Supreme Command

National Review, July 14, 2003 by Mackubin Thomas Owens

Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations, by Peter D. Feaver (Harvard, 381 pp., $49.95)

During the 1990s, a number of events suggested that all was not well with civil-military relations in America. The media played up stories about alleged sexual harassment in the military, about military attitudes toward Bill Clinton's fitness to serve as commander in chief, and about heated debates on the military's role in the post-Cold War world. There is no question that civil-military relations during the 1990s were contentious, characterized by mutual suspicion and misunderstanding. But why had things gotten so bad? Some believed the tensions were a temporary phenomenon, attributable to the perceived anti-military character of the Clinton administration. But others expressed concern that the problems went deeper.

Peter Feaver's excellent new book, Armed Servants, sheds much-needed light on civil-military relations in the U.S.; indeed, it may come to supplant Samuel Huntington's classic 1957 study of American civil- military relations, The Soldier and the State. Armed Servants should be read not only by academic specialists in national security, but also by military professionals-it will change the way they think about these issues.

In the social sciences, a good theory must accomplish, at a minimum, three things. It must be empirical, i.e., it must describe reality, accounting for the most relevant phenomena. It must possess a certain predictive quality-able to successfully predict that under such and such conditions, the following will occur. And finally, it should serve as a normative guide for the prescription of policy. Huntington's theory fell short in the first two areas; and Feaver helps fill in the blanks.

The central issue of civil-military relations is civilian control. In order to ensure its security, society delegates the use of force to a subgroup within society. How does society ensure that this subgroup does what it is supposed to do, without turning on society itself? If the military is weakened in order to ensure that it will not turn on society, it may face defeat on the battlefield. If the military is given everything it needs to ensure that it will prevail on the battlefield, it may be in a position to launch a coup. But even short of a coup, there is always the possibility that the military will simply not obey the civilian authorities.

For some five decades now, Huntington's theory has dominated this field. His main empirical claim was that civil-military relations were shaped by three variables: the external threat, the constitutional structure of the U.S., and the ideology of liberalism. Huntington argued that the Soviet threat meant that the U.S. would need to maintain a large military establishment for a long time, but that the other two variables stood as obstacles to the necessary allocation of resources for defense; unless the "ideological constant" of liberalism changed, the U.S. would not be secure.

Huntington's primary prescriptive contribution was to identify a way to meet the Soviet threat without giving up civilian control; he called his approach "objective control" of the military by civilians. This objective control simultaneously maximized military effectiveness and efficiency on one hand and subordination of the military to civilian authority on the other. The key to this approach is military professionalism. This requires a bargain between civilians and soldiers. On one hand, civil authorities grant a professional officer corps autonomy in the realm of military affairs. On the other, "a highly professional officer corps stands ready to carry out the wishes of any civilian group which secures legitimate authority within the state." Huntington contrasted this vision with a worst-case scenario he called "subjective control": the systematic violation of the autonomy necessary for a professional military. Huntington argued that forcing the military to defer to civilians in the military realm would lead to failure on the battlefield.

Feaver argues that, as elegant as Huntington's theory is, it doesn't fit the evidence of the Cold War. To begin with, the U.S. prevailed in the Cold War despite the fact that it did not abandon liberalism: "The evidence shows that American society as a whole almost certainly became even more individualistic and more antistatist than when Huntington warned of the dangers of liberalism in 1957." Furthermore, during the Cold War, the military became more "civilianized," through the politicization of the officer corps; and civilians habitually intruded into the military realm. "According to many of the indicators Huntington cited as critical, civilians did not adopt the objective control mechanism" that Huntington himself claimed was so important. Huntington's theory fails to fit the available evidence, and so-Feaver argues-another theory is required.

To provide such an alternative, Feaver turns to "agency theory," which was originally developed by economists to analyze the relations between principals and the agents to whom they delegate authority. The problem that 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?