Document created: 25 July 01
Air University Review, May-June 1981

From Defense Policy to National Security

the tortuous adjustment for American military professionals

In the years immediately following World War II, the concept of national security became elevated to the level of a commanding idea, with overtones that heavily influenced the content and style of virtually all facets of American foreign policy for decades.¹ In an era dominated by national security concerns, American military professional came to assume a prominence in the policy process far greater that that which they had enjoyed in pre-World War II America. Moreover, in their effort to respond to the new and multifaceted demands imposed on them in contributing to and carrying out national security policies, military professionals developed a breadth and depth of expertise that far exceeded what had been required in earlier times.

Yet the increase in professional expertise has not been accompanied by a proportionate increase in professional self-esteem. On the contrary, although subject to considerable fluctuation in the past decade, the pattern has been one of widespread professional malaise and frustration.

Some have pointed to the humiliation of the Vietnam experience to explain the unsettled state of professional self-esteem. Others point to policies introduced in the wake of the Vietnam failure that have affected military personnel adversely. These include reductions in force, a diminution of fringe benefits, and a transition to an all-volunteer force plagued (especially in ground combat units) by poorly educated recruits.

It is clear that the Vietnam experience and its aftermath have posed troublesome challenges for American military professionals. I contend, however, that longer-term trends provide a more fundamental explanation of the threats to military-professionalism that have been experienced. In the context of post-World War II concerns with satisfying national security goals, the relationship of the military to the civilian sector has become altered. The explicit dimensions of change in the relationship, described in a series of propositions below, reveal a paradoxical pattern of military-professionalism simultaneously being promoted, augmented, thwarted, and undermined.

The Argument Outlined

Proposition 1. The concept of national security gained wide currency only after World War II, with a meaning distinct from terms such as military policy and defense policy, which had been prevalent earlier.

Proposition 2. By the early 1950s (the McCarthy era), the expression of concern by security had become virtually indistinguishable from concern with combating communism. However, widespread adoption of the concept after World War II represented an intellectual adjustment that civilian and military officials had made to the complexities of the postwar world, and not simply their surrogate for anticommunism.

Proposition 3. The creation of an integrated structure for national security affairs case civilians in roles that intruded into what previously had been the exclusive domain of military expertise. At the same time, the roles assigned to the armed forces made demands on them for increased expertise and breadth of perspective.

Proposition 4. The modern era of deterrence limited wars, counterinsurgency and counterterrorist operations, nuclear war-gaming, and military alliances and assistance programs has introduced complexity and sometimes contradictions into the missions assigned to U.S. military units and personnel. The measures used to assess performance have become more ambiguous.

Proposition 5. The heating of the Cold War (in Korea, Vietnam, and more recently in Afghanistan) generated demands for quantitative and qualitative increases in the military establishment. However, each resulting increase was paralleled by increasing emphasis on centralized control of military operations.

Proposition 6. The American armed forces have become a far more formidable, professionalized institution than in the pre-World War II era. Yet as individuals, military professionals tend to have less autonomy and to experience more challenges to their distinctive professional competence, even from within military hierarchy, than was characteristic of earlier times.

Proposition 7. The threat of professional self-confidence imposed by the reduction of uniquely military expertise has been compounded by a trend toward machine or technology-intensive military organization.

Proposition 8. Uncertainty and ambiguity regarding mission and measures of performance, demands for greater breadth of perspective and depth of professional expertise, technology-dependence, and a loss of autonomy have undermined the professional self-esteem of career military personnel.

The nature and magnitude of the change in American policy perspectives that occurred with World War II can be fully appreciated only with some reference to historical experience and traditions.

The feasibility and desirability of continuing the tradition of avoiding political entanglements abroad (notably with European powers) had become a matter of serious debate in America as early as the 1880s and 1890s. The advice that George Washington gave in his farewell message, reaffirmed by Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address and adhered to by his successors on into the post-Reconstruction years, was essentially discarded by American policymakers during the Spanish-American War. Efforts to assume the traditional foreign policy posture again were made during the Taft and first Wilson administrations, only to be abandoned with the commitment of American troops to battle in Europe in 1917.

However, faith in the belief or hope that Americans could remain isolated from foreign embroilments was revived with a new intensity in the years after World War I. The onset of a worldwide economic depression, coupled with the collapse of disarmament negotiations and the specter of growing militarism in both Europe and Asia, generated deep anxieties among Americans. Isolationist proposals such as the Neutrality Acts were broadly supported. Even more restrictive measures such as the Ludlow Resolution (which would have required a popular referendum in order for war to be declared) were only narrowly defeated.

Republican administrations following Wilson prided themselves on trimming the military establishment to the bone.² Isolationist fervor became even more intense. Domestic issues assumed still higher priority when Roosevelt assumed office at the onset of an economic depression, despite an awareness of strategic realities on Roosevelt’s part which exceeded that of both his Republican predecessors and his Democratic Secretary of State.

Perhaps above all, Roosevelt had a keen sense of domestic-political sentiment. Thus, for example, he appointed a high-level committee to study war-mobilization needs in 1934, only to ensure that the committee died of inaction within a few months when the congressional Nye Committee objected.

In the summer of 1938, Roosevelt asked Bernard Baruch to head a defense coordination board, to provide top-level planning for mobilization of the American society for war. But by the end of the year, FDR had decided that the proposal would be unacceptable to the American public. Finally, in August 1939, he created a war resources board similar to the boards he had considered in 1934 and 1938, but when the board submitted its report to him in November 1939, he declined to make the report public and permitted the board to expire.³

Until late in his second term, Roosevelt’s overriding preoccupation was with his New Deal program for economic recovery, and he was content to rely heavily on Secretary of State Cordell Hull in defining the orientation of American foreign policy.

Hull’s outlook was archetypical of the "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems" that George Kennan has described as a characteristic American weakness.⁴ He believed as had Wilson, that "power politics" in wor1d affairs had become outmoded and that an enlightened spirit of peaceful negotiation could and must prevail.⁵ Under his leadership, the State Department was expected to promote peace, as through reciprocal trade agreements, not to prepare for distasteful contingencies that would require the commitment of American armed forces.

It was contrary to Hull’s principles that the military should be included in the design of foreign policy. However, increasingly in the months following Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, President Roosevelt turned to military advisers to help him reshape American programs for possible involvement in war. Hull was resentful of his loss of exclusive prerogative for shaping foreign policy and for the resulting changes that were occurring. However, his resentment was increasingly expressed in the form of withdrawal from the arena of policy discussion rather than by assertiveness. For example, he declined comment on proposals submitted by the military chiefs to the President in late 1940 calling for rearmament in the Pacific, on the grounds that "the recommendations were of a technical military nature outside the proper field of his Department." And when the military delegation that had attended an Anglo-American conference to discuss joint strategic planning circulated its reports early in 1941, Hull refused to look at them.⁶ After Pearl Harbor, he was virtually a nonparticipant in the strategic policy process.

For their part, American military officials in the interwar years had lamented the isolationist mood and feared the consequences of a policy of unpreparedness. Yet most of them adhered strongly to the traditional view that the military professional must have no concern for political matters, nor should he have any voice in shaping policy beyond giving advice regarding issues of a narrowly technical military nature.

The case can be overstated. Military men flew the mail when the postmaster general canceled contracts with civilian carriers; they also participated in prominent New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Moreover, the Army Industrial College, which had been created in 1924, was producing a small cadre of military officers (from all arms of service) familiar with problems of industrial mobilization in the event of war.⁷ In a similar vein, in the reorganization of the Army General Staff that had occurred after World War I, a War Plans Division was created with responsibilities to include assessing the probable impact on military operations of societal resource levels and of diplomatic and economic policies. By 1939, in fulfillment of this responsibility, the War Plans Division was maintaining regular liaison with the Departments of State, Treasury, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Justice.⁸

The breadth of perspective required in the War Plans Division made it an exception to the pattern within the Army General Staff, to say nothing of the military establishment as a whole. In general, parochial concerns with the immediate problem of carrying out assigned training and maintenance tasks with insufficient personnel and equipment predominated. The relatively few members of the War Plans Division had a highly restricted view of the range of policy matters on which they might approximately comment.⁹ Their view was not significantly different from that presented by the Army Command and General Staff College:

Politics and strategy are radically and fundamentally things apart. Strategy begins where politics ends. All that soldiers ask is that once the policy is settled, strategy and command shall be regarded as being in a sphere apart from politics.¹⁰

World War II and especially American involvement after Pearl Harbor moved military professionals from the periphery to the center of the policy process and resulted in a radical alteration of views. Although the State Department under Cordell Hull tended to be shunted aside by the shift in emphasis to wartime concerns, other components of the civilian sector became far more involved than ever before in the policy process as a result of wartime mobilization.

Industrialists, many of whom had been held at arm’s length during the peak New Deal years, became active in wartime production. Organized labor became involved in manpower planning and farmers in lend-lease programs. Thousands of academics moved into administrative and research assignments in government or into positions to assist in the design of military recruitment, testing, and training programs. Scientists, who traditionally had remained aloof from and wary of government, became heavily involved in wartime roles of crucial importance.¹¹

It is not surprising that a key lesson almost universally drawn from the wartime experience by civilian and military officials alike was that the American response to the exigencies if the postwar era would require intelligence and policy coordination on a scale lacking early in the war (for example, at Pearl Harbor) but largely achieved by the war’s end. A related lesson, for which Munich and Pearl Harbor were appropriate shorthands, was that democracies could never again afford to indulge in wishful military unpreparedness.¹²

The conversion that had been experienced by Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a leading prewar isolationist, was typical of that which a large segment of the American populace had shared. As Vandenberg recalled,

Prior to World War II, the oceans were virtual moats around our continental bastions. All this changed progressively at Pearl Harbor and thereafter. It became very obvious to me that this was a different world in which we had to sustain our own freedoms . . . All of the changes rendered obsolete all of our prior thinking regarding our own national security.¹³

The success achieved in World War II was not attributable to the armed forces alone—far from it. Only the integrated efforts of all sectors of government and the population as a whole had made success possible, and only comparable integration of effort could assure security in the future.

The most important institutional manifestation of these lessons learned was the National Security Act of 1947. Under provisions of the act, the armed forces were unified (albeit loosely) under a Secretary of Defense (later the Department of Defense). The collective wisdom of the various service chiefs was to continue to be available to the President, as it had been during the war, through formalization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Intelligence gathering was to be coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency. A National Security Resources Board, a Munitions Board, and a Research and Development Board, respectively, were to institutionalize the means whereby the skills of scientists, engineers, economists, industrialists, and others from the civilian sector could be brought to bear on issues affecting the nation’s security. Finally, to provide the President with a top-level advisory body that represented leadership of the key departments involved in national security matters and that drew on the intelligence provided by the CIA, the National Security Council was created.

Some observers have described the National Security Act as a cornerstone in the building of a post-World War II national security state.¹⁴ Whether it is accurate to speak of the emergence of a national security state in postwar America is perhaps more a semantic than a substantive issue. ("Whether a ‘cow’ is a cow is for the people to decide," as Ludwig Wittgenstein used to say regarding definitional disputes.) The national security state serves as a analytical construct, and, like all analytical constructs, it represents an oversimplification of complex phenomena, with particular features exaggerated or highlighted in the hope that patterns and relationships among the phenomena can thereby be better understood.

Thus, Daniel Yergin’s discussion of the origins of the national security state focuses on the triumph of Riga axioms over Yalta axioms.¹⁵ The resulting discussion is far from a full explanation of the roots of U.S. postwar policies toward the Soviet Union, but it does provide a helpful framework for understanding the influence that the prewar experience of American diplomats in Stalinist Russia had on postwar policies. Similarly, Richard Barnet’s discussion of the operational code of the national security manager is somewhat over-generalized in its application.¹⁶ Still, it captures elements of a mindset prevalent enough to provide useful insights into aspects of policy behavior that otherwise might seem inexplicable.

In more strident variations on the theme, such as that of Marcus Raskin,¹⁷ the post-World War II concern with national security is seen as a euphemism for the militaristic impulse of the ruling elite. National security served as a rallying cry designed to mobilize support for rearmament, with the fear of being branded as communist used to silence those who would object to militaristic policies.

One can acknowledge the importance of elites in shaping postwar American policies, the inclination of the President to "scare hell out of the American people" in an effort to mobilize support for the national security policy of containment, and the pernicious tendency in postwar American politics for anticommunist witch-hunting to be used to intimidate left-of-center critics.

However, only by making the fallacious assumption that policy perspectives that had become widely shared by the early 1950s were equally present from 1945 to 1949 can one sustain the argument that the concept of national security was nothing more than a code word for arming-to-the-teeth against communism. Moreover, only by ignoring policy initiatives that were taken in the early postwar years to limit military influence can one equate the concept of national security with militarism.

The ouster of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace from the cabinet in September 1946 doubtless was an important early indication of the loss of influence of the left-wing of the Democratic Party on the Truman administration’s foreign policies.¹⁸ Moreover, enunciation of the Truman Doctrine in March l947 was made in terms of such a broad commitment to the defense of "free peoples" that even such relatively tough-minded policy advisers as George Kennan shuddered.¹⁹

The oft-noted ambivalence of the Truman administration toward military policies must be acknowledged, however. Despite his evident determination to remain firm if not intransigent in his dealing with Stalin and despite initiation of programs and policies such as the Greek-Turkish Aid Program, the Military Assistance Program, and the NATO alliance, not until the outbreak of the Korean War did Truman depart from his insistence on bare bone ceilings for defense. The American military buildup that came with involvement fighting in Korea tended to affirm the view that the key to national security was military supremacy, a view that had been articulated January 1950 in NSC-68.²⁰

The equation of national security with military might that came with NSC-68 and Korea however, represented an important shift in priorities, not merely a logical extension of the national security perspectives that had prevailed in policy circles since the end of World War II Truman’s State of the Union address in 1947 for example, gave eloquent testimony to a view of national security which, far from being militaristic in emphasis, might well be described antimilitaristic (but not antimilitary) in tone:

National security does not consist only of an army, a navy, and an air force. It rests on a much broader basis. It depends on a sound economic of prices and wages, on prosperous agriculture on satisfied and productive workers, on a competitive private enterprise free from monopolistic repression, on continued industrial harmony and production, on civil liberties and human freedoms—on all the forces which create in our men and women a strong moral fiber and spiritual stamina.²¹

To be sure, even during his years of insistence on penurious defense budgets, Truman was an advocate of military preparedness. For example, as early as the fall of 1945 he was urging Congress to introduce a program of universal military training (UMT). The cynic might point to such advocacy as evidence that

Truman’s multifaceted requisites of national security (quoted above) were mere hollow rhetoric, used to conceal an orientation that was essentially militaristic. However, it seems clear that like many other American advocates of universal military training, Truman saw UMT as the best way to ensure military preparedness without encouraging militarism or an undue increase in the influence of the military establishment. As Truman emphasizes in his memoirs, he believed that UMT was more democratic than a program of selective service because no ablebodied male would be exempted from UMT. Moreover, he saw UMT as entirely consistent with the American historical tradition, in which a body of citizen-soldiers (militia) was to provide the democratic alternative to maintaining a large standing army.²² It was military training that was to be universal, as General George C. Marshall, another UMT advocate, emphasized in his 1945 report as Army Chief of Staff; the specter of a huge mass army would thereby be avoided, not promoted.²³

Despite the arguments of Truman, Marshall, and other proponents of UMT to the contrary, many in Congress and among the public at large continued to fear that UMT was the first step on the road to militarism. Thus, legislation for UMT was never enacted.

A year prior to the scuttling of UMT proposals in favor of selective military conscription, a National Security Act had been passed. Some critics have viewed this legislation as the product of rampant militarism, laying the foundation for a national security state. More accurately, the act was simply another product of widely shared wartime experience. The organizational structure created by the act, although certainly not an inevitable outcome of postwar planning in its specific content, was a highly predictable outcome in terms of general scope and purposes. As explained by James Forrestal, key architect of the act, in testimony supporting it, "The complexity of the modern world, the telescoping of the factors of time and space, require the closest relationship possible between our military and our national policy-making organizations—that is, between the War and Navy Departments and the Department of State.²⁴ This was an observation that had some far-reaching organizational implications—but surely it was a point of view shared not simply by a tiny elite but by a majority of Americans who had reflected on the experience of the war.

An effective military establishment was the keystone of a successful national security policy, and it is true that some civilians—notably those in the State Department who had experienced the muffling of their voices relative to those of the military during the war—feared military dominance of the national security apparatus. However, what is notable about the National Security Act is not the prominence given to the military role in policymaking but rather the prominence given to civilians as key advisers to the President in national security matters. The key body established by the National Security Act, of course, was a National Security Council (NSC). All of the statutory members of the NSC were (and are) civilians, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in turn serving as advisers to the NSC. Civilians headed the National Security Resources Board, the Munitions Board, and the Research and Development Board. The CIA was an important exception to the pattern, with a military man selected as its head, although large numbers of persons in key positions in the agency were civilians. The armed forces were subordinate not only to the President as commander-in-chief but also to a civilian Secretary of Defense and civilian secretaries of the three principal arms of service. The Secretary of Defense, in turn, was prohibited by provisions of the Act of 1947 from having his own military staff.

Moreover, with such related organizational developments in national security affairs as the creation of Rand with Air Force sponsorship, the Operations Research Office of the Army, the Navy’s Operations Evaluation Group, and the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, civilians began to shape strategic doctrine and military planning to a degree that had been unthinkable in the prewar era.

But if the postwar consensus was that national security was too multifaceted to leave to the generals and admirals, it also implied that "the modern major-general" ought to know more than drill and fortifications. Social, political, psychological, economic, and technological factors had to be taken into account in military planning, operations, and training to a far greater extent than in the past. The increasing emphasis on the deterrence mission in the nuclear age added its own complexities. As a former head of the Department of Social Sciences at West Point observed, the expertise required of the modern military professional included "the management and application of military resources in deterrent, peacekeeping, and combat roles in the context of rapid technological, social, and political change."²⁵

The requisites of the deterrence mission have not necessarily been consistent with those of the mission of preparing to fight; likewise, the requirement to be sensitive to dimensions of social and political change in the world is not necessarily readily integrated with a demand to be technically proficient. Ambiguities regarding mission are associated with ambiguities regarding the measures by which one’s performance as a military professional will be measured. Is combat-related technical proficiency the key skill that should be cultivated? What real payoff in career terms can one expect with the development of foreign-language proficiency? How important are public relations skills? Is effectiveness in dealing with congressional staffers the mark of a true military professional, or the mark of a military man who has abandoned professionalism?

Despite these mounting ambiguities, it is true that the American military in the post-World War II era attained a position of importance critical to the success of many governmental policies. Never before in peacetime had the military assumed such vast and far-flung responsibilities, ranging from occupation and postwar reconstruction to foreign military advisory and assistance duties. In early postwar occupation roles, individual military leaders such as General Douglas MacArthur in Japan and General Lucius D. Clay in Germany exercised enormous influence over American policies, sometimes to the consternation of officials in the State Department.²⁶ With subsequent American armed involvement first in Korea and later in Vietnam, the military in general became a key instrument of American policy.

Some critics have complained, especially in response to military actions in Vietnam, that the military had become too powerful and were able to carry out operations contrary to American best interests and principles.²⁷ The general pattern over the decades since World War II, however, has been one of a growing tendency on the part of American presidents and their top civilian advisers to assume control over military operations, even to the point of dictating details of tactics and maneuver believed by military professionals to be within their exclusive province of specialized competence. The confrontation between Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral George W. Anderson, during the Cuban missile crisis is a classic example of the trend. McNamara was not willing to concede, as Anderson insisted, that the Navy’s long-established expertise in conducting blockades entitled it to conduct this one without civilian direction.²⁸

Even such an apparent deviation from the general pattern as the action taken by General John D. Lavelle in Vietnam in 1972 serves only to underscore the point that military professionals increasingly have felt hampered by what they have perceived as civilian meddling. Lavelle was relieved of command of the Seventh Air Force and permitted to retire from the service when it was discovered that he had ordered 24 bombing missions in violation of established "protective-reaction-strike-only" policies. Moreover, he had ordered records of the missions altered to cover-up the policy violations. The point here is not that Lavelle’s actions were justified but that they were taken because "he felt deep frustration about constraints on the air war, and about the fact that airmen were killed because of those constraints." His civilian as well as military superiors had urged him to be more aggressive in the conduct of the air war in Vietnam at the same time that they were imposing restrictions which, in his view, made it more difficult to carry out aggressive actions effectively.²⁹

Although it was during the tenure of Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird that General Lavelle was relieved of command, Laird’s general willingness to work closely with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to respect their judgment led to a reduction in civilian-military strains that had been experienced during the McNamara years. Nevertheless, the trend toward centralized control that was so evident in the McNamara era continued under Laird and has continued subsequently. It is a trend that is explicable in part—perhaps in large part— simply as the outgrowth of developments in communication technology. Washington keeps tighter reins on the actions of U.S. military (and civilian) personnel in Seoul or Berlin or on board the Enterprise because it is now possible to monitor such actions on a continuous basis. The current emphasis on command, communications, and control (C³) reflects such developments.

A related factor that must be included in an explanation of the trend toward centralization of control is one describable in terms of organizational learning. Especially as the result of experience in foreign policy crises, failures in the past that were attributable at least in part to lack of guidance from Washington or to breakdowns in communication between Washington and commanders in the field have led to an increasing emphasis on the development of finely tuned, centralized crisis-management systems. Thus, the control that was exercised from Washington during the Cuban missile crisis in part represented a reaction to earlier failures to exercise an appropriate degree of control over the Bay of Pigs invasion. The close monitoring and direction of actions leading to the rescue of the Mayaguez and its crew were prompted in part by the still fresh memories of faulty communication and a failure to prevent the crew of the Pueblo from being seized and taken to North Korea to be imprisoned.³⁰

Although the rationale for centralization of control has been articulated most often in terms of the imperatives of crisis management, the centralization impulse is evident also in relatively routine operations. The impulse is reflected not merely in the tendency of civilian officials in Washington to issue directives governing facets of routine military activity ranging from the housing of personnel to supply purchasing procedures. It also is reflected in the tendency of top military officials to grant less autonomy to subordinate commanders than was the case in an earlier era.³¹ Such a tendency is explicable in part in terms of personnel policies that foster a rapid turnover in command positions, thereby encouraging top officials to overdirect and oversupervise in order to prevent the rapid fluctuations in policies and procedures that might come if local command autonomy were permitted. Related factors are the PR-consciousness of modern military managers and the high visibility-to-media criticism of those in top positions. As William L. Hauser has noted, "In order to decentralize, high-level leaders and managers must be willing to accept some error, abuse, and inefficiency on the part of subordinate units."³² But such risks are precisely of the sort that officials in highly exposed positions are unlikely to be willing to assume.

Military professionals in command and in staff positions not only have become increasingly dependent on guidance from their superiors, they have also become increasingly dependent on technology.³³ Sophisticated technological equipment such as computers, radar, and electronic sensors have become more complex as they have become more ubiquitous in military organizations.

The trend toward technological dependence is evident even in the infantry, the prototype of the traditional, labor-intensive fighting unit. It is in the more traditional military organization that the trend has been most threatening to professional self-image, for reasons well described by Morris Janowitz in his examination of the struggle among military technologists, military managers, and heroic leaders.³⁴ The trend is now even more pronounced than it was when Janowitz identified it in The Professional Soldier twenty-one years ago.

Paradoxically, the military professional of today is quite likely to be both more skilled technologically than was his counterpart of twenty years earlier and more technologically dependent. He is more likely today to define his tasks in terms that reflect extended exposure to managerial paradigms and managerial jargon; yet like his counterpart a generation earlier, he probably insists that his role is primarily one of leadership rather than one of management.

The Concept of Professionalism
Reconsidered

The pattern of thirty-five years of experience of American military professionals with being asked to contribute to national security is one in which they have found the demand for professionalism expanded and intensified (greater breadth of expertise, more technological and managerial competence) at the same time that they have felt hampered and thwarted in the exercise of independent professional judgment (through a blurring of boundaries between military and civilian domains of expertise, through centralized control, and through increased dependence on advanced technology). The pattern is one that requires us to rethink the concept of professionalism. In Samuel P. Huntington’s classic treatment of the subject, a persuasive case was made for defining professionalism in terms of advanced expertise, corporateness, and social responsibility.³⁵ However, especially when the effort was made to apply these three criteria to the relative degree of professionalism displayed by military organizations across time and across political systems, various scholars expressed doubts about the utility of this definition. If a military establishment acquired greater expertise over the years but also was showing an increased propensity to meddle in politics in pursuit of parochial self-interests (thereby displaying a lack of social responsibility), was it becoming more professionalized or less professionalized?

A similar question arises with the pattern of adjustment of the American military establishment to the national security era since World War II: Has American military professionalism increased or decreased over the past several decades? No clear answer emerges if one attempts mechanically to measure professionalism using the three criteria suggested by Huntington.

Clarification is provided with the introduction of some distinctions. It is useful, first of all, to distinguish between the extent to which a particular institution, such as the military, has become professionalized and the professionalism displayed by the particular individuals within the institution. Second, as suggested recently by Richard Betts, it is useful to distinguish among individuals by the positions they occupy and to recognize that the professionalism to be expected to some extent will be a function of position and not merely of the individuals who occupy the position.³⁶

The professionalism of institutions can be identified most readily by structures, doctrine, procedures, and institutionalized standards, whereas the professionalism of individuals is most evident in attitudes and behavior (the former relevant to the degree that they permit inferences about the latter).

Thus, we may say that an institution such as the military is professional to the extent that:

• it develops structures (such as schools and staff organizations), doctrine, and procedures for the systematic accumulation, dissemination, and use of task-related knowledge, and for the effective and efficient use of resources to carry out assigned tasks (missions);

• it develops and maintains standards for performance;

• its personnel selection and advancement reflect such standards.

In general, this measure of institutional professionalism corresponds to the corporatism that Huntington discusses. Expertise per se is not a measure of institutional professionalism. However, the standards of performance serve to provide an institutionalized guarantee of requisite levels of expertise: the higher the standards the more professional the institution. Similarly, although the professionalism of an institution as a whole is not appropriately measured by the social responsibility of its various members, standards of performance surely include norms of conduct and ethics that are highly relevant to the social responsibility of the institution.

The professionalism of individuals, as distinct from the institutions of which they are a part, is appropriately determined by the skill and judgment they put into practice in the performance of professionally relevant tasks and the commitment they demonstrate to the ideals of the profession and its corporate development.

Even though individuals may acquire more expertise as they gain additional professional career experience, they may find themselves in assignments that either deny them the opportunity to exercise their skill and judgment fully or that detract from their commitment to professional ideals and corporate concerns. Betts’s observation is relevant here. Briefly, he notes that the higher a professional rises in the governmental hierarchy, the more politicized will be the process by which he is selected and the nature of the duties that he is assigned.

Thus, "pure professionals" are more likely to be found among military officers below flag rank than among those whose flag-rank positions push them inexorably into the political arena.³⁷

The insight is a useful one (especially as applied by Betts to a clarification of the debate between traditional administrative theorists and bureaucratic revisionists). However, it is important to recognize that those below flag rank are not necessarily "pure professionals." Just as high-ranking positions impose demands through a fusion of responsibilities with those of the civilian sector, lower-ranking positions impose the demands and constraints of subordination. The full exercise of professional skill and judgment may thereby be denied or constrained.

Frustrations associated with constraints and competing role demands may erode the individual’s professional commitment. As Andrew Bacevich has observed,

The indispensable prerequisite of military professionalism is personal autonomy. Individual commitment—freely undertaken, willingly offered—underlies the professional’s dedication to common purposes, shared values, and internally regulated standards of performance.³⁸

The distinctions between institutional and individual professionalism and variations in individual professionalism that are explicable in terms of position help one to comprehend the paradoxical pattern of military professionalism that is being simultaneously fostered and thwarted in the national security era. The state has tended to promote the professional development of American military institutions, in general, by urging them to raise standards of performance and modify structures, doctrines, and procedures in ways that would enable them to respond to more complex and challenging demands. On the other hand, for various reasons previously stated, individual professionalism has been threatened to some extent (with variation from one assignment and position in the hierarchy to another) by trends in recent decades.

As noted earlier, some of the intrusions on autonomy, which have been frustrating to military professionals, have been unintended consequences of measures taken for other reasons (for example, availability of technology that can enlarge the volume of information available to decision-makers). Yet there are compelling reasons why the state denies full autonomy to professionals. Professional expertise is power, and the autonomous exercise of expertise is power beyond state control, which is unacceptable. The final paradox the student or practitioner of military professionalism must confront is that autonomy per se is no guarantee that professionalism will be enhanced. The often unprofessional conduct of Army bureau chiefs in the years before the Root reforms illustrates the point.³⁹

Thus, no simple solutions emerge, either from the perspective of society as a whole or from that of the military professional. There is no turning back to what some might describe as the halcyon days of the pre-World War II era. The society and American military personnel need to understand that military professionalism has been made more complicated and more challenging by the demands of the national security era. The commitment to and encouragement of military professionalism are as needed today as ever before; but the imperatives of civilian control, among other reasons, dictate the imposition of continued constraints on professional autonomy.

This article in somewhat different form was presented to the Twentieth Anniversary National Conference of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, Chicago, 23-25 October 1980.

1. I agree with Daniel Yergin that it is reasonable to describe national security as a commanding idea in post-World War II America, although as the subsequent discussion will make clear, I disagree somewhat with Yergin on the meaning that was given to the concept by policymakers in the early years after the war. For his views, see Daniel H. Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, 1977).

2. On the eve of the 1932 elections, the Republicans boasted proudly in campaign literature that the American Army "through successive reductions had reached the irreducible minimum consistent with self-reliance, self-respect and security." Republican Party National Committee, Campaign Textbook 1932, pp. 86-87.

3. Bernard M. Baruch, The Public Years (New York, 1960), pp. 263-82.

4. George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy 1900-1950 (New York, 1959), pp. 86-87.

5. As Hull observed of the principles of international law and moral conduct he was promoting in the 1930s, "to me there was nothing vague about them. They were solid, living, all-essential rules. If the world followed them, the world could live at peace forever. If the world ignored them, war would be eternal. . . . To me these doctrines were as vital in international relations as the Ten Commandments in personal relations." Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull," 2 vols. (New York, 1948), 1:536. See Also the commentary by Donald F. Drummond, "Cordell Hull," in An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century, edited by Norman A. Graebner (New York, 1961), chapter 10.

6. Mark S. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Chief of Military History Office, Department of the Army, 1950), p. 123, quoted with commentary by Harvey C. Mansfield, in Walter Millis, Arms and the State: Civil-Military Elements in National Policy (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1958), pp. 50-51.

7. However, as Baruch has observed, programs such as those of the Army Industrial College were "only small islands of concern in a sea of indifference": The Public Years, pp. 264-65. See also James E. Hewes, Jr., From Root to McNamara: Army Organization and Administration, 1900-1963, Special Studies (Washington: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1975), pp. 50-56.

8. Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, United States Army in World War II, The War Department (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1951), chapter 2. The War Plans Division was redesignated the Operations Division in 1942.

9. Ibid., p. 44.

10. U.S. Army, Command and General Staff School, Principles of Strategy (1936), pp. 19-20, quoted by Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959), p. 308.

11. The dramatic change that occurred in the realm of pure, as distinct from applied, science is described by Daniel S. Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science (New York, 1967), chapters 3-5. Greenberg notes that with the resulting altered relationship, in the early postwar years "it is evident that something between seduction and rape repeatedly occurred, but at various points it is by no means certain which party was the aggressor and which the victim," p. 124.

12. The shorthands were appropriate in the sense that they accurately refer to the historical events most salient to those that experienced them. This is not to deny that the lessons learned sometimes have been misapplied to more recent circumstances. See Ernest R. May, The Lessons of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York, 1973).

Contributor

John P. Lovell (USMA; M.A., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has served as visiting professor at Army War College. Dr. Lovell is author of Neither Athens Nor Sparta? The American Service Academies in Transition (1979) and coeditor and contributor of New Civil-Military Relations.

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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