Search results

While the president is the commander-in-chief, Congress plays a very significant and underappreciated role in US civil-military relations, the relationship between the armed forces and the civilian leadership that commands it. Indeed, we cannot understand civil-military relations in the United States without an appreciation of Congress. The ebbs and flows in US civil-military relations depend in part on congressional use of four main tools available to provide direction to the military. These include the selection of military officers, determining how much authority is delegated to the military, oversight of the military, and establishing incentives for appropriate military behavior. Congress sets the military's budget, influences military policy by calling officers to testify, sets or changes personnel policy, and approves or rejects a host of initiatives from officer promotion to base closures. This unique book will help readers better understand the role of Congress in military affairs and national and international security policy

Counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US military in Afghanistan have led to the US military embarking on civil governance reform. This has created new forms of civil-military relations with Afghan and international counterparts. These relations appear less dramatic than 'conventional' civil-military relations, in that they do not create the same visible alignment on the ground between military and non-military identities. In addition, the increased merging of civil and military work areas creates a new complexity that stems from semantic confusion. This complexity is mostly about norms and principles, in that the core puzzle is the more general question of what kinds of tasks the military should and should not do, rather than about violent consequences to civilians and questions of neutrality. This article proposes the term 'third-generation civil-military relations' to capture and examine the conceptual challenges that stem from the merging of military and civil work areas in Afghanistan's reconstruction. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright PRIO, www.prio.no]

Peacekeeping in the late 1990s is a complex and diverse task. Missions involve military, political and humanitarian aspects and, as a result, civilian and military personnel are working together to a greater degree than ever before. Peacekeeping operations in the 1990s have been marked by insufficient military input at the strategic level; unclear mandates; and weak command and control by the UN. In the field, whether under UN or NATO auspices, missions are hampered by the culture clash between civilians and the military; by poor coordination of civilian and military tasks; by inadequate military training to meet peacekeeping's specific demands; and by differing approaches to human-rights issues and the media. This paper argues that steps must be taken to improve civil-military relations. Measures should include increased military input in framing peacekeeping mandates; improved political guidance for commanders on the ground; and training to meet peacekeeping's particular needs. Civil-military relations in peacekeeping require a continuing dialogue between the two sides to strengthen the effectiveness of international intervention and to minimise competition and argument.

View that armed forces involvement in politics will be determined by civilian government effectiveness in coping with problems of governance and not threatening military interests. Transition to civil rule, the military and the intelligence agencies, and the governments of prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

Students of civil-military relations, particularly those in the developing countries, admit having to work on myopic assumptions, meagre data, sloppy conceptualization and inelegant explanations. The relative newness of this area of studies could be one reason for this. The study of civil-military relations in the narrow sense referring mainly to military coups and interventions, has attained importance after World War II. But the study of civil-military relations in the broader perspective of multiplicity of relationships between military men, institutions and interests, on the one hand, and diverse and often conflicting non-military organizations and political personages and interests on the other, has begun to draw academic interest only in the last two decades or so. In the twentieth century, the armed forces, being an universal and integral part of a nation's political system, no longer remain completely aloof from politics in any nation. If politics is concerned, in David Easton's celebrated words, with the authoritative allocation of values and power within a society, the military as a vital institution in the polity can hardly be wished out of participatory bounds, at least for legitimate influence as an institutional interest group with a stake in the political decision-making. The varying roles the military may play in politics range from minimal legitimate influence by means of recognized channels inherent in their position and responsibilities within the political system to the other extreme of total displacement of the civilian government in the forms of illegitimate overt military intervention in politics. This paper seeks to attempt an overview of the existing scholarship on civil-military relations; second, it examines civil-military relations in the world with special reference to major political systems of the world; third, it surveys the literature on civil-military relations in general, and finally, it attempts to develop a general, complex, and hopefully fruitful causal model for analyzing the dynamics of civil-military relations; exploring implications for future research on civil-military relations.

Counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US military in Afghanistan have led to the US military embarking on civil governance reform. This has created new forms of civil—military relations with Afghan and international counterparts. These relations appear less dramatic than 'conventional' civil—military relations, in that they do not create the same visible alignment on the ground between military and non-military identities. In addition, the increased merging of civil and military work areas creates a new complexity that stems from semantic confusion. This complexity is mostly about norms and principles, in that the core puzzle is the more general question of what kinds of tasks the military should and should not do, rather than about violent consequences to civilians and questions of neutrality. This article proposes the term 'third-generation civil—military relations' to capture and examine the conceptual challenges that stem from the merging of military and civil work areas in Afghanistan's reconstruction.

Describes the rise to power of the armed forces in the 1960s and 1970s, and the diminishment of military power and prerogatives in government, 1980-94.

This article accepts the norms related to civil-military relations that Don Snider et al. propose in this special issue as being the appropriate norms for professional military officers. It then reviews the curricula of the six war colleges to see what they are currently teaching about civil-military relations and about civilian society. Next, it examines the views about those relations that war college students report themselves as actually holding. Some of these, i.e., findings related to officers' views about not obeying directives they believe "unethical but legal" and their willingness to obey "unwise" commands may seem to contradict the norm of civilian control. Others that are related to officer responsibility to "advocate" and to "insist" on some policy matters also seem to contradict these norms. The article concludes with some recommendations for curriculum revision.

THE ISSUE OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS PRESENTS THE new Argentine government with several problems. One is the structuring of government, that is general staff relations. Moreover the new authorities must take a position in the short to medium term over the question of responsibility for the 'dirty war', the plundering of the public purse by the officer corps between 1976 and 1982 and the defeat in the war with Britain. And in the longer term they must confront the wider issue of how to both 'civilianize' the armed forces and 'demilitarize' civil society.