State, The

State, The. The American concepts of state and state power have since colonial times been shaped by national security interests and by experience in the management and use of the American military. Insofar as a sovereign state holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, state power must be defined with reference to the raising and employment of armed forces. The logic is Hobbesian. The state provides order; the alternative is anarchy and a life both “brutish and short.” Given this choice, the citizen opts for order and accepts the rule of Hobbes's Leviathan—the state.

Historical development has distanced the American state from this view but never quite overcome it. The nation's founding myth—that a dispute with the crown over contractual rights and responsibilities caused the Revolution—follows John Locke's contrary postulate that the social contract grants limited power to the state. The Constitution itself confirmed the relevance of Locke's version of the contract metaphor to the U.S. government and its constitution.

The Internal Security Dilemma and the Nineteenth‐Century American State.

This conception of limited state power poses special problems with respect to national security. National security becomes a vital issue when survival of the state is threatened; then the Hobbesian (or realpolitik) understanding of the state and state power clashes with the Lockean (or liberal) conception. This clash creates what can be called the “internal security dilemma.” In the realpolitik view, the state cannot provide the blessings of liberty unless it can assure its own survival. In the liberal view, the powers of the state must be so disposed as to protect citizens. Hence the dilemma: The state must somehow cope with threats to itself while maintaining the liberties and rights of citizens.

From the end of the War of 1812 to the close of the nineteenth century, state survival was not a question of external threat. Survival emerged as a serious sectional issue, which the Civil War settled; otherwise, policies and disputes associated with the security of the American state centered on providing the United States with strategic space. By denying the western hemisphere to rival powers, the Monroe Doctrine (declared in 1823 but an unfinished project until the twentieth century) laid claim to an enormous strategic space for the United States. The quarrel with Britain over the Oregon Country, settled diplomatically in 1846, and the disputes with Mexico that led to the Mexican War in that same year, actualized American state claims to territory on the basis of strategic considerations no less than by invoking “manifest destiny.” The Civil War, however, definitively established the nineteenth‐century American understanding of the state's power to ensure its survival, as the federal government held a continent‐wide country‐qua‐empire together by force of arms. The scale and violence of the Civil War tested the limits of war itself, while its political stresses took a heavy toll on civil liberties—the federal courts proving particularly ineffective guardians against martial law's encroachments on freedom of speech and assembly.

The exercise of political opposition and the employment of military force furnish two major reference points for defining the state. Democracy requires the possibility of legitimate opposition to government, while nation‐states under threat to their survival or security, and states that vastly expand their military activity, usually give priority to security considerations and seek to limit political partisanship. Such tensions were particularly evident in the early‐ and mid‐nineteenth‐century United States, where army officers, and to a lesser extent navy officers, often cultivated political connections and acted as partisan figures. In 1846, for example, the Senate rejected President James K. Polk's attempt to appoint Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a civilian with no military experience and a fellow Democrat, as the top general commanding the campaigns against Mexico. Polk had to content himself with two Whig generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, both aspirants to their party's presidential nomination in 1848, as leading officers in the campaigns. In 1864, Gen. George B. McClellan, once Abraham Lincoln's general in chief, ran against Lincoln as Democratic nominee for the presidency. For his own part, Lincoln did not hesitate to appoint brigadier generals and allot military contracts as a means of cultivating local interests and winning their political support.

Partisanship and “pork” persisted after the Civil War, but preferment gradually diminished. The army, deployed in the West during the Plains Indians Wars, became more isolated from American society and thus susceptible to reforms, adopted after the Spanish‐American War, that made it more professional and less political. Up to that point, however, political considerations generally tended to place American state power—and the services of the U.S. Army—at the disposal of local interests. This was largely true in the Mexican War and in westward expansion. In the Spanish‐American War, the Cuban campaign was essentially a projection of land power partly in response to the demands of Cuban exiles in New York and Florida.

The army reforms of 1899–1904, largely under Secretary of War Elihu Root, reinforced civilian authority over the army, with a chief of staff, the army's leader‐manager, answering to the president as commander in chief, and depending upon the civilian secretary of war to be effective in his own job. This structure reduced the autonomy of the army bureaus and weakened their links to congressional interests, while centralizing authority in such a way as to strengthen professionalism. Despite a certain amount of resistance at the top, officers tended to embrace the new managerial ideals, which facilitated the planning and coordination fundamental to modern warfare, and thus rejected older, populist views of military leadership, which stressed romantic, intuitive qualities and fostered partisan political activity. The navy followed suit, achieving its reforms by more informal means.

Professionalism has usually advanced at the expense of local politics in the American military establishment and has strengthened civilian leadership based on the power and authority of the president as commander in chief. Significant advances occurred during the first two decades of the twentieth century, although localism remained evident at the end of the century when post–Cold War budget cutbacks led to military base closings that were opposed by local interests.

During the twentieth century, American armed forces took part in four major wars—World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War—and several minor conflicts, the largest of which was the Persian Gulf War. None of these five occurred in the western hemisphere: two took place in Europe, two in Asia, and one in the Middle East. Local interests played either a negligible role or no role at all in any of them. Military power was associated with “high politics,” a phrase commonly used during the Cold War to refer to the way Congress and the executive branch handled national security in the nuclear age—in particular, the way Congress deferred to the president—and the way the public rallied to support state power in times of crisis.

When the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson chose a professional officer to command the American Expeditionary Forces. Though Gen. John J. Pershing was son‐in‐law to a senior Republican senator, he avoided partisan politics, and after the war, he scotched a movement to run him for president on the Republican ticket.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt minimized political controversy about the conduct and purpose of the war effort by two means. One was to promote bipartisanship; the other, to delay the resolution of contentious issues about war aims until the return of peace. The first he accomplished by bringing two prominent Republicans into his wartime cabinet (Henry L. Stimson as secretary of war and Frank Knox as secretary of the navy) and appointing other Republicans to administer war agencies. The second he accomplished by declaring, as he did at the Casablanca Conference in 1942, that unconditional surrender was the Allied military objective of the war.

But important issues about the employment of the armed forces as the principal instruments of state power in war remained. One had to do with strategic priorities. Roosevelt adopted the army's favored strategy of defeating Germany first (before Japan). Command links to the European theater from Roosevelt through Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe worked nearly perfectly. No field commander in American history caused his commander in chief less trouble or delivered more results than did Eisenhower. Although Japan surrendered sooner than expected, the Pacific War was a different matter, for Asia's lower priority left two military scores to be settled after 1945—one with the navy and one with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Both had important consequences for the state and its control over the armed forces.

The navy's priority lay in the Pacific theater, where it could demonstrate its seaborne striking power. Only after the defeat of Germany did it gain first priority, and then the Pacific War ended quickly. In the immediate aftermath of the war, as the administration of Harry S. Truman sought to restructure the U.S. military, the navy bitterly opposed the force integration that modern warfare required. This dispute was settled by the Key West Agreement of 1948 and other compromises, delaying the development of combined arms warfare and perpetuating interservice rivalry that handicapped military operations and distorted military advice during the Vietnam War.

MacArthur proved in some ways a more difficult problem. Charismatic and personable, he was a virtual throwback to the nineteenth century; as army commander in chief of the Pacific theater, he proved an uneasy partner to the admiral commanding the Pacific Fleet, Chester Nimitz. With the defeat of Japan, MacArthur became the virtual American proconsul in Tokyo, often ignoring instructions from Washington on occupation policy. The problem worsened when it fell to him to lead the United Nations (predominantly American) forces in the Korean War. His relations with Washington deteriorated into mutual mistrust until President Truman dismissed him in 1951, when MacArthur sought the support of congressional Republicans in a ploy reminiscent of the Partisan Politics of the Mexican War or the Civil War.

This, the second score to be settled from World War II, showed that Eisenhower's example was now the rule. A general might have presidential aspirations, but not a hint of them may show until he takes off his uniform. American military activities in the last half of the twentieth century would scarcely be isolated from business interests or shielded from political controversy, but whatever personal political ambitions arose within the officer corps were strictly channeled.

The Truman administration's political fortunes suffered because of the Korean War, which put any candidacy by Truman for a second elected term as president beyond consideration. In broader terms, Truman had invoked crises too often in his efforts to build a permanent and stable Cold War posture. Eisenhower profited by his predecessor's hard lesson that presidents could overplay their hand in the “high politics” of state power. Elected in part to end the Korean War, Eisenhower resisted the temptation to use crises to win political support for military programs and military actions. Yet his calmer leadership style with respect to “high politics” had its own problems. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first of the space satellites, in 1957, his administration came under attack for its seeming unconcern about competing with Soviet military technology. John F. Kennedy employed charges of a “missile gap” in his successful presidential campaign in 1960 (only to learn later, and admit, that it never existed).

No twentieth‐century war drew the American state into more domestic dissent than the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson's decisions about the war added up to an unsuccessful military policy, with disastrous domestic effects. As with Truman and Korea, they led to a turnover of the White House to a Republican president. Richard M. Nixon, who succeeded Johnson, expanded the war in the course of ending it, leaving the Democrats in bitter opposition and the American state burdened with failures in both security policies and the handling of its military leaders and forces. Yet if Vietnam raised the political costs of engaging American military forces abroad, it did not end the practice. It had little effect on NATO; if anything, the ending of the American engagement in Vietnam enabled the United States to strengthen its forces in Europe. Meanwhile, the nation's postwar isolationism proved only temporary. Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 at the head of a Democratic Party that espoused moderately anti‐internationalist and antimilitary policies. But Carter reversed himself and started a rearmament program that became the Ronald Reagan rearmament policy of the 1980s. The Vietnam War's more permanent legacy, a reduced confidence in America's leaders in their employment of force, led Reagan to try to restore popular confidence in U.S. military power. In this he proved only partially successful.

“Vietnam” remained shorthand for a warning against committing American military forces without an exit strategy. But strategy alone was not the issue: the way the American state handled “high politics” was.

As the management of the armed forces in relation to Congress, the executive branch, and society, “high politics” defined the degree of consensus on national security issues and hence the dimensions of American state power. Defined in this inclusive way, the Cold War's high politics shifted dynamically over time to reflect changes in threat perceptions, in the perceived need for the armed forces, and in their successes and failures. State power expanded and contracted accordingly, growing during the first half century, declining briefly in the early fifties as a result of the Korean War and the Communist scare, then recovering and reaching its high point of consensus on security issues in the early sixties. It was never the same again. The manifest errors of the Vietnam War reduced public and elite confidence in the employment of force to achieve political goals and sharply curbed the expression of state power. Eventually, the early seventies watchword, “No more Vietnams,” faded from use; but the skepticism it reflected remained. By the late eighties and nineties, policymakers concerned with security and the state were looking increasingly to economic leverage as a substitute for military power.

Nuclear Danger and the Definition of the Powers of the Commander in Chief.

Before the United States acquired nuclear weapons, U.S. political leaders regarded the state's military function as synonymous with its capacity to mobilize for and conduct large‐scale warfare. Nuclear weapons did not displace this role because conventional war‐fighting capabilities continued to be regarded as necessary in maintaining stable deterrence and in minimizing the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war. Yet nuclear weapons irrevocably altered the way the American state employed force to achieve security. Three interrelated factors shaped the change.

The first was World War II's impact on the balance of power. The war severely damaged the military capacity of all participants except the United States, which emerged as the world's first superpower. This eliminated the prospect that America could confine itself to the role of power balancer of last resort, for other states could no longer reliably stabilize the international political order. Specifically, Western Europe could not balance the Soviet bloc without an explicit and tangible U.S. commitment from the beginning. For the first time in its history, the American state had to maintain massive military forces in the absence of active hostilities.

The second factor that shaped the American state's military power after World War II was the American view of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. U.S. leaders saw it as a threat to the military and political security of Western Europe and to American interests there. They took the Soviet bloc as a given; in the interest of stability, they did not challenge it—which in turn meant containing it, not defeating it. For a European statesman, the point was self‐evident, but those who wielded American state power found it an unfamiliar idea. Only for the leaders of the American state was it necessary to decouple the identification of a rival from the course of the action the United States had taken in two world wars: to mobilize and defeat it.

The third factor was the American development of nuclear weapons systems—the warheads themselves and the technologies for warning and target acquisition, for aiming and delivering and guiding weapons, for safeguarding them and for commanding and controlling their employment—that could deter enemies from attacking at locations remote from U.S. territory; and finally, the doctrines that explained how these vast, complicated systems should be positioned and employed. All of this placed an enormous burden on the military command and control process, beginning at the top, with the commander in chief. President Kennedy, appalled at the “spasm war” scenarios for which the nuclear air force had planned, took steps in 1961 to provide himself, as commander in chief, with options in a Flexible Response doctrine, expanding the range of choices available to presidents for employing nuclear weapons. But the Vietnam War produced a quite different approach to options, based on a critique that placed much of the blame for the U.S. defeat on civilian leaders—in particular, on the president—for overextending American power and micromanaging the war with catastrophic consequences.

This criticism has persisted. President Reagan's secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, issued guidelines for military interventions that assured maximum autonomy to the generals in determining how they might fight. In substance, President George Bush followed these guidelines in the Persian Gulf War.

Criticisms of the Vietnam War also led to the Congressional War Powers Resolution of 1973. Intended by its authors to increase congressional participation in decisions that might lead to war under circumstances that did not directly threaten the survival of the United States, this act has been opposed by every president since its passage. Presidential concern for preserving the prerogatives of the commander in chief, however, have been no more significant in rendering the act inconsequential than has congressional reluctance to follow through on the claim to a decisive role in determining whether or not forces should be introduced in dangerous situations. The law claims for Congress a resolve it has in actual practice lacked: to share in presidential decisions regarding the employment of conventional forces.

At the end of the twentieth century, divergent views about security threats, the military forces needed to meet them, and the employment of those forces have left the American concept of the state, in relationship to security and the military, unfocused and in flux. Congress avoids showdowns over military issues with the president; legislators avoid partisan showdowns among themselves over military policies. Meanwhile, the military itself enjoys a voice in security policy—and is called upon to participate in quasi‐police activities like the “war on drugs”—to a degree unanticipated by military professionals at midcentury.

Looking back from an era of total war and nuclear standoff, one is struck by the prominence the U.S. Constitution gave (and still gives) to executive power by combining in the presidency the offices of chief of state and commander in chief. This solution reflected British experience as it was understood at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and addressed the internal security dilemma in two enduring respects. One was to avoid the potential tyranny of an Oliver Cromwell (the English military dictator in the mid‐seventeenth century) by conferring the highest military authority on a civilian, whose authority did not derive solely from the Congress. The other was to combine the offices of chief of state and commander in chief as a means of avoiding “Caesarism,” the despotism of a military commander insulated by popularity from control by civil authorities. The men who drafted the Constitution were aware of an internal security dilemma when international threats to the survival of the American state were taken seriously. This dilemma remains. After more than 200 years, it continues to impose stress on a government of limited powers that, when dealing with the issues of its citizens, ultimately depends upon the survival of the state.
[See also Civil Liberties and War; Congress, War, and the Military; Constitutional and Political Basis of War and the Military; Nationalism; Supreme Court, War, and the Military.]

Bibliography

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Samuel P. Huntington , The Soldier and the State; The Theory and Politics of Civil‐Military Relations, 1957.
Ernest R. May, ed., The Ultimate Decision; The President as Commander in Chief, 1960.
Paul Y. Hammond , Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century, 1961.
Allan R. Millett and and Peter Maslowski , For the Common Defense; A Military History of the United States of America, 1984.
Henry Bartholomew Cox , War, Foreign Affairs, and Constitutional Power: 1829–1901, Report of the American Bar Association Steering Committee on War, Foreign Affairs, and Constitutional Power, Vol. 2, 1984.
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John Hart Ely , War and Responsibility, 1993.
John T. Rourke , Presidential War and American Democracy: Rally 'Round the Chief, 1993.
Barbara Hinckley , Less Than Meets the Eye; Foreign Policy Making and the Myth of the Assertive Congress, 1994.

Paul Y. Hammond