Civil Military Legal Relations Where To From Here

This book investigates the place of civilian courts in civil-military theory and their impact on the civil-military relationship in three western liberal democracies. It challenges the evolving civil-military relationship, demanding a re-evaluation of the theory to incorporate the courts.

While military law is often narrowly understood and studied as the specific and specialist laws, processes and institutions governing service personnel, this accessible book takes a broader approach, examining military justice from a wider consideration of the rights and duties of government and soldiers engaged in military operations.

"The interaction between military and civilian courts, the political power that legal prerogatives can provide to the armed forces, and the difficult process civilian politicians face in reforming military courts remain glaringly under-examined. This book fills a gap in existing scholarship by providing a theoretically rich, global examination of the operation and reform of military courts in democracies. Drawing on a newly-created global dataset, it examines trends across states and over time. Combined with deeper qualitative case studies, the book presents clear and well-justified findings that will be of interest to scholars and policymakers working in a variety of fields"--

This book details the position in 13 countries on calling out the military in the domestic domain. A historical context along with the current position and practice is provided.

The exercise of public power by the military in civilian Western democracies such as Australia and the United States demonstrates a tendency toward diminished responsibility for moral behavior. Pauline Collins argues that a different system of military criminal investigation and discipline outside the civilian justice system enables the military to operate like a coterie and can lead to a failure in the requisite moral standard of behavior required of military personnel and maintaining civilian institutional control. Collins argues that the justifications for separate treatment weakens both the military reputation and the practice of civilian control of the military as well as leading to an overall decline in morality and values in a democratic society.

This book examines how U.S. domestic institutions stand up to global threats and whether intelligence sharing across military and civilian law enforcement barriers is legal. The U.S. Constitution is designed to distribute power in order to prevent its concentration, and in particular, it draws clear lines between the responsibilities of the military and those of civilian law enforcement. But the new global threat paradigm, requiring responses both abroad and at home, calls out for military and civilian intelligence gathering to work in tandem. The Civil-Military Divide: Obstacles to the Integration of Intelligence in the United States looks at historic and legal ramifications of such efforts. Louise Stanton's thought-provoking work sums up the current state of U.S. intelligence gathering at all levels of government. It then looks at the range of recommendations for overhauling our intelligence efforts in the context of the U.S. Constitution to assess what may or may not be constitutionally supportable. At issue are three long-established, often reaffirmed principles: the separation of powers, the federalist system that gives the U.S. government precedence over states, and the separation of the civilian and military sectors.

This book develops a responsible and practical method for evaluating the success, failure, or “crisis” of American civil-military relations among its political and uniformed elite. The author’s premise is that currently there is no objectively fair way for the public at large or the strategic-level elites to assess whether the critical and often obscured relationships between Generals, Admirals, and Statesmen function as they ought to under the US constitutional system. By treating these relationships—in form and practice—as part of a wider principal (civilian)-agency (military) dynamic, the book tracks the “duties”—care, competence, diligence, confidentiality, scope of responsibility—and perceived shortcomings in the interactions between US civilian political authorities and their military advisors in both peacetime and in war.