The recent (well done) article in Foreign Affairs by Michael Desch on the state of American civil military relations brought forth some strong and equally well written counter attacks by General Myers, Richard Kohn, and Mackubin Owens.  This sort of very public argument is desperately needed.  The last such debate occurred in the 1990s when a number of scholars were worried that the post-Cold War situation had created a civil-military crisis in America.  The difference then was that the argument was largely confined to academic circles.  While this debate is certainly more read in such circles, Foreign Affairs is more widely read than most academic journals.

This is a needed debate.  How to balance the necessary civilian control of the military and provide the right amount of political guidance to the use of military force without dangerous intrusion into purely military matters is important.  The argument falls around two primary camps.  The first is largely a Huntington-based camp in which there are analytically separate civilian and military worlds.  The civilian world determines and manages the strategy and gives orders to the military world.  Then, the military world is left largely free to execute the necessary operations and tactics to meet the political guidance.  The second camp, a bit more skeptical of how things actually work in the real world, and heavily influenced by the Vietnam debacle, advocates more interaction between the two worlds and even requires the military world to push back against the civilian world if the guidance seems misplaced or dangerous.

Desch is certainly of the latter camp while Myers, Kohn, and Owens are less so, perhaps even of the Huntington camp.  The critics of Desch are worried that too much military criticism of civilian leadership is at least borderline insubordination.  Certainly public criticism is seen that way.  Indeed, the education I had while serving 28 years in the Navy told me to criticize and argue (in private) until the order was given.  Then, it was necessary to salute and obey.  If I was unable to do that then it was my duty to resign my commission.

The bottom line is that public debate over the correct balance between civilian and military authority is absolutely necessary.  Even Eliot Cohen, hardly a Huntingtonian, calls the argument “the uneven dialogue,” meaning that in the end, the military must give way to the civilian authority, and ultimately the civilian authority is the only one who has the right to be wrong.

Keep arguing and continue the debate.  I suspect that part of the reason we made many of the mistakes in the current war in Iraq (the decision to go in the first place and the management of it since) was due to too little civilian control of the military during the Clinton years followed by too much (or inappropriate) control of the military (or perhaps a poor reaction on the part of the military to such control) during the Bush administration.  Getting the balance right means that we must be able, at a minimum, recognize when the balance is not right.  We only find that out by debate, usually in the bright unforgiving light of public discourse.

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