Military Politics: New Perspectives

Bringing together new research by leading scholars, this volume rethinks the role played by militaries in politics. It introduces new theories of military politics, arguing against the inherited theories and practices of civil-military relations, and presents rich new data on senior officership and on the intersection of military politics and military operations. As the first volume in Berghahn Books’ Military Politics series, it provides a blueprint for a new research paradigm dedicated to tracing how militaries shape their political environments, focusing particularly on the core democratic questions raised by politically-effective (and ineffective) militaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jul 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805390244

Book preview

PART I

NEW THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER 1

What Is Military Politics?

THOMAS CROSBIE

Introduction

At the broadest, military politics are those political processes pertaining to or primarily involving military organizations. The military politics of the United States—which have a special claim on our attention because of that country’s central place within the system of states—are as broad and varied as are American environmental politics or health politics, encompassing not just top-level executive decision-making but all the debating, defining, shaping, and persuading efforts that take place throughout society. The military politics of NATO, to take a different example, would therefore be the full range of political processes pertaining to or primarily involving NATO as a military alliance, processes taking place within NATO organizations, between states in international arenas, and also within individual member states.

In its plural noun form, the term stands in tension with cognates such as security politics (e.g., Kessler and Daase 2008) or defense politics (Sapolsky et al. 2022). Military politics in this sense is akin to hospital politics or physician politics, as those relate to the broader category of health politics. Military politics are nested within defense and security realities but are shaped by the gravitational effect of the military as a specific sort of thing. What is signaled by the word military in military politics is thus the resilience of uniformed services in dominating the expression of state violence on the world’s stage. These sorts of military politics demands we pay attention to militaries, making military organizations, military actors, and military events the centerpiece of analyses of security and defense dynamics.

This is no more than a commitment to reality. Despite the rise of paramilitary, private, and irregular units the world over (Swed and Crosbie 2018; West and Crosbie 2021; Hoffman 2006), and despite the extreme confusion associated with discovering sharp analytical boundaries within the linked ecologies of the national security sector blob (Abbott 2005: 270; Porter 2018: 11), traditional militaries retain their primacy. Pushing against the disciplinary preference for the new kids on the block, a broad military politics approach holds that militaries (and particularly military politics) are worthy of special attention and study—as the chapters that follow attest.

This chapter aims at something slightly different. I work toward defining a vision of military politics as a collective noun (military politics is) and ultimately a proper name. From this vantage point, military politics is an emerging subfield that foregrounds the role of military actors, institutions, and events in explaining political realities, focusing particularly on the active role played by officers in shaping their political environments.

For many soldiers and scholars alike, there is something profoundly unsettling about the mere possibility of such a field, and especially about suggesting—as I do—that military politics is particularly important to study in relation to democracies. Indeed, there is a widespread but mistaken belief that while democracies may have military politics (in the plural), those in uniform should have little or no role in how these events play out. In this common view, there is nothing wrong with military politics research per se, but since those in uniform should be kept away from such activities, researchers interested in militaries are discouraged from being interested in military politics (that disciplinary labor should instead be left to researchers interested in bureaucratic politics and other fields). My view is that those among us (in and out of uniform) who view the military as an object of special interest and who acknowledge its unique impact on our social lives are precisely the people who should pay special attention to military politics, and especially the roles those in uniform play in affecting military politics.

Is this really such a dramatic claim? Let us return to the health politics versus physician politics comparison. A military-centered theory of military politics holds that those in uniform are centrally located within the network of actors shaping the way the military instrument is resourced, understood, employed, and restrained. This insight need not place the military at the center of security or defense studies, but it does have important implications for those fields, since it suggests that our experience of security and our collective defense—how these sorts of issues are resourced and understood, and how such agencies are employed and restrained—are somehow shaped by the work of military officers. Likewise, it would seem strange to study physician politics without thinking about the role that physicians and their professional organizations sometimes play (appropriately or not) in shaping how their societies resource and understand who has the right to wield a scalpel. And moving beyond the special role of physicians, it seems strange to study health politics without recognizing that physicians not only have an impact on the health of their individual patients but also—through their collective efforts—have an important impact on our understanding of health itself, including how we resource health issues, how we employ agents to help improve health outcomes, and how we restrain those efforts within acceptable bounds (strictly limiting who wields a scalpel, what products can claim health benefits, and so forth).

Military politics makes no more dramatic claims than these: that just as physicians shape the political realities governing their field, with no necessary corruption of their capacity to practice good medicine, military professionals shape the political realities governing their field, likewise with no necessary corruption of their capacity to practice the military arts (although certainly corruption is possible). The same holds true of physicians’ special (but not exclusive) impact on health politics, and military professionals’ special impact on defense and security politics.

To champion a military politics subfield, I begin by considering the two most influential theoretical challenges to developing such an approach. The first is Samuel P. Huntington’s (1957) theory of a self-regulating professional officer corps, loosely overseen by civilian masters. This theory rejects the possibility of military professionals appropriately engaging in political processes: military politics, in this view, is not done by military professionals. The second is Peter D. Feaver’s (2003) theory of a bureaucratic officer corps closely controlled by civilian oversight and punishment. This theory likewise posits a threat inherent in military-political behavior by those in uniform: military politics, in this view, is done by those in uniform, but their efforts pit them against civilian interests. Specifically, military politics breaks with these versions of civil-military relations (which is the dominant field of study linking militaries to political processes) by sidestepping the major stumbling blocks in each theory: Huntington’s (1957) assertion that military professionals are apolitical, and Feaver’s (2003) assertion that military interests are advanced only at the expense of their civilian principals.

Together, those two very different aversions to military-political behavior contribute to a sort of allergy in the mainstream of civil-military relations that military politics can help cure. While the pivot away from these dominant strands of civil-military relations can be justified on these grounds alone, the true motivation for a pivot to military politics is the obvious and troubling gap that has emerged between the scholarship and the practitioners’ realities. To help close this gap, the second part of the chapter explores what those who have written under the banner of military politics have discovered so far about the topic.

In the final part of the chapter, I draw in a wider literature, not written under the military politics banner but which address questions of how officers go about doing the alignment tasks (vertical and horizontal) that are so central to their political impact. The conclusion returns to the question of what a military politics subfield might look like, a topic taken up for a final time in the closing chapter of the book.

Military Politics and Its Discontents

The Origins of Civil-Military Relations Scholarship

The term civil-military relations (lowercase) was introduced to the lexicon by the Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Committee on Public Administration, with an annotated bibliography published in 1940. The term was used to broadly encompass any research bearing upon those problems of public policy which were posed by the prospect of a continuing high mobilization even in peace time, and by the continuing necessity for a careful coordination of military, diplomatic, and industrialization policy (Fox 1954: 278). These civil-military relations were of interest because they had already begun to show signs of stressing America’s democratic institutions. Rather than enjoying a peace dividend, the United States found itself in the middle of a cold war that demanded immense capital investment as well as the fostering of a large expert community (in and out of uniform) to manage the new weapons systems, to theorize the new strategic balancing, and to staff the new headquarters. Whether it could meet its geostrategic challenges without being utterly transformed in the process was far from clear.

The 1940 report mapped civil-military relations along two axes: one concerned with how civilians should manage a growing military sector (vertical alignment), and the other with how military experts should integrate with other elements of national power (horizontal alignment). These twin concerns are still of paramount interest today. For example, contemporary Professional Military Education focuses on supporting the intellectual development of officers as they come to recognize their role as actors within domestic and international political systems (Libel 2016; Crosbie, Lucas, and Withander 2019). Likewise, contemporary military operational thought is absorbed by the challenges of interoperability, the comprehensive approach, and the future multidomain operating environment (Paget 2016; Perkins 2017; Hachey, Libel, and Dean 2020). From the classroom to the battlefield, officers today are repeatedly tasked with overcoming the organizational and institutional barriers that separate them from other elements of national power (horizontal alignment) and with ensuring that their tactical effects are consonant with the strategic goals of their civilian masters (vertical alignment). In this sense, today’s militaries are still faced by uncertainty regarding how to align along the horizontal and vertical axes, just as they were in 1940.

A little over a decade after the term was introduced, several efforts were launched to reappraise American civil-military relations. Members of the American Political Science Association scheduled a roundtable to discuss the topic at their annual meeting in 1953. That same year, the Twentieth Century Fund appointed a committee to study civil-military relations, leading to a multiyear research project housed at Princeton University. At Dartmouth College, two professors started a research project on military education (Masland and Radway ), while at the University of Michigan the sociologist Morris Janowitz started another, very ambitious cross-national survey of the military profession.¹ The following year, the SSRC convened another committee comprised of some of the leading social scientists of the day, now bearing the name Committee on Civil-Military Relations Research (although the members were themselves unhappy with the term) (Fox 1954).² This committee published another annotated bibliography in 1954, but its ambitions were much greater, aiming not to provide an overview of the field but rather to energize it. This seemed to work, as other efforts, at Columbia University, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Corporation, and Brookings Institute all followed shortly thereafter.

Among this flurry of activity was a modest project by the young Samuel P. Huntington, a project described in 1954 as a study of defense policy and expenditures. Somewhere in the following years, Huntington achieved a theoretical breakthrough, described in more detail in what follows, that introduced the theory of professions as the primary explanans for military effectiveness and subordination to civilian authority. Working closely with the sociologist Morris Janowitz, Huntington (1957) released his major theoretical intervention in this emerging field in 1957, titled The Soldier and the State—and, thanks to Janowitz, bearing the subtitle The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Coletta and Crosbie 2019: 19).

The breakthrough established what became Civil-Military Relations (capitalized, and abbreviated as CMR), a subfield that coalesced around Huntington’s distinctive vision of civilian control. The subfield was dominated by Huntington’s thinking until Feaver and others disrupted the field in the late 1990s, giving rise to several alternative paradigms. Feaver notably abandoned the use of the military profession as an explanatory variable, and shifted instead to a principal-agent model. The tradition that emerged in the wake of Feaver’s critique of Huntington focused on exploring gaps that separate civilian and military policy preferences, providing insights in this way into why more or less oversight and civilian punishment might be required in different circumstances. These two traditions both focused on problems of vertical alignment. Both neglected problems of horizontal alignment. And both are marked by serious theoretical problems that severely limit their conceptual coherence and predictive value. As a result of changes in the geostrategic context, neither tradition has much explanatory power today, as Risa Brooks (2020) argued in her analysis of the paradoxes of professionalism that both theories neglect to resolve. Before I advance that argument, however, I will briefly summarize the problems with Huntington (1957) and Feaver (2003) as they relate to developing a military politics perspective.

The Officer Corps as Apolitical Profession

Huntington’s major theoretical breakthrough in The Soldier and the State was to introduce the theory of professions into an analysis of the vertical alignment problem that had already been identified in the 1940 SSRC report. In Huntington’s (1957: 469) understanding, scholars had thus far conceptualized the military as a bureaucracy (e.g., Brotz and Wilson 1946), or as a feudal-aristocratic vestige (e.g., Vagts 1937). Meanwhile, the theory of professions had developed without much reference to militaries. The critical influence on Huntington was Carr-Saunders and Wilson’s The Professions (1933). This was a major work that attracted wide attention but followed an inductive constellation approach (Haberstein 1963: 292) in defining what should or should not be considered a profession, with the result lacking much in the way of conceptual rigor. Huntington synthesized the field of professions research, noting that some scholars gave special weight to the ethical dimension, others to the cognitive dimension, and yet others to the collective character of professional groups.

From these starting points, Huntington (1957: 8–10) developed a three-dimensional ideal type of profession. Professions are those occupational groups that most closely approach the ideal of entirely monopolizing a field of expert knowledge (expertise), of fully internalizing a sense of responsibility to one’s client (responsibility), and whose members act with the highest degree of mutual recognition, sharing norms governing who belongs and who does not belong (corporateness). Huntington (1957: 11) argued that while militaries are not exceptionally close to this ideal, the closer that an officer corps gets to the ideal type, the stronger and more effective it is.

Although clothed in descriptive terms, the argument itself is fundamentally normative, as becomes clear in the last chapter. There, Huntington shifts into an elevated rhetoric that establishes a compelling vision of how the American officer corps should act in relation to the state. His strongest articulation of the political character of the officer corps comes near the end of the Conservatism and Security section of this final chapter:

A political officer corps, rent with faction, subordinated to ulterior ends, lacking prestige but sensitive to the appeals of popularity, would endanger the security of the state. A strong, integrated, highly professional officer corps, on the other hand, immune to politics and respected for its military character, would be a steadying balance wheel in the conduct of policy. (Huntington 1957: 464)

Huntington was at pains to convince his readers that the closer an officer corps draws to the ideal type of military profession, the less it is connected to politics—it becomes, in the final instance, immune to politics. Thus inoculated, military professionals can occupy a new role within the leadership of the state: rather than compete for power, they will instinctively subordinate their will to that of the political leadership, and will provide objective information (drawn from their monopoly of the expertise needed to employ the military instrument of power). These objective professionals are a steadying balance wheel in the doing of policy because they will execute their directives with equal efficiency regardless of who gives the orders, or indeed regardless of whether they agree with the orders they have been given.

What exactly makes a professional immune to politics? For Huntington, it is the responsibility element of the profession that affects this transformation. Responsibility is double-edged: the professional internalizes a feeling of responsibility to serve the client (ultimately, the society), but also a feeling of responsibility to the expertise he or she wields (a devotion to the skill itself). Critically, financial incentives must be made secondary to the feelings of responsibility that motivate professional service: otherwise, the professional becomes corrupted and drifts away from the ideal. In Huntington’s view (1957: 10), the profession becomes a moral unit positing certain values and ideals.

Like the category of responsibility, the category of expertise is based on internalized feelings of duty to the society and to the management of violence (Huntington 1957: 15). The stress in that famous phrase should be placed on management, rather than on violence: military professionals should not be mistaken for promoters of the use of the military instrument, but rather as mitigators of that instrument, ensuring its responsible use to achieve the military security of the state. Responsibility and expertise are entirely intertwined concepts in this view. But herein lies a problem.

All professionals must grapple with the dilemma of a client with bad or dangerous ideas. A lawyer may know that taking a case to trial is an objectively bad idea, and advise his or her client to take a plea deal instead. Nevertheless, the client has the prerogative to disagree and insist upon a trial. Through loyal service to a foolish client, the lawyer ultimately serves the interests of his or her true client, society itself, which demands that those brought before the law be empowered with the ultimate authority over their own representation. By contrast, a physician is somewhat more likely to reject a patient’s foolish preference for unnecessary surgery, since physicians view their sense of responsibility through the lens of the Hippocratic oath, which creates a red line (not doing harm) that can be used to reject a patient’s preferences.

Professions differ in the degree to which the professional is properly empowered to reject their client’s preferences. Or rather, professions differ in the degree to which the proximate client (the person hiring the professional) stands in for the ultimate client (society itself). For the military, Huntington parses this as follows: the ideal military professional is guided by an awareness that his skill can only be utilized for purposes approved by society through its political agent, the state (1957: 15–16). He continues:

[the military professional] cannot impose decisions upon his client which have implications beyond his field of special competence. He can only explain to his client his needs in this area, advise him as to how to meet these needs, and then, when the client has made his decisions, aid him in implementing them. (16)

These meager tools—explain, advise, implement—stand for the entirety of what Huntington views as responsible political engagement on the part of officers.

Military professionalism is more complicated than other forms of professionalism because its expert knowledge pertains to the very existence of the client, and logically transcends the client’s own understanding because the expertise has been monopolized by the military. This gives rise to the major problem of Huntington’s theory (at least as it relates to military politics), which becomes obvious when the broader goal of his argument is foregrounded. Throughout The Soldier and the State, Huntington is trying to deductively explain why some states succeed in maintaining militaries that are both effective and subordinate, reflecting his very real fear that the United States will lose the Cold War unless it creates a military that is more effective but no less subordinate. For Huntington (1957), militaries in democracies are effective and subordinate if and only if the military is professional, and if and only if civilians use objective control—in other words, they allow the officer corps to maintain a strict monopoly over both military expertise and the application of that