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Civil control of the military is a doctrine in military and political science that places ultimate responsibility for a country's strategic decision-making in the hands of the state's civil authority, rather than completely with professional military leadership itself.
Jun 11, 2020 · The principle of civilian control of the military places ultimate authority over U.S. armed services in the hands of civilian leadership, with civilian responsibility and control of the military balanced between the executive and legislative branches of the government.
- Effective Civilians
- A Politicized Military
- Praetorian Propensity
- Tired Theories
- Moving Forward
- Notes
To military professionals and scholars of U.S. civil-military relations, these articles outline aspirational principles. Unfortunately, real-world nuances and realities of the current civil-military balance of power were neglected or omitted. There was further a failure in these articles to explain why civil-military relations have deteriorated ove...
Members of the Armed Forces swear an oath to the U.S. Constitution. Thus, there is a fair expectation that military elites in a democratic republic will be apolitical and above the partisan, political scrum. Yet, the mythical narrative that the military is apolitical is fraught with contradiction. An increasing number of studies find that U.S. mili...
Civilian control of the military is supposed to be exercised across all three branches of government. This “best practice” is idyllic. However, the military is deeply embedded across the government and has come to constitute and behave as an epistemic community with exceptional influence over national security policy and process that can overwhelm ...
The theoretical framework or lens by which to view these dynamics is found in the scholarly field of civil-military relations theory. Unfortunately, civil-military relations theory and scholarship is challenged; it is stale, stuck in the past, and backward looking. It fails to account for future operational environments in which the velocity of war...
If civilian leaders and lawmakers are to confront the dangers of strained civil-military relations, they need to focus less on the military and more on themselves. Strained and imbalanced civil-military relations are less about how powerful and influential the military is and more about how broken our political system is and how weak our political ...
Andrew Bacevich, ed., “Elusive Bargain,” in The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 210.Martin Dempsey et al., “To Support and Defend: Principles of Civilian Control and Best Practices of Civil-Military Relations,” War on the Rocks, 6 September 2022, accessed 20 October 2022, https://...Peter Feaver and Michele Flournoy, “Let’s Stop Being Cavalier About Civilian Control of the Military,” Lawfare (blog), 13 September 2022, accessed 20 October 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/lets-...Thomas Szayna et al., The Civil-Military Gap in the United States: Does It Exist, Why, and Does It Matter? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2007), 151–57; Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers...Jan 12, 2021 · principle of civilian control of the military.3 1 See Mackubin Thomas Owens, U.S. Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group) 2011, and Rosa Brooks, “Civil-Military Paradoxes,” as found in Jim Mattis and Kori
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Jan 26, 2024 · Civilian control of the military is a foundational concept of democracy in the United States. In recent years, voices in the community that study the civilian-military relationship have raised concerns that civilian control is being slowly eroded away by the outsized participation of the military in national policy making.
Jan 18, 2021 · Civilian control is often taken to mean that the military simply follows orders, but that is too narrow an approach. For the political leadership to shape military policy and activity and align it with their interests, civilians require more than the power to make decisions.
the Army can effectively conduct civil control during and immediately following large scale combat operations. If the U.S. Army invests in capabilities to conduct rule of law operations, it will be capable of rapidly and decisively restoring order and meeting national strategic objectives.
