Civil‐Military Relations: Civilian Control Of The Military

Civil‐Military Relations: Civilian Control Of The Military. By the time that the United States became an independent nation, civilian control of the military was already firmly established as an axiom of government. On the basis of history and political theory, Americans considered standing armies to be instruments of despotism as well as defense. With their weapons and discipline, soldiers possessed the means to overthrow a government and destroy liberty. In the state constitutions written after independence, in the Articles of Confederation, and in the Constitution of 1787, the generation that founded the United States explicitly subordinated military forces to elected officials so that all the great decisions relating to war and peace, to raising and organizing armies and navies, to governing them internally, and to their use and support, rested in the hands of the representatives of the people, or those appointed by them to administer military affairs.

The system adopted at the end of the eighteenth century derived from English practice and American colonial experience. At the time of settlement in the early 1600s, military forces belonged to the crown. During and after the English Civil War of the 1640s, when Parliament sought control of the armed forces, executed the king who resisted this claim, and was then replaced by a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, civilian control broke down. The Stuart monarchs who were restored to the throne after 1660 reasserted military command, but seemed to threaten arbitrary rule by using the new standing army as their instrument. In the constitutional settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, Parliament took control of military finance and discipline in what proved to be a watershed for English liberty. Henceforth, civilian control rested on dividing authority over the military between Crown and Commons so that neither could rule by force: Parliament would approve the existence of a military establishment through its power of the purse (appropriating money annually) and by passage of a mutiny act to govern the internal order of the forces. The monarchy retained command, deployed the regiments and ships, and raised and administered them in peace and in war.

In the century before independence, the colonies experienced a similar struggle between legislative and executive. Legislatures created militias or authorized the raising of volunteers or conscripts, voting the funds and setting the conditions of service by law, while command and administration rested with the governors. Gradually, using mostly the power of appropriation, the assemblies increased their influence when governors, desperate for forces for defense against European and Native American foes, compromised their authority in return for money, supplies, and permission to raise men. The governors, many of whom were military officers, wielded great influence, but fear of military rule was muted because local defense depended on militia or citizen volunteers—the adult white male population, officered by members of the local elite who rarely had reason to attempt to overturn the established order. During the struggles with France beginning in 1689, however, conflict with the British army, friction with the population, and the regulars' disdain for provincial forces all reinforced colonial antipathy to royal forces. By the time of the Revolution, the standing army had become a symbol of repressive authority and arbitrary rule. The Boston Massacre in 1770, when redcoats fired into a threatening mob, killing five civilians, and the imposition of military government in Massachusetts under the Coercive Acts in 1774, engraved a century's concern with controlling military force into the American political tradition, confirming the belief that the safest way to defend a free people was to rely on citizen‐soldiers.

During the Revolutionary War, military and civilian leaders took care to ensure civilian control of the forces raised. As commander of the Continental army, George Washington conspicuously deferred to Congress's authority. Throughout the war, he treated state and local officials with respect, working to minimize conflict. Even during the most desperate periods, there was no serious consideration of suspending civilian rule. And at the end, in spite of intense bitterness over the prospect of demobilization without back pay or promised pensions, the officers at the main cantonment near Newburgh, New York, rejected a call to revolt or resign en masse in the so‐called Newburgh “Conspiracy.” Washington's intervention in the crisis, the refusal of the officers to defy civilian authority, and Washington's solemn return of his commission to Congress a few months later, began a national tradition of loyalty and subordination that has characterized American military forces ever since.

The Constitution of 1787, following English and American custom, provided for civilian control by distributing authority over the military to the three branches of government and to the states, so that none could use force to seize power. Congress could “raise and support Armies,” “provide and maintain a Navy,” and specify their organization and governance, but appropriations for the army were limited to two years, forcing every new Congress to consent to land forces. As commander in chief, the president would command and deploy the nation's armed forces and conduct war once Congress declared it, but Congress must approve all the president's nominations of officers and even, if desired, their assignments to duty. While Congress could “provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia,” the states appointed officers and retained authority over the forces unless called into federal service. Because the military operated under law, and the national government acted directly on the citizenry rather than on the states as under the Articles of Confederation, the judiciary could hold members of the military personally accountable. Finally, supposing that an armed citizenry provided the ultimate safeguard against an army overthrowing republicanism, the Second Amendment guaranteed “the right . . . to keep and bear Arms,” preventing the government from destroying the militia by disarming the population.

For the next century and a half under this constitutional arrangement, the nation's military forces remained subordinate to civilian authority in spite of frequent tension and occasional conflict. Geographic separation from Europe and disentanglement from great power rivalry allowed the United States to keep its regular military forces very small, and devoted largely to exploration, patrolling against Indians and pirates, and other constabulary activities. Defense rested upon mobilizing the population behind a shield of coast artillery and naval forces, with the regulars providing training, leadership, and weapons for the citizen forces raised. Congress exercised its powers under the Constitution in laws specifying the size, shape, organization, character, funding, and function of the armed forces (including in part the state militias), periodically expanding and contracting the forces, authorizing new installations and weapons, investigating problems, and generally dictating the broader policies and procedures under which the military operated. On a day‐to‐day basis, civilian control became an administrative matter, carried out by the secretaries of war and of the navy, who directed the armed services with the help (and sometimes over the resistance) of senior military officers commanding forces or managing bureaus in the two cabinet departments.

Most important, civilian control functioned successfully because it was assumed by the public and internalized within the armed forces. Belief in the rule of law, combined with reverence for the Constitution as the legitimate foundation of civic society, meant that any open disobedience would fail and invoke punishment—or plunge the country into crisis. As part of their professionalization during the first half of the nineteenth century, the officer corps of the navy and army began to disassociate themselves from partisan politics, viewing the armed services as the neutral instruments of the state and themselves as soldiers or sailors loyal to the government regardless of which party held sway. During the political upheavals of Reconstruction and the labor disorders of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the army ruled the South and was dragged into riot duty and law enforcement, Congress (with officers' blessing) in the Posse Comitatus Act (1878) prohibited the use of the regular army to execute the laws or to act under the command of local or federal officials other than the military chain of command as specified in the Constitution or law. The willing subordination of a nonpartisan military establishment has assured civilian supremacy down to the present day.

Yet beneath a seemingly placid surface, the peacetime relationship between the military and civilian leadership was filled with discord and struggles for influence that sometimes flared into open conflict. After the War of 1812, strong secretaries of war and of the navy had to establish the supremacy of their offices in confrontations with uniformed leaders. Top army generals fought with cabinet secretaries and with Congress over issues as personal as rank and as significant as their own authority, or the organization and funding of their armed service. Occasionally, the senior general and secretary were not even on speaking terms. Agitation by naval officers in the 1880s, by reform‐minded army officers in the 1890s, and by army airpower advocates in the 1920s and 1930s were catalysts in the modernization of both services, but at the same time provoked schisms inside the officer corps and in Congress and the executive branch. In the case of Billy Mitchell, the controversy led to a spectacular trial for insubordination.

Between the Civil War and World War II, officers grew gradually more estranged from American society, which they viewed as undisciplined, unprincipled, and preoccupied with commercialism. In peacetime, the armed forces suffered lean budgets, pork barrel expenditures, skeletal forces, deteriorating equipment, and low combat readiness. But at the same time the increasing participation of the United States in world politics, and the growing complexity of warmaking, particularly logistics and operations, gave professional officers greater influence in military affairs. And the maturation of the armed services into cohesive institutions, configured on the basis of doctrines of war fighting and attuned to their own organizational needs, gave their advice—now institutionalized in staffs and agencies in Washington—more authority.

War tended to mute the friction, but it never disappeared. After a weak beginning in the War of 1812, the dominance of the president in wartime was established by Presidents James K. Polk and Abraham Lincoln: managing mobilization, overseeing strategy, negotiating with allies and enemies, and even on occasion ordering operations. Except for a brief effort to oversee the conduct of the Civil War, Congress deferred to presidents, supporting requests for larger forces, new weapons, increased appropriations, and expanded executive authority. Disagreement between military and civilian leaders, largely over strategy, generally remained out of public view. Except for rare instances, such as the struggle between Lincoln and Gen. George B. McClellan over taking the offensive during the Civil War, military commanders acceded to presidential wishes even when opposed to a particular policy or course of action. Presidents understood how quickly wartime heroes could become presidential aspirants (as numerous generals from Andrew Jackson through Dwight D. Eisenhower have done) and how difficult they could be to manage, which contributed to the tension. Polk, Lincoln, William McKinley, and Woodrow Wilson kept a tight rein over the direction of their conflicts, Wilson personally making overall policy while leaving the details of implementation, tactics, and fighting to the military.

The mobilization for World War II that began in 1940 spread the influence of the military more deeply into the fabric of American society than ever before. When the government, applying its World War I experience and plans readied during the interwar years, took control of society by drafting men into the armed forces, converting production to munitions, controlling raw materials and wages and prices, and harnessing virtually all activity to achieving victory over the Axis, the military became powerful arbiters in American life. Franklin D. Roosevelt never ceded any authority; he directed the war effort in broad outline and sometimes in small detail. But the needs of the military forces and the judgments of the uniformed leadership framed many choices, and extended deeply into foreign policy and economic life. In ways both obvious and subtle, the power and prestige of the professional military reached a zenith in the American experience.

The creation of a permanent military establishment in the 1950s to contain the Soviet Union and deter nuclear war overloaded the traditional procedures by which civilian control functioned. The military institutions were simply too large, their activities too diverse, and their influence too pervasive for effective oversight by the legislative and bureaucratic procedures historically used by civilians on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch. Vicious struggles broke out between the armed services over roles, missions, strategy, and budgets, which the civilians, struggling to balance military needs with finite financial resources and lacking any consensus about how to meet the threat, could not contain, even under the new, more unified organizational structure of the Department of Defense (DoD). The need to control atomic weapons and to harmonize military operations with broad national objectives, particularly to keep limited wars from escalating into a general conflagration, drove civilians to invade what had become the customary prerogatives of military commanders in the field. In 1951, in the most public civil‐military confrontation in American history, President Harry S. Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur, one of the century's most celebrated commanders, for openly opposing the administration's effort to keep the war in Korea limited to the peninsula and to conventional weapons. By 1961, the century's only professional soldier‐president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had become so concerned about restraining defense spending and conflicts with (and between) the armed services that he left office warning about a “military‐industrial complex” whose “influence, whether sought or unsought,” had the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations reasserted civilian control by installing new bureaucratic procedures in the Pentagon to unite strategy and policy with force structure and budgets, and by imposing special instructions or operational restrictions on commanders, notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fighting in Southeast Asia. But over the next three decades—partly in reaction to the disaster in Vietnam, partly in response to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's peremptory rule, and partly because the Republicans, dominating the presidency, became such vocal champions of national defense—influence over military affairs began gradually to shift back toward the uniformed leadership. Congress, controlled for most of the period by the Democrats, added staff and began to exert more power through appropriations and directives in legislation. But the Goldwater‐Nichols Act (1986), a defense reorganization law, gave the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and senior commanders in the field more weight inside the DoD. Successful interventions abroad, especially the Persian Gulf War, restored the military's prestige. And a new generation of officers—more determined to resist policies that would damage military effectiveness or involve U.S. forces in quagmires abroad, less sensitive to the historical restraints involved in subordination to civilian authority, and more adept at political maneuvering inside the bureaucracy and on Capitol Hill—gained greater success in promulgating their views in policy and decision making, even after the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s, after losing a public battle with the military and Congress over permitting homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces, President Bill Clinton's administration relinquished much of its power over the military establishment in the areas of budget, organization, and strategy. Only in foreign interventions did the president assert his authority, and then within limits negotiated with a military leadership wary of deploying American forces abroad.

Thus, at the close of the century, civilian control remained the same sometimes smooth, sometimes awkward, but always situational process it had been throughout American history: shaped by the issues and personalities of the moment; characterized by consultation but also negotiation, tension, and conflict; and measured by the relative influence of the professional military and civilian authorities in policy and decision making. Congress and the president continued to pass the laws and decide upon war and peace, and the military to operate under law and civilian authority. At the same time, military and civilian leaders struggled in uneasy partnership to reconcile frequently diverging perspectives in pursuit of the common defense, in an increasingly uncertain world.
[See also Conscription; Gay Men and Lesbians in the Military; Militia Acts; Militia and National Guard; Commander in Chief, President as.]

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Richard H. Kohn