July
17, 2003, 8:45 a.m. Civilian
Rumsfeld
Overseeing
the military.
t would be an understatement to say that Donald Rumsfeld has ruffled a
few feathers during his tenure as secretary of defense. He has been called
a "takedown artist," a "control freak" who has little
patience with the niceties of military protocol. His critics say he thinks
nothing of insulting general officers and running roughshod over those
with whom he disagrees. Not surprisingly, the uniformed military has struck
back. Anti-Rumsfeld leaks to the press have been unprecedented. Hardly
a week goes by without a story in the press quoting anonymous officers
trashing the secretary for one reason or another.
The uniformed military
might not like it, but there's a term for what Rumsfeld is doing at the
Pentagon. It's called exercising civilian control of the military —
a feature of Republican government much beloved by the Founders of the
United States.
Ensuring civilian control of the military is actually one of the oldest
problems of political science. It is raised by Socrates in Plato's Republic
in his discussion of the "guardians," who are described as having
the virtues of a well-bred guard dog, "dangerous to their enemies
[but] gentle to their friends."
How does a state
create a body of fighters who are capable of defeating an enemy but also
not inclined to turn on those whom they defend? If the military is so
powerful that it can be assured of winning on the battlefield, it might
well choose to launch a coup to seize the government. Accordingly, to
guard against the dangers of a coup, the state might seek to tame the
military by extirpating marital virtues — most likely resulting in
defeat on the battlefield.
In his 1957 book, The
Soldier and the State, Samuel Huntington argued that the best
way for a republic such as the United States to avoid the two polar outcomes
— either coup or defeat — was to allow the military autonomy
in its own realm but also to insist that it remain within its limits.
Huntington called this approach "objective control" of the military
— which, he claimed, simultaneously maximizes military effectiveness
and efficiency on the one hand and subordination of the military to civilian
authority on the other.
In Huntington's theory, the key to objective control is military professionalism.
This amounts to a bargain between civilians and soldiers. To begin with,
civil authorities grant a professional officer corps autonomy in the realm
of military affairs. At the same time, "a highly professional officer
corps stands ready to carry out the wishes of any civilian group which
secures legitimate authority within the state."
At the opposite pole lay Huntington's worst-case scenario: "subjective
control," or the systematic violation of the autonomy necessary for
a professional military. Huntington argued that subjective control was
detrimental to military effectiveness, and that forcing the military to
defer to civilians in the military realm would lead to failure on the
battlefield. In keeping with this view, it has become an article of faith
within the military that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was the result of
undue civilian meddling in military affairs.
But as Eliot Cohen and Peter Feaver have shown, in practice, American
civil-military relations do not actually conform to Huntington's objective
control. This has been true in both war and peace. As Cohen illustrates
in his recent book, Supreme
Command, successful wartime presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln
and Franklin Roosevelt, "interfered" extensively with military
operations — often driving their generals to distraction. The problem
with Vietnam was not so much civilian interference as bad policy and strategy
all around.
And the same holds for peacetime. In his new book, Armed
Servants, Feaver shows that during the Cold War, the military
became increasingly "civilianized" and the officer corps more
politicized, and civilians habitually intruded into the military realm.
"[A]ccording to many of the indicators Huntington cited as critical,
civilians did not adopt the objective control mechanism he claimed was
the crucial causal mechanism" that permitted the United States to
prevail during the Cold War.
Feaver turns to "agency theory" to explain civil-military relations
during the Cold War and after. The problem agency theory seeks to analyze
is this: Given different incentives, how does a principal ensure that
the agent is doing what the principal wants him to do? Is the agent "working"
or "shirking?"
The major question for the principal is the extent to which he will monitor
the agent. Will monitoring be intrusive of non-intrusive? This decision
is affected by cost: The higher the cost of monitoring, the less intrusive
the monitoring is likely to be.
The agent's incentives for working or shirking are affected by the likelihood
that his shirking will be detected by the principal and that he will then
be punished for it. The less intrusive the principal's monitoring, the
less likely it is that the agent's shirking will be detected.
Feaver applies agency theory to civilian control of the military. Does
the military agent do what the civilian principal wants, or does it "shirk"
by pursuing its own goals? The most obvious form of military shirking
is disobedience, but it also includes foot-dragging and leaks to the press
designed to undercut either policy or individual policymakers. Feaver
provides an explanation for why such phenomena exploded during the 1990s.
According to Feaver, and contrary to Huntington, the civil-military relations
pattern that prevailed during the Cold War was Huntington's subjective
control. There was a wide gap between the preferences of the civilians
and the military, but the military "worked" because the costs
of intrusive monitoring were relatively low, and because the military
believed the likelihood of punishment for shirking to be fairly high.
Of critical importance was the firing of a popular military hero (MacArthur)
by an unpopular president (Truman). This dramatic action dramatically
shaped the expectations of the military concerning the likelihood of punishment
for shirking during the Cold War period.
During the 1990s, a new civil-military relations pattern emerged in which
civilians monitored intrusively, yet the military "shirked."
For one thing, the preferences of civilian and military elites diverged
to an even greater degree than they had during the Cold War, substantially
increasing incentives for the military to pursue its own set of goals.
This situation was exacerbated by the creation of a powerful chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Act of 1986,
and the occupation of this office by a popular, politically savvy general
— Colin Powell.
Finally, the expectation of punishment for shirking decreased as a result
of the election of Bill Clinton, whose equivocal relationship with the
military made punishment unlikely. Combined with a powerful and popular
military leader — and an absence of consensus regarding security
affairs across the executive and legislative branches — the civilian
principals were in a relatively weakened position vis-à-vis the
military agents.
If Feaver is right, it is no wonder that the uniformed military is constantly
at odds with Rumsfeld and other civilians. There was practically no
civilian oversight of the uniformed military during the Clinton years,
and the military got used to doing business that way. The characterization
of Donald Rumsfeld as McNamara II by anonymous officers, the explosion
of leaks during the period leading up to the Iraq war, the press attacks
on Rumsfeld during the first week of the war when the pace slowed down,
and current criticisms of the postwar plan (or lack thereof) — all
are examples of military shirking. And it will take some time to change
the culture, so we can expect to see continued leaks and foot-dragging
on the part of the military.
Much as we may hope that civilian control prevails, there is a real danger
that it could be reasserted at the cost of a dispirited and demoralized
uniformed military. Right now, the perception among officers is that Rumsfeld
wants to surround himself with "yes-men" and that dissent will
not be tolerated. This is a recipe for disaster.
Rumsfeld needs to take a cue from Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill,
and other great military leaders of democracies. By all means, he should
challenge, cajole, probe, and question his uniformed military — and
then challenge them again. But he should also encourage true dialogue,
in the hope of achieving a dynamic, creative tension within the Pentagon
on everything from war fighting to transformation. This is the path to
healthy civil-military relations — and to true civilian control of
the military.
—
Mackubin Thomas Owens, an NRO contributing editor, is on leave
from the Naval War College to write a history of U.S. civil-military relations.
He led a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam, 1968-69.
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t would be an understatement to say that Donald Rumsfeld has ruffled a
few feathers during his tenure as secretary of defense. He has been called
a "takedown artist," a "control freak" who has little
patience with the niceties of military protocol. His critics say he thinks
nothing of insulting general officers and running roughshod over those
with whom he disagrees. Not surprisingly, the uniformed military has struck
back. Anti-Rumsfeld leaks to the press have been unprecedented. Hardly
a week goes by without a story in the press quoting anonymous officers
trashing the secretary for one reason or another. 
