Civil Military Relations

"This carefully conceived collection focuses on an important, but often overlooked, aspect of civil-military relations: military effectiveness. Insightful and informative ... the chapters form a cohesive whole. Those interested in military politics, from the novice student to the seasoned expert, will find the book useful and thought provoking." -Zoltan Barany, University of Texas at AustinHow does civilian control affect military effectiveness? Can a balance be achieved between the two? In-country experts address these questions through a set of rich comparative case studies. Covering the spectrum from democracies to authoritarian regimes, they explore the nexus of control and effectiveness to reveal its importance for national security and the legitimacy of both political order and the military institution.

Based on a conference held in Washington, DC, 13-14 Mar 1995.

politics, and national security policy.--John R. Ballard "On Point"

The topic of civil-military relations has high significance for academics, for policy makers, for military commanders, and for serious students of public policy in democratic and other societies. The post-Cold War and post-9-11 worlds have thrown traditional as well as new challenges to the effective management of armed forces and defense establishments. Further, the present century has seen a rising arc in the use of armed violence on the part of non-state actors, including terrorists, to considerable political effect. Civil-military relations in the United States, and their implications for US and allied security policies, is the focus of most discussions in this volume, but other contributions emphasize the comparative and cross-national dimensions of the relationship between the use or threat of force and public policy. Authors contributing to this study examine a wide range of issues, including: the contrast between theory and practice in civil-military relations; the role perceptions of military professionals across generations; the character of civil-military relations in authoritarian or other democratically-challenged political systems; usefulness of business models in military management; the attributes of civil-military relations during unconventional conflicts; the experience of the all-volunteer force and its meaning for US civil-military relations; and other topics. Contributors include civilian academic and policy analysts and military officers with considerable academic expertise and experience with the subject matter.

A provocative approach to evaluating civil-military relations. Dale R. Herspring considers the factors that allow some civilian and military organizations to operate more productively in a political context than others, bringing into comparative study for the first time the military organizations of the U.S., Russia, Germany, and Canada. Refuting the work of scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington and Michael C. Desch, Civil-Military Relations and Shared Responsibility approaches civil-military relations from a new angle, military culture, arguing that the optimal form of civil-military relations is one of shared responsibility between the two groups. Herspring outlines eight factors that contribute to conditions that promote and support shared responsibility among civilian officials and the military, including such prerequisites as civilian leaders not interfering in the military's promotion process and civilian respect for military symbols and traditions. He uses these indicators in his comparative treatment of the U.S., Russian, German, and Canadian militaries. Civilian authorities are always in charge and the decision on how to treat the military is a civilian decision. However, Herspring argues, failure by civilians to respect military culture will antagonize senior military officials, who will feel less free to express their views, thus depriving senior civilian officials, most of whom have no military experience, of the expert advice of those most capable of assessing the far-reaching forms of violence. This issue of civilian respect for military culture and operations plays out in Herspring's country case studies. Scholars of civil-military relations will find much to debate in Herspring's framework, while students of civil-military and defense policy will appreciate Herspring's brief historical tour of each countries' post–World War II political and policy landscapes.

The Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations not only fills this important lacuna, but offers an up-to-date comparative analysis which identifies three essential components in civil-military relations: (1) democratic civilian control; (2) operational effectiveness; and (3) the efficiency of the security institutions. This Handbook will be essential reading for students and practitioners in the fields of civil-military relations.

This book investigates the relationship between international security governance, democratic civil-military relations and the relevance of strategy, as well as of absolute and relative gains, in norms formation in hybrid orders. Highlighting caveats of the legacy of Huntington’s paradigm of military professionalism, the book applies a robust methodology and data collected in four sample regions in Pakistan. It gauges the effects of international and local actors’ support in the Security Sector Reform domain and examines instances of civil-military interactions and military transition. The book also analyses determinants and strategies that can influence them to demonstrate the impact of global governance in norms diffusion, as well as of absolute and relative utility gains and incentives in normative change. The author generates a new theory pertaining to international organisations and actors as determinants of transformation processes and consequently sheds new light on the issue of global security governance, especially its impact on civil-military relations and democratisation in hybrid orders. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of global governance, civil-military relations, grand strategy and foreign policy as well as Asian politics, South Asian studies, peace, security and strategic studies, International Relations and political science in more general.

This book addresses the challenge of reforming defense and military policy-making in newly democratized nations. By tracing the development of civil-military relations in various new democracies from a comparative perspective, it links two bodies of scholarship that thus far have remained largely separate: the study of emerging (or failed) civilian control over armed forces on the one hand; and work on the roots and causes of military effectiveness to guarantee the protection and security of citizens on the other. The empirical and theoretical findings presented here will appeal to scholars of civil-military relations, democratization and security issues, as well as to defense policy-makers.