Document created: 11 December 03
Air University Review, March-April 1973
Academic and professional study by the modern defense specialist of contemporary war, strategy, and national security is the most exacting of the social sciences. It calls for extraordinary skills and demands a sense of discrimination, commitment, and perspective that would both electrify and dismay the conventional student of economics, jurisprudence, theology, or medicine. If his scholarship is to be balanced and significant, accurately reflecting the contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes of the human condition, the defence specialist must take into account a wide range of variables: variables of a political, financial, psychological, and sociological character, technical as well as theoretical. With the analysis and integration of all these factors, he may not feel entirely comfortable.
For this comprehensive approach to the study of war, whether for its preparation and conduct or for its deterrence, the historian’s methodology seems the most sound. The historian, by providing a sheet anchor to the concrete realities of the condition of man—his social, psychological, geostrategic, and demographic environment at any chosen period of time—will not be led into the fallacy of believing that there is a technical solution for every social problem and that by endlessly reconstructing models and refining theories of international behavior and organization it would be possible to banish forever the inevitability of war from the conduct of human affairs.
These nuclear age exercises in the construction of a positive science of peace, enscaffolded with laws and principles by which it can be immutably governed, are as ludicrously and tragically out of touch with the technological “state of the art” as were those baroque and didactic theories of the strategic positivists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—men such as Hamley, Foch, Fuller, and Liddell Hart—whose central dogma of the decisive battle had, by 1945, brought classical warfare to its climax. Admirable though they might be to apostolic theologians and other rulers of celestial societies, these exercises are potentially disastrous in political communities whose relations, order, and security are determined by the controlled interpretation of, among other things, military power and civil authority.
Indeed, it can be asked in considering the problem of civil-military
relations within an age and system of international order and politics clouded
and suffused by deterrence, disarmament, arms control, peace keeping, military
assistance, and alliance structures in which the military factor must compete
with other domestic claims in the formulation of national goals and policy, and
in which the distinctive image and classical functions of the profession of
arms have been eroded and defiled, does the traditional dialectical
approach—the clear separation and strict subordination of military power to
political authority—have any valid claim to exist? Should the scientific study
of civil-military relations continue to turn exclusively upon the simple and
emotive issue of political control over military expertise when the
politico-strategic-technological environment in which such a study must take place
has paradoxically become at once more confused and more rational? Is it
any longer sufficient to explain the democratic condition exclusively in terms
of a suspicious civil power, embodying the protection of individual liberty and
justice, jealously scrutinizing and, if necessary, restraining a professional
leviathan whose accretion of power might lead to the insensible and inadvertent
conversion of the classical freedoms into an implacably garrisoned state? In an
age that has blurred the classical distinctions between war and peace, strategy
and policy, victory and defeat, fears and threats, does not the politician,
bureaucrat, or industrialist “on horse-back” represent at least an equal and
perhaps more insidious threat to the constitutional order of the State as that
supposed to have been traditionally posed by the man in uniform?1
For where soldiers and politicians disagree, only bureaucracy prevails.2 It is here, in the grey no-man’s-land of joint services and interdepartment committees dealing with policy, manpower, procurement, education, management, and research that soldiers are momentarily “politicised.” They are brought to realize that, if the balance of freedom and security is to be preserved, then armed forces must necessarily constitute not the overriding and decisive interest to which all others must defer but one which, while significant and indispensable, must be capable of voluntary self-restraint and self-analysis, must efface the arrogance of the power which it disposes, and must never concede the claims of competing, equally urgent interests with a shrill or ill grace.
It is here that bureaucrats, who often confuse economy with efficiency, are “militarized” in the sense that they are brought to realize that the intangible and contingent factors of national security and professional expertise (such as discipline, judgment, and morale, which condition the equally intangible qualities of surprise and stubbornness upon which victory often depends) are not so susceptible to cost-effectiveness analysis as their economic modular theories lead them to dogmatise. It is here, too, that politicians—who are not always prone to trust their official professional advisers, who sometimes confuse real power with furtive popularity, and who often see in bureaucratic consolidation and force reductions a means of emasculating inconvenient advice and unpalatable initiatives while reasserting their sovereign political authority—become both bureaucratised and militarized.
Here they are forced to weigh the ineluctability of violence in domestic and international politics (including the vast destructive and repressive potential of which the armed profession disposes) against the diplomatic—indeed humanistic—necessity for negotiation and compromise, for moderation and restraint. It is primarily here that the politician, if he did not understand it before, is educated in the idea that the armies for whose direction and control he is ultimately accountable are no less than great corporations, whose functioning is limited not only by the frictions engendered by administrative shortcomings, natural hazards, inadequate information, and human fear but also by rivalries, ambitions, and an institutional inertia which it requires great qualities of character to overcome. To the professional and bureaucratic arguments of what is militarily, financially, and administratively desirable, he must present the case for what is socially acceptable and politically possible.
But all of this, if it is to be more than a matter of good intentions, high purpose, and rule of thumb, presupposes that soldier, bureaucrat, and politician are not only talking the same language but are able at once to translate their technical jargon into the plain table talk of a literate but largely indifferent electorate—an electorate that confides ever greater degrees of trust to experts charged with the higher direction and management of their personal safety and national security. This must be done while at the same time satisfying that powerful lobby of civilian academic defence specialists which, since 1945, has done so much to shape and influence the nuclear strategic debate, a debate to which the armed forces have not provided an altogether effective response.
Thus a case can be made for the conduct of civil-military relations in the nuclear-guerrilla age wherein the various exponents of the instruments and resources of national power have been brought into continuous contact, not so much for the capricious control of military power as for its precise and intelligent regulation through a comprehensive system of interpenetration. Such a case would recognize the incipience of violence in political instability and the inevitability of organized violence in the orderly conduct of international affairs. It would do so because man, as a political animal desirous of promoting the perceived interests of the state he controls, must acknowledge that the possibility of the use of violence always exists and therefore the instruments of violence must be ready at hand.
Wolfville, Nova Scotia
Notes
This article was largely inspired by a rereading of E. M. Lyon’s analysis of “The ‘New’ Civil-Military Relations,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 55, March 1961, pp. 53-63.
1. See, for instance, Adam Yarmolinsky, “The Military Establishment (How Political Problems Become Military Problem),” Foreign Policy, No. I, Winter 1970-71, pp. 78-98.
2. Morton H. Halperin, “Why Bureaucrats Play Games,” Foreign Policy, No. II, Spring 1971, pp. 70-90.
Dr. Adrian Preston (Ph.D., University of London) is Visiting Professor of Military and Strategic Studies at Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada. He served as captain in the Canadian Army, 1954-62, and is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada, where he is an Associate Professor of History and War Studies. He has lectured at defense colleges in Canada and India and is author of three books and numerous articles in professional journals worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Historical Society.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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