Forces & Society. doi:10.1177/0095327X17737498
Coletta and Crosbie 21
Ruhl, J. M. (2003). Civil–military relations in post-Sandinista Nicaragua. Armed Forces &
Society,30, 117–139.
Schiff, R. L. (2008). The military and domestic politics: A concordance theory of civil–
military relations (1st ed.). London, England: Routledge.
Schmitt, E. (2018). U.S. military’s global edge has diminished, strategy review finds. New
York Times, November 14. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/us/poli
tics/defense-strategy-china-russia-.html
Sewall, S., & White, J. (2009). Parameters of partnership: U.S. civil–military relations in the
21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School Project on Civil–Military Rela-
tions. Retrieved from https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/parameters-partnership-
us-civil-military-relations-21st-century
Shields, P. M. (2017). Introduction to symposium: Roundtable on the ethics of senior officer
resignation in the United States. Armed Forces & Society,43, 3–4. doi:10.1177/
0095327X16662541
Snider, D. (2008). Dissent and strategic leadership of the military professions. Report. Car-
lisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute.
Tama, J. (2015). Independent commissions as settings for civil–military deliberation: The
case of women in the military. Armed Forces & Society,42, 407–426.
Trafzger, D. W. (2001). De Guatelama a Guate-Peor? Guatemalan military interventionism,
1944–1970. Armed Forces & Society,28, 77–97.
Travis, D. S. (2017). Saving Samuel Huntington and the need for pragmatic civil–military
relations. Armed Forces & Society,43, 395–414.
Travis, D. S. (2018). Decoding Morris Janowitz: Limited war and pragmatic doctrine. Armed
Forces & Society. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0095327X18760272
Ulrich, M. P. (2015). “Cashing in” stars: Does the professional ethic apply in retirement?
Strategic Studies Quarterly,9, 102–125.
Walt, S. M. (2018). The hell of good intentions: America’s foreign policy elite and the decline
of U.S. primacy. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Author Biographies
Damon Coletta is a professor of political science at the U.S. Air Force Academy,
where he edits the journal, Space & Defense. His latest book, Courting Science:
Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century (Stanford, 2016), analyzes
the changing role of science and technology in international security.
Thomas Crosbie is an assistant professor of military operations at the Royal Danish
Defence College. He is a political and military sociologist whose work has appeared
in journals including Armed Forces & Society,Comparative Sociology,Parameters,
Poetics,Politics, and War in History.
22 Armed Forces & Society XX(X)
