Civil–military relations (Civ–Mil or CMR) describes the relationship between military organizations and civil society, military organizations and other government bureaucracies, and leaders and the military. CMR incorporates a diverse, often normative field, which moves within and across management, social science and policy scales.Shields, Patricia, (2015) "Civil Military Relations" in Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, Third edition Taylor and Francis DOI: 10.1081/E-EPAP3-120052814 More narrowly, it describes the relationship between the civil authority of a given society and its military authority. "The goal of any state is to harness military professional power to serve vital national security interests, while guarding against the misuse of power that can threaten the well-being of its people."Pion-Berlin D., Dudley D. (2020) Civil–Military Relations: What Is the State of the Field. In: Sookermany A. (eds) Handbook of Military Sciences. p. 1. Springer, Cham Studies of civil–military relations often rest on a normative assumption that it is preferable to have the ultimate responsibility for a country's strategic decision-making to lie in the hands of the civilian political leadership (i.e. civilian control of the military) rather than a military (a military dictatorship).
A paradox lies at the center of traditional civil–military relations theory. The military, an institution designed to protect the polity, must also be strong enough to threaten the society it serves. A military take-over or coup is an example where this balance is used to change the government. Ultimately, the military must accept that civilian authorities have the "right to be wrong".Peter D. Feaver. 2003. Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press In other words, they may be responsible for carrying out a policy decision they disagree with. Civilian supremacy over the military is a complicated matter. The rightness or wrongness of a policy or decision can be ambiguous. Civilian decision makers may be impervious to corrective information. The relationship between civilian authorities and military leaders must be worked out in practice.
The principal problem they examine, however, is empirical: to explain how civilian control over the military is established and maintained.James Burk. 2002. "Theories of Democratic Civil–Military Relations." Armed Forces & Society. 29(1): 7–29.Herspring, Dale. 2005. The Pentagon and the Presidency: Civil–Military Relations from FDR to George W. Bush (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas) In the broader sense it examines the ways society and military intersect or interact and includes topics such as the integration of veterans into society, methods used to recruit and retain service members, and the fairness and efficacy of these systems, the integration of minorities, women, and the LGBT community into the military, the behavior and consequences of private contractors, the role of culture in military organizations, voting behavior of soldiers and veterans, and the gaps in policy preferences between civilians and soldiers.
While generally not considered a separate academic area of study in and of itself, it involves scholars and practitioners from many fields and specialties, although the primary focus is in political science, sociology and history. It involves study and discussion of a diverse range of issues including but not limited to: civilian control of the military, military professionalism, war, civil–military operations, military institutions, and other related subjects. International in scope, civil–military relations involves discussion and research from across the world. The theoretical discussion can include non-state actorsRobert Mandel. 2004. "The Wartime Utility of Precision Versus Brute Force in Weaponry." Armed Forces & Society. 30(2): 171–201.Robert Mandel. 2007. Reassessing Victory in Warfare. Armed Forces & Society. 33(4): 461–495. as well as more traditional nation-states. Other research involves discerning the details of military political attitudes, voting behavior,Donald S. Inbody. 2015. The Soldier Vote: War, Politics, and the Ballot in America . New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.Donald S. Inbody. 2008. "Partisanship and the Military." in Inside Defense: Understanding the U.S. Military in the 21st Century. Derek S. Reveron and Judith Hicks Stiehm (eds). New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.Donald S. Inbody. 2009. Grand Army of the Republic or Grand Army of the Republicans? Political Party and Ideological Preferences of American Enlisted Personnel. and the potential impact on and interaction with democratic societyMorris Janowitz. 1982. "Consequences of Social Science Research on the U.S. Military." Armed Forces & Society. 8(4): 507–524.Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, (Eds.) 2001. Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil–Military Gap and American National Security. Cambridge: MIT Press. as well as military families.Jere Cohen and Mady Wechsler Segal. 2009. "Veterans, the Vietnam Era, and Marital Dissolution: An Event History Analysis." Armed Forces & Society . .Brian J. Reed and David R. Segal. 2000. "The Impact of Multiple Deployments on Soldiers' Peacekeeping Attitudes, Morale, and Retention." Armed Forces & Society. 27(1): 57–78.Richard T. Cooney, Jr., Mady Wechsler Segal, David R. Segal and William W. Falk. 2003. "Racial Differences in the Impact of Military Service on the Socioeconomic Status of Women Veterans." Armed Forces & Society. 30(1): 53.85.David R. Segal and Morten G. Ender. 2008. "Sociology in Military Officer Education." Armed Forces & Society. 35(1): 3–15.
History
The history of civil–military relations can be traced to the writings of Sun TzuSun Tzu. 1971. The Art of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. and Carl von Clausewitz,Carl von Clausewitz. 1989. On War. Princeton: Princeton University Press. both of whom argued that military organizations were primarily the servants of the state.
Concerns about a growing militarism in society, largely coming from the experiences of the first half of the twentieth century, engendered an examination into the impact of military organizations within society.Alfred Vagts. 1937. A History of Militarism: A Romance and Realities of a Profession. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Pearl S. Buck, et al. 1949. "New Evidence of the Militarization of America." National Council Against Conscription.
The ramifications of the Cold War, specifically the American decision to maintain a large standing army for the first time in its history, led to concerns about whether such a large military structure could be effectively maintained by a liberal democracy. Samuel P. Huntington and Morris Janowitz published the seminal books on the subject which effectively brought civil–military relations into academia, particularly in political science and sociology.Samuel P. Huntington. 1957. The Soldier and the State; the Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Morris Janowitz. 1960. The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press.
Despite the peculiarly American impetus for Huntington's and Janowitz's writing, their theoretical arguments have been used in the study of other national civil–military studies. For example, Ayesha Ray used the ideas of Huntington in her book about Indian civil–military relations.Ayesha Ray. 2013. The Soldier and the State in India: Nuclear Weapons, Counterinsurgency, and the Transformation of Indian Civil–Military Relations. London: Sage Publications. In The Man on Horseback, Samuel E. Finer countered some of Huntington's arguments and assumptions and offered a look into the civil–military relationships in the under-developed world. Finer observed that many governments do not have the administrative skills to efficiently govern, thus opening opportunities for military intervention—opportunities that are not as likely in more developed countries.Samuel E. Finer. 1988. The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
The increased incidence of military coups d'état since World War II, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, brought about a growing interest in academic and journalistic circles in studying the nature of such coups. Political upheaval in Africa led to military take-overs in Dahomey, Togo, Congo, and Uganda, to mention just a few.Samuel Decalo. 1976. Coups and Army Rule in Africa: Studies in Military Style. New Haven: Yale University Press. Political unrest in South America, which involved military coups in Bolivia (189 military coups in its first 169 years of existence), Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, was largely a result of forces attempting to stem the increasing influence of left-wing and communist led uprisings.Charles F. Andrain. 1994. Comparative Political Systems: Policy Performance and Social Change. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. The 2006 military coup in Thailand and the varied roles of militaries in repressing protests or staging coups in the Arab Spring engendered continued interest in this area.Mark Beeson. 2008. "Civil–Military Relations in Indonesia and the Philippines: Will the Thai Coup Prove Contagious?" Armed Forces & Society. 34(3): 474–490.
The end of the Cold War led to new debate about to the proper role of the military in society, both in the United States and in the former Soviet Union. However, as before, much of the discussion revolved around whether the power of the state was in decline and whether an appropriate level of civilian control was being brought to bear on the military.Michael C. Desch. 1998. "Soldiers, States, and Structures: The End of the Cold War and Weakening U.S. Civilian Control." Armed Forces & Society. 24(3): 389–405.Michael C. Desch. 2001. Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Bartholomew H. Sparrow and Donald S. Inbody. 2005. Supporting Our Troops? U. S. Civil–Military Relations in the Twenty-first Century. Prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C. (September).K.E. Sorokin. 1993. "Conversion in Russia: The Need for a Balanced Strategy." Journal of Political and Military Sociology . 12(2): 163–179.Dale Herspring. 2009. "Civil–Military Relations in the United States and Russia: An Alternative Approach." Armed Forces & Society. 35(4):667.
Professional organization and journal
The principal professional organization for civil–military scholars is the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (IUS).https://web.archive.org/web/20061208145339/http://www.iusafs.org/ The IUS sponsors Armed Forces & Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which publishes articles on civil–military relations, force diversity, veterans, military families, privatization, officer training, recruitment and retention, public opinion, conflict management, unit cohesion, ethics, and peacemaking.http://afs.sagepub.com/ The journal Armed Forces & Society is located at Texas Tech University and is currently edited by Ori Swed. The IUS and the journal are international in scope and have a conference every other year in odd years. The 2025 conference is held in Reston, Virginia.
The topics of research in civil–military relations are varied as evidenced by recent scholarship in such topics as: Health of the forceThomas, J. L., Adrian, A. L., Wood, M. D., Crouch, C. L., Lee, J. D., & Adler, A. B. (2018). Mental Health and Stress Among Army Civilians, Spouses, and Soldiers in a Closing Military Community. Armed Forces & Society, 0095327X18771004Kysar-Moon, A., & Mustillo, S. (2018). Race/Ethnicity and Traumatic Brain Injury: Are There Disparities in Positive Screenings and Diagnoses Among Service Members Returning From Afghanistan and Iraq?. Armed Forces & Society 0095327X18761852.