Note: This segment is Part I of V in a outline prepared for a future long-form commentary
The Soldier and the State was written in the aftermath of the unprecedented military action on the Korean Peninsula and the opening acts of what would become the Cold War. In the wake of the Second World War, the social order and societal forces needed a comprehensive examination of how a nation that had risen to global preeminence would assimilate a generation of Americans who had fought the Nazis, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and had stumbled through the erratic but eventual triumph in Korea. The key differential is the relatively new, industrialized professional force that had become the penultimate lever of power in national aims.
Two of the largest gatherings of military forces – not merely American military forces – in the middle twentieth century took place in just over a decade, and what followed was a generation who professionalized the awesome hard power wielded by the greatest country on Earth, perhaps the greatest single country in world history. This, as Huntington noted, was a fundamental shift in the dynamic between society and the men of its armed forces: that national security was no longer assumed, but an objective of policy. The mid-century societal shift then, was a new mandate to clarify how a military integrates with the social imperative of pursuing state security, rather than simply assuming and sustaining it.
It’s a particularly nuanced and difficult question to answer, thus creating the need for a scholar of Huntington’s prowess to tackle the immensely complex theory of civil-military relations. And today, to overstate the premise, that world is infinitely more complex than in Huntington’s day, and the dynamic of civil-military relations is complicated by a growing diversity of social, economic, and philosophical influences.
The national security construct itself is far more complicated, as the global arena of state security is no longer as clear as it was in the decade predating Huntington’s work. War in the information age has lost its moral imperative, if for no greater reality than the information domain is now one of conflict, subterfuge, and is a breeding ground for disinformation by adversaries so as to undermine the legitimacy of any conflict. So too is the new security imperative in a dynamic state construct, one where social movement, awareness, and rapid shifts represent a far more pliable and modular paradigm.
The imperative, then, bears first consideration as the introduction. Prior to the great wars that altered the international order and balance of power, national security was an assumption of the state; the means of professionalized violence – men, machines (in their myriad levels of progress), logistics, administration, and finances were a contingency of national power rather than a pillar of its nature. Power in kingdoms and principalities, royalists and their familial networks once represented the disparate organization of hard power in international competition. Huntington noted the manner in which an aristocratic order – the old world burned out in the Great War – saw the rise of a niche group of professional soldiers who argued for the professionalization of the force wholesale, and whose ideas would foment the transition of military forces at the turn of the twentieth century. National Security as a national objective required the institutionalization of violence, both for the sake of legitimacy, but also as a growing demand on the states’ financial resources.
Regarding legitimacy, fear of professionalized violence becoming the sole possession of a military professional class certainly fostered concern for a European aristocracy who had alone held power in the social order. A professionalized class of military represented a direct threat to the power bases of that old order, wherein Huntingtin noted that “the achievement of objective civilian control has only been possible, of course, since the emergence of the military profession.”[i] Previously, the role of professionalized violence was scattershot, part-time arrangements of mercenary and aristocratic in lieu of enlisted masses led by an officer corps, and thus the foundations of the sacred relationship emerged as a result of that changing nature of the service members themselves, while the character of the state evolved with each centuries passing.
The use of monopolized violence by historical predecessors to this paradigm were, most often, warlords and conquerors, but not policy levers to sustain that assumed national security status. Political alignment carried little, if any weight or obligation, so long as the political end state was achieved and the incentives offered between the state and the warfighters were fulfilled. The relationship herein, prior to the professionalization of violence, was almost wholly transactional. The key shift, notwithstanding the emergence of class representation as aristocracy began to give way to political apparatus’, was the institutionalization of military service, organized around the national identity of the citizenry (those with varying degrees of individual liberties and thus, the option of service). In Huntington’s work, great significance is placed upon the officer corps as the locus of this professionalization of violence as class and national identity began to calcify into more modern lines.
The Solder and the State addressed myriad social components that directly impacted the delicate negotiation of control over professionalized violence. The work’s brilliance accounts for the pre-20th century influence of such contracting factors such as liberal society ideological constant against the military professionalism,[ii] that a standing military absent conflict is merely a vector for despotism and citing such examples as key leaders from the Department of War preparing against possible conflict against Germany without Woodrow Wilson’s knowledge or consent in 1912. Conversely, Huntington noted that the conservative nature of the constitution itself – the federalizing of war making authority and capacity as an explicit mechanism of objective civilian control – stood in confrontation with a military of officers and experts in violence who exist in exception to civilian leaders as a matter of course. Further, the rise of military publicists such as Mahan and Wood – each having outsized influence on military planning, strategy, and legislative decisions on military organization and expenditure – would be additional factors that demanded consideration as having an influence on the civil-military dynamic. Following the end of the Second World War, with the United States having fully professionalized its capacity for violence as an institution (Huntington eloquently reviewed both Imperialist Japan’s political militarism and Germany’s professional militarism as prefaces to American institutionalization), a combination of political and professional militarism arose in the shape of a widely expanded Department of War and politically-influential military officers within the American national security apparatus writ large.
The formative decades of the American military leading up to Huntington’s great work thus created a colossus of political and professionalized violence, demanding the critical academic review of the dynamic between it and the American body politic. The key cog in this machine, ultimately, is the concept of objective civilian control. That concept, oversimplified, is that professional military expertise, that being the professionalization of violence, is best utilized to achieve national security imperatives (the objective of state security, rather than the sustainment of security) when the division between civilian authority and professional military activity is clear. Clarity is achieved when elected civilian leaders are empowered to decide where, when and for what purpose military capacity is to be used to achieve the security imperative, while the military professionals are empowered to achieve those clearly stated political end states without civilian actors choosing the how. This concept is undermined by what Huntington called subjective civilian control, wherein the military professionals are drawn into the political domain or are purposefully incorporated into select civilian groups within the bastion of elected power. In short, any mechanism which violates political neutrality by the professional military by civilian actors, or that which alters the military professional decision making, becomes subjective, and thus alters the legitimacy of the civilian-military dynamic.
Key points to this summary are that civilian objective control must determine where and when to use professional violence and must clearly state an outcome for which violence is applied. The military as an institution must be empowered to pursue those political end states without civilian decision-making undermining the ways and means, or simply, the how professional violence is employed.
In contemporary review, there are several additional components that must be incorporated into the greater theory of civil-military relations. These include the warfighter (soldier) imperative, the new state construct, and the influence of social capital as a policy resource for the application of professionalized violence.
[i] S. Huntington. (1957). “Chapter Four: Power, Professionalism & Ideology.” The Soldier & The State. Vintage Books (Randomhouse), Harvard University Press reprint. Pg. 85.
[ii] That “standing armies in a time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican Governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people,” quoting Elbridge Gerry to the Continental Congress in 1784)
