Chapter 1
Introduction

How is it that a country founded in fear of a standing army would come to think of its military as a bulwark of democracy? That is the animating question of this book.

There is no other country in which the military is so proficient, so respected, so influential in policymaking without becoming a threat to civilian governance. Standard models of civil-military relations would predict a military so constituted to be tempted by coups or state capture.1 Yet, for over 250 years, there has never been an organized attempt to overthrow the US government by its military. It is a precious, anomalous history.

Why that is the case isn't simple. It's partly the political culture of the colonies that would become the United States devising a government of distributed and counterbalancing power. It's partly the restraining example of an extraordinary individual during state formation, giving time for civilian institutions and military norms to form and strengthen. It's partly structural factors such as geographic expanse, rival and dispersed urban and commercial centers, and a benign international security environment coupled with urgent domestic insecurity (the "insider threat" of conflict with Native Americans) resulting in a weak federal army and strong militia. It's partly adroit politicians demonstrating the skills that make them successful and simply outplaying ambitious military aspirants. Which is to say that the American experience has proven beneficial and durable but difficult for other states to emulate.

This book isn't a comprehensive military history of the United States. Many important events that shaped the country and its forces go unrecorded in this account. Many themes that frame understanding of events do not appear here. This history focuses on only one of the five sets of interdependent relationships that comprise civil-military relations, that between civilian elites and military leaders.2

What this book attempts to do is look at the evolution of relations between the American military and its civilian leadership, elected or appointed by those elected to determine national policy. To do so, it focuses on consequential instances of friction between those civilians with authority over the military and military leaders' response to that authority. What emerges from that interaction is a system of rules and norms of behavior that scholars term civil-military relations.

This book focuses on the military side of the equation: what are the constitutional, legal, and normative standards? What cases help understand appropriate military comportment? While civil-military relations are interactive, we predominantly police the military rather than the civilian leadership, for two reasons. First, because there are no qualification requirements political leaders must meet beyond election or appointment to merit their structurally superior position over the military. And, second, because it is the military that has recourse to violence.

My colleague Frank Gavin describes civil-military relations as the most boring subject in academia. He is woefully mistaken. The arc of the story is inherently interesting - George Washington inspiring mutinous soldiers to instead be the first army in a thousand years not to become a threat to democracy, the terrible dilemma of Ulysses Grant having to choose which constitutionally prescribed civilian source of authority to obey during cataclysmic feuding between the president and Congress, struggles to understand fighting limited wars in the nuclear age, the glittering success of professionalization after ending conscription, the unbalancing of the system when public trust in everything but the military collapses, and the maneuverings by civilians to pull the military into political partisanship that will delegitimize the military with the American people.

Where Frank Gavin is correct is that most of us who write about civil-military relations write at the postgraduate level, and for each other. We political scientists who comprise most of the scholars working on the subject mostly wrestle with theory, which I think it's fair to say is seldom of general interest even to other scholars and certainly not to policymakers living the issues, historians recounting and assessing them, or people who don't spend their professional lives thinking about these issues. So, while I do examine the canonical literature addressing civil-military relations, with apologies to all the smart people writing on the issue, I put the literature at the end of the story so as not to frighten off the Frank Gavins of the readership.

What I'm trying to do with this book is invite general readers into an understanding of the subject by telling the story of the evolution of a unique relationship of a powerful military comfortably subservient to elected leaders. Or at least a military that is at nearly all times mostly principled and placid in that subservience, because there are numerous bad examples - incidents where military officers traduce law or norm or, more recently, where political leaders attempt to goad the military (sometimes successfully) into a more politicized role. But those bad examples are exclusively individual actions, not the mobilization of a restive military in insurrection.

The most important thing I learned researching and writing this book is that the Founding Fathers had it wrong - they worried that a standing army would be a threat to civilian governance, but what actually happened is that the creation of a professional military dramatically reduced the challenges to civilian control of the military in the United States.

The main tenets of civil-military relations as established in the United States are that the military:

• owe their loyalty to the Constitution;
• are subordinate both to the president as commander in chief and to the Congress;
• can only either faithfully carry out civilian orders or resign their commission.

There are almost no incidents of military insubordination during the nation's actual wars. Whether the US is winning or losing, it is deeply engrained in the American military tradition that civilians determine the strategy and resourcing of wars, for better and for worse. The only example of wartime insubordination is that of General MacArthur during the Korean War, and President Truman's firing of him rings down through the decades uncontested.

The US experiences more friction in the aftermath of wars, as civilians and the military argue over reduced forces and budgets. Those instances are hyperbolized as dangerous rebellions - the Admirals' Revolt! - but are mostly the earnest actions of both civilian and military leaders, struggling to understand changing technologies and geopolitical developments, acting within the bounds of a political system designed for Congress to contest executive control by the president. The understanding of how nuclear weapons affect risk calculations and uses of conventional forces was particularly challenging, as civilian leaders came to think quite differently from most military leaders of the time.

Creation of a volunteer force and the military becoming small relative to the population created another turn of the kaleidoscope. In those circumstances, the military has become a main source of public understanding about warfare in ways with which civilian leaders are often uncomfortable and which veterans capitalize on politically. As public confidence plummeted in most institutions of government and civic life in America, it held roughly constant for the military, leading the public to blame elected leaders and praise the military in ways that encourage broader military involvement in politics.3

But contemporary concerns about the military becoming a partisan political force are largely unfounded. Despite norm-shattering behavior by a small but influential coterie of politicians, military leaders, and veterans, the constitutional, legal, and normative boundaries of civil-military relations in America remain robust. And the central reason the US military abjures political involvement is that the leaders understand organically what survey research on civil-military has revealed: while partisan civilians encourage the military wading into our political and cultural disputes, they respect the military less when they do.4 Needing to recruit a volunteer military, and reveling in the approbation of the public, the military consider it in their self-interest to restrain their own involvement. Such discipline doesn't extend to veterans, whom the public do not separate from the military, and who have every right as citizens not in active military service to engage in politics.

There are basically only two essential tests of the health of civil-military relations in the US:

• can the president fire military leaders with impunity? and
• will the military carry out policies they don't agree with?

The American military easily meets both of those standards. For all of the discomfort of our febrile political moment, the American military remains dedicated to not being a threat to democracy. That professionalism could conceivably prove problematic with the election of what Pauline Shanks-Kaurin terms an "unprincipled principal" as president, were Congress to cede even more of its constitutional authorities to the executive for partisan purposes or politicians prove able to...