ow much longer will it be before the American people awaken to the crisis in civil-military relations? Weekly, if not daily, we are subjected to a steady drumbeat of embarrassing incidents involving the military. Yesterday, it was a major security lapse or an intelligence failure that led to the inexcusable deaths of U.S. service personnel. Today, it's another in a seemingly endless string of sexual misconduct charges. Tomorrow, it almost assuredly will be a friendly fire incident, the failure of another gold-plated weapon system, a cheating scandal, or some general or admiral abusing the privileges of rank.
The litany is tiresomely familiar. Its monotonic frequency seems to have dulled the senses of a public that should be outraged.
It may not be at all clear how, or whether, to cure the military's ills. The source of this disease resides in the expectations the three parties to the civil-military relationship have of one another and in their uniform failure to measure up.
To the practiced observer, these expectations are obvious. Civilian officials and presidents expect two things above all else from the military. The first is operational competence, the ability to successfully accomplish assigned missions. The second is sound advice. Both things are inherently subjective and depend ultimately on those who make such judgments.
A political appointee or average citizen devoid of military understanding is ill-equipped to distinguish a military that is doing well what it should be doing from one that is doing either the right thing badly or the wrong thing satisfactorily.
Soundness of advice similarly may reflect how broad (strategic) or narrow (purely military) the advice is; whether it reinforces or runs counter to what its recipients want to hear; or whether it truly determines results that are subject to so many other intervening influences.
Not-So-Great Expectations
Beyond expecting the military to provide operational competence and sound advice, civilian officials expect other things as well:
- Generally unquestioning obedience not merely to legitimate political direction, but to the full range of civilian dictates and desires, however frivolous, ill-conceived or self-serving. By this same reasoning, even responsible dissent is considered disobedience. Also, no task-such as ushering at the White House-is considered too inconsequential or demeaning for dutiful military personnel.
- Conduct responsible enough to avoid becoming a political liability.
- Sufficient affordability not to visibly drain resources from other political priorities.
No less, though, does the military seek from its civilian masters clear strategic guidance that effectively charts the country's course. Such guidance provides an antidote to the momentary imperatives of expediency and convenience that pervade the policy process. It also establishes a rational basis for allocating national resources, preventing constant crisis, determining military requirements and justifying use or non-use of the military. It thereby gives reasonable assurance to the military and the public that those in charge know what they're doing and are motivated by more than self-interest.
However logical, reasonable and even necessary these expectations, they are only rarely fulfilled. Politics doesn't guarantee, nor even necessarily encourage, competence in governing-as many in office regularly demonstrate. Moreover, politicians typically show little inclination to produce the sort of blueprint for action that opponents could use to hold them accountable.
Accordingly, the military generally is content to limit its expectations of civilian officials to two things: (1) appreciation and support-if not understanding-of its purpose, uses, capabilities, needs and value; and (2) sufficient political acumen to get things done properly and effectively in the messy, frustratingly pluralistic worlds of domestic and international politics.
The military's expectations of the people are no less telling in their impact on the attitudes and performance of the armed forces.
Though the military expects citizens' support-if for no other reason than as psychological recompense for the sacrifices it sees itself making-it seems willing to accept mere non-interference as a minimal reflection of public trust. The military also seems to expect civic commitment and public order as obligations of citizenship (preferably of the compliant, deferential kind).
The people seem to share with civilian officials the expectation that the military provide operational competence and sound advice. However, the public's powers of discernment and judgment-as well as the willingness to forsake the rights to know about and speak out on allegedly sensitive national security matters-vary widely.
Thus given to blind trust in those who profess to serve them, the people ask that their military maintain strict political neutrality-distancing itself from partisan politics, staying out of domestic affairs. The public also expects military personnel to conform to the highest standards of ethical and legal conduct, even if the international environment in which they operate is the dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed Hobbesian jungle realists tell us it is.
Military Strength Eroding
Today, precious few of the mutual expectations in the civil-military relationship are being met. From these failed expectations flows the crisis that afflicts us.
Ideally, the military would be a useful instrument of national power in pursuing the country's strategic goals, as well as a socially, politically and economically responsible institution that contributes to the preservation of civil society.
Civilian authorities would establish a definitive strategic purpose and direction for the country, effectively manage events and exercise responsible military oversight. The people would be engaged and employ reasoned judgment to rigorously oversee the military's overseers.
Reality has fallen well short of this ideal. Civilian officials, increasingly devoid of firsthand or even derivative military experience, have shown commensurately little faculty for critical discernment in military matters. Having further been consistently less than adroit in the larger conduct of international affairs, they have failed to engender the minimal credibility necessary to compensate for their pronounced military illiteracy.
Instead, they have feigned understanding and support by invariably deferring to established military practices and preferences and by shamelessly invoking insider rhetoric to mask their shortcomings and counter criticism. Lest anyone doubt this, note how often former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and former Defense secretaries William Perry and Les Aspin invoked the hackneyed mantras of "military readiness" and "national interests."
At the same time, under the guise of urgency and national self-defense, these civilian officials have perpetuated the common presidential practice of repeatedly committing U.S. troops abroad.
Circumventing or outmaneuvering Congress in Bosnia is only the most glaring recent example. The result has been a diminution of effective civilian control of the military.
The military-parochial to a fault, greedy for resources, disturbingly politicized and beset by civic illiteracy-has made the most of its bureaucratic and political survival skills. While ostensibly accepting nontraditional assignments such as peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance that core true believers consider extraneous and burdensome, and while zealously trumpeting itself as the revolutionary vanguard for new-age cyberwar, the military has remained stubbornly wedded to a hidebound conception of war and self.
The tenets of this entrenched world view are only too familiar: War is inevitable. Peace, always a temporary respite, is a function of one's readiness for war. War is traditional combat, and victory goes to the party most proficient in managing violence. The military exists solely to prepare for and wage war. Therefore the profession occupies privileged standing and should be immune from the meddling scrutiny of amateurs.
Such beliefs have led the military to continue preparing for the wars of the past; to deny the relevance of, and therefore be unprepared for, most contemporary contingencies; and to give experience-impaired civilian officials little choice between the unpalatable options of inaction and failure in responding to crises.
These same beliefs, because they reflect the types of individuals the institution attracts and rewards, also have contributed to incessant institutional disobedience, apparently too subtle for most of us to recognize. They are the outgrowth of an institution that has lost its identity, that no longer has confidence in or respect for those it is supposed to serve.
The people, increasingly disenchanted, cynical and alienated, are captive still of the Cold War mentality that convinced them they endanger the republic by knowing too much about their military. The resulting apathy, hostility and distrust undermine national will, civility and democracy itself. Congress, in turn, far from fulfilling the republican ideal, has set itself above the people and repeatedly shown its incapacity as an effective check on presidential excess and as a representative voice of the people.
These conditions call to mind the facetious Cold War aphorism that under communism workers pretend to work and the state pretends to pay them. It might similarly be said that under post-Cold War American democracy, civilians pretend to control the military and the military pretends to be controlled.
When expectations in the civil-military relationship go unmet, the result is alienation, distrust, disunity and, ultimately, strategic debilitation. We're at that point today, notwithstanding our self-absorbed, chest-thumping claims to Lone Superpower status. If we don't act quickly to reverse the situation, we'll pay the price in ways that will leave us to reminisce about the glory we once enjoyed.
Gregory D. Foster is George C. Marshall professor and director of research at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University in Washington. The views expressed here are his own.
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