Civil-Military Relations

The relationship between a state's civilian political leaders and its military officers, as well as the influence that relationship exerts on the creation of foreign and defense policies. Civil-military relations describe how the armed services of a state interact with civilian authorities and with the larger civil society.

Civilian control of the military is a characteristic of democratic states. Civilian control means that there is a clear distinction between political and military duties and that there is clear subordination of the military to the civilian leadership. Democratic theory and tradition hold that the military should not interfere in politics and that the armed forces should not influence the making of national policy. Excessive military influence over foreign and defense policy is considered an erosion of civil-military relations and a threat to democratic values. Military activity is meant to support political objectives, which are defined by the elected civilian leaders of a state. The incompatibility between military professionalism and political participation and the belief that military influence over national policy is a threat to democratic values form the core of the concept of civil-military relations.

Formal institutional arrangements govern the civil-military relationship in the United States. These arrangements include the separation of powers and the division of civilian control over the military found in the Constitution. The nation's founders were concerned with the potential for excessive, arbitrary, and unchecked military power. The framers of the Constitution saw the danger in having the power to both declare and wage war concentrated in a single branch of the government. As a result, the Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war and to raise and support military forces (Article I, Section 8), whereas the president, as commander in chief of the nation's armed forces, has the power to conduct military operations and wage war (Article II, Section 2).

Two important pieces of legislation have shaped civil-military relations since World War II: the National Security Act of 1947 and the 1986 Department of Defense Reorganization Act (also known as the Goldwater-Nichols Act). The National Security Act of 1947 established the U.S. Department of Defense and mandated that the secretary of defense be a civilian. The secretary of defense reports directly to the president and wields command authority over the armed forces on behalf of the president. The Goldwater-Nichols Act greatly strengthened the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and named the chairman as the principal military adviser to the president, the National Security Council, and the secretary of defense. Many observers felt that the powers vested in the chairman of the JCS by this act greatly increased the power and influence of the military.

Civil-military relations are also defined by the attitudes of the military with respect to their civilian leaders. Throughout the course of U.S. civil-military relations, the armed forces historically have assumed an ethical and moral obligation to exercise self-restraint and to subordinate themselves to the civilian leadership. The attitudes that the military and civilians adopt toward each other are important in establishing the balance of civil-military relations. Many of the military services make explicit references in their doctrine manuals to their subordination to civilian authority. Ineffective civilian leadership and weak civilian control of the military can be a threat to balanced civil-military relations. Lack of military knowledge and expertise on behalf of civilian leaders also may contribute to a deterioration in civil-military relations.

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