The Gap

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000 by Peter D. Feaver, Richard H. Kohn

Soldiers, Civilians and their Mutual Misunderstanding

IN A 1997 speech at Yale University, Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed to see "a chasm developing between the military and civilian worlds, where the civilian world doesn't fully grasp the mission of the military, and the military doesn't understand why the memories of our citizens and civilian policy makers are so short, or why the criticism is so quick and so unrelenting." Cohen was voicing an age-old concern about America's relations with its military, one echoed in recent years by policymakers who fear that, absent an urgent threat to the nation's security, a democratic society will not nurture and support an adequate military, and that the military's loyalty to civilian authority will diminish accordingly.

The question at the end of the 1990s was said to be a "cultural" one: Has a "gap" in values between the armed forces and civilian society widened to the point of threatening the effectiveness of the military and impeding civil-military cooperation? To answer this question, we directed a comprehensive study, The Project on the Gap Between the Military and Civilian Society, sponsored by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies--a consortium of faculty from Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University--with a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation. Specifically, the project sought to answer three questions: What is the character of the civil-military gap today? What factors are shaping it? What are the implications for military effectiveness and civil-military cooperation?

To assess these questions, we, in cooperation with roughly two dozen experts, surveyed some 4,900 Americans drawn from three groups: military officers identified for promotion or advancement, influential civilians, and the general public. [1] The questions we posed addressed many topics: defense and foreign policy, social and moral issues, and relations between civilian policymakers and military officers. Our team then analyzed the answers and combined them with other political, sociological and historical studies to draw conclusions and offer specific recommendations.

We discovered that, while the concerns of the secretary of defense and others should not be exaggerated, numerous schisms and disturbing trends have emerged in recent years, which, if not addressed, may further undermine civil-military cooperation and in certain circumstances harm military effectiveness.

Not a New Concern

CONCERNS about a troublesome divide between the armed forces and the society they serve are hardly new and in fact go back to the beginning of the Republic. Writing in the 1950s, Samuel Huntington argued that the divide could best be bridged by civilian society tolerating, if not embracing, the conservative values that animate military culture. Huntington also suggested that politicians allow the armed forces a substantial degree of cultural autonomy. Countering this argument, the sociologist Morris Janowitz argued that in a democracy military culture necessarily adapts to changes in civilian society, adjusting to the needs and dictates of its civilian masters. [2] The end of the Cold War and the extraordinary changes in American foreign and defense policy that resulted have revived the debate.

The contemporary heirs of Janowitz see the all-volunteer military as drifting too far away from the norms of American society, thereby posing problems for civilian control. They make four principal assertions. First, the military has grown out of step ideologically with the public, showing itself to be inordinately right-wing politically, and much more religious (and fundamentalist) than America as a whole, having a strong and almost exclusive identification with the Republican Party. Second, the military has become increasingly alienated from, disgusted with and sometimes even explicitly hostile to civilian culture. Third, the armed forces have resisted change, particularly the integration of women and homosexuals into their ranks, and have generally proved reluctant to carry out constabulary missions. Fourth, civilian control and military effectiveness will both suffer as the military--seeking ways to operate without effective civilian oversight and alienated from the society around it--loses the respect a nd support of that society.

By contrast, the heirs of Huntington argue that a degenerate civilian culture has strayed so far from traditional values that it intends to eradicate healthy and functional civil-military differences, particularly in the areas of gender, sexual orientation and discipline. This camp, too, makes four key claims. First, its members assert that the military is divorced in values from a political and cultural elite that is itself alienated from the general public. Second, it believes this civilian elite to be ignorant of and even hostile to, the armed forces--eager to employ the military as a laboratory for social change, even at the cost of crippling its warfighting capacity. Third, it discounts the specter of eroding civilian control because it sees a military so thoroughly inculcated with an ethos of subordination that there is now too much civilian control, the effect of which has been to stifle the military's ability to function effectively. Fourth, because support for the military among the general public r emains sturdy, any gap in values is inconsequential. The problem, if anything, is with the civilian elite.