Say No  Link to Politics

Perm Solvency

It is not shirking, however, when the military is given an opportunity to present its case to the president, and the president changes his mind. Healthy civil-military relations involve civilians giving the military an opportunity to provide candid advice -- check that, requiring the military to provide candid advice -- and then civilians making a decision. Sometimes that decision is different from what the civilians would have made in the absence of that advice. But that is not necessarily "getting rolled." It could just be "getting informed."

Lt. Col. Frank G. Hoffman, USMCR (ret.), a non-resident senior fellow of the FPRI and a research fellow at the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) in Quantico, Virginia, stated that the protracted war in Iraq “has uncovered profound cracks in some of the dysfunctional elements that are inherent to American civil-military relations.” The precarious nature of the nation’s civil-military relations contributed to poor policymaking and ineffective execution. Civilian control of the military is firmly grounded constitutionally, structurally, and historically, but civil-military relations—the interface between policy leaders and military officers—are more complex and less structured. “Ultimately, it’s about the interchange of viewpoints, and the production of effective strategies and decisions about the use of the military instrument.” A narrow focus on control leads to overlooking the overall purpose of the use of force and can denigrate the quality of the decision-making process, the outputs of which are what are really at issue. During recent conflicts the climate and context of the civil-military relationship has not been open to rigorous discourse. Needed inputs for military officers and others were “either ignored, muzzled, intimidated, or cut out of the process.” Hoffman noted that problems in civil-military relations are embedded in several myths. One myth is that there has been a clear, inherent division of labor between the military and civilians since Vietnam: civilians set political objectives and then get out of the way. This overlooks what Eliot Cohen has called the “unequal dialogue,” where civilian leaders probe the military and the military asks the same about the ends and means of policy.[4] “Separating policy from strategy and operations is simply an extremely poor alternative to the intense and admittedly uncomfortable interaction of policy desires and military realities that needs to occur inside the White House and inside the Pentagon.”

Professional guidelines for military professionals include the limits of dissent, restraint from leveraging bureaucratic advantage to achieve institutional self-interest, and the acceptance of the principle of non-partisanship. It is essential to the professional development of military officers that they learn to recognize when the bounds of the limits of dissent are breached. Policy advocacy has its place in a collaborative policymaking process, but actions resulting in outcomes counter to the civilian leadership’s policies subvert civilian authority. The military leadership should apply its expertise without ‘shirking’.7 Officers should represent their profession and offer their best military advice. Their core responsibility is to execute policy, avoiding excessive advocacy and insistence of their views. Healthy civilmilitary relationships engender a climate of collaboration within which civilian and military expertise can come together to craft national security policy. The civilian political leadership sets political objectives that the military supports through continued interaction with the political leadership.