An exchange on civil-military relations

National Interest, The, Summer, 1994

Four reactions to Richard H. Kohn's article in our Spring 1994 issue, together with a response from the author.

Colin Powell:

OF ALL THE problems facing the nation, a crisis in civil-military relations is not one of them and things are not out of control.

Mr. Kohn lays major responsibility for this non-crisis at my door step. I trust Mr. Kohn and the Republic are sleeping more soundly now that I have retired. I note that, to keep the pot boiling, in his last paragraph he takes a minor swipe at General Shalikashvili by an anonymous source.

I can assure your readers that Presidents Bush and Clinton, and Secretaries Cheney and Aspin, exercised solid, unmistakable civilian control over the Armed Forces and especially me. That's the way it should be and was. My activities as Chairman were always taken with the prior knowledge of my civilian leaders. It was not lost on me that Mr. Cheney had shown he knew how to fire generals. Mr. Aspin showed he could reject my recommendations because of broader issues he had to consider.

A more balanced article might have noted that both Presidents Bush and Clinton expressed satisfaction with the manner in which I provided my advice. By the way, it should be noted that President Clinton has been receiving rave receptions in his recent visits with the troops. Mr. Kohn had better look for another "crisis" with more staying power.

On a factual note, Mr. Kohn was correct in noting that the biography about me by David Roth, Sacred Honor, showed me as the copyright holder. It should have occurred to Mr. Kohn that it was an error, since authors usually copyright in their own name. The publisher's error was corrected in the second printing. Mr. Roth holds the copyright on his work.

General Colin Powell (ret.) was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989-1993.

John Lehman:

AFTER DECADES of academic conformity in praise of more centralization in the Pentagon and "reform" of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it is refreshing to hear common sense from a professor at last. Professor Richard Kohn is full of excellent insight. Civilian control, as the term is generally understood and certainly as it was intended by the Founding Fathers, has been eliminated by years of well-meaning reform legislation, culminating in the Goldwater-Nichols Act, drafted almost entirely by military staff officers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the committee staffs.

Our early leaders, well-read in historic lessons, feared standing armies. They divided military control between the branches and among the states. They purposefully avoided centralizing naval and military forces under one agency, and put the militias under state control. As Justice Brandeis said, "Separation of powers was adopted...not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power...to save the people from autocracy." In their understandable quest for efficiency, the military reformers have consolidated the power previously separated between the military departments, disenfranchised the civilian officials of each service, and created autocracy in the Joint Staff and arbitrary power in the person of the Chairman.

Reading Rick Atkinson's account of Oval Office decision-making in Desert Storm (Crusade, Houghton-Mifflin, 1993), one finds General Powell providing the president not choices but one recommendation, to end the fighting early, leaving Saddam in office. The president could overrule such a unitary military position only at the greatest political peril. It is hard to believe it is the same government, when one recalls the accounts of FDR'S famous war councils where he encouraged MacArthur to argue with Marshall, Marshall with King, King with Nimitz. He heard all military perspectives and then made the decision himself. He would never allow himself to be faced with only one military option, and adamantly opposed Marshall's constant efforts to create a Chairman with the powers now enjoyed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Of the careful balancing established by the founders to ensure civilian control, all that remains is the important separation of budgetary appropriation from Executive command.

Perhaps the most important dimension of civilian control is our tradition of citizen soldier. The Continental naval captains and privateers were not professional naval officers, nor were Washington and his generals professional soldiers. Our Constitution is imbued with the concept of the minuteman, the citizen soldier, and citizen sailor. Washington held Cincinnatus, the farmer who took up arms to save Rome and then returned to the plow, as his ideal, not Caesar. While the need for small cadres of career professionals was recognized early in the nineteenth century, the bias against large career military forces in peacetime was strengthened by 150 years of practice. The land grant acts, for example, created a reserve officer training corps, not a career officer training corps. The officers and men of our navy and military were expected to be drawn largely from civilian pursuits for limited terms, assuring a constant leavening of civilian cultural values within the military and in turn carrying back to the civil world a respect for and understanding of military culture.