Soldiers Of The State Reconsidering American Civil Military Relations

In American academe today the dominant view of civil-military relations is sternly critical of the military, asserting that civilian control of the military is dangerously eroded. Though tension clearly exists in the relationship, the current critique is largely inaccurate and badly overwrought. Far from overstepping its bounds, America's military operates comfortably within constitutional notions of separated powers, participating appropriately in defense and national security policymaking with due deference to the principle of civilian control. Indeed, an active and vigorous role by the military in the policy process is and always has been essential to the common defense. A natural starting point for any inquiry into the state of civil-military relations in the US today is to define what is meant by the terms civil-military relations and civilian control. Broadly defined, civil-military relations refers to the relationship between the armed forces of the state and the larger society they serve how they communicate, how they interact, and how the interface between them is ordered and regulated. Similarly, civilian control means simply the degree to which the military's civilian masters can enforce their authority on the military services. Clarifying the vocabulary of civil-military relations sheds an interesting light on the current, highly charged debate. The dominant academic critique takes several forms, charging that the military has become increasingly estranged from the society it serves; that it has abandoned political neutrality for partisan politics; and that it plays an increasingly dominant and illegitimate role in policymaking. This view contrasts the ideal of the nonpartisan, apolitical soldier with a different reality. In this construct, the military operates freely in a charged political environment to impose its own perspective in defiance of the principle of civilian control.