In 1945, the United States began a demobilization of the massive military force that had been built up during World War II. Strong public and bipartisan pressure succeeded in forcing the government to bring American soldiers home and to reduce the size of the armed forces quickly. Strikes and even some rioting by military personnel at overseas bases in January 1946 pressured President
Harry S. Truman to continue the process despite growing concern about the Soviet Union and an increasing recognition that the United States was not going to be able to retreat into the isolationism of the pre-war years. Attempts in the
United States Congress to continue
conscription to provide a trained reserve as a replacement for a large standing military force failed and, in 1947, the World War II draft law expired. By the summer of 1950, the armed forces of the United States had fewer than 1.5 million personnel on active duty, down from a high of 12 million in 1945. By the next year, however, in response to
North Korea's invasion of
South Korea, the size of the U.S. military was again on the rise, doubling to more than 3.2 million personnel. Reaching a high of 3.6 million in 1953, the total number of personnel on active duty in the U.S. military never again dropped below two million during the 40-plus years of the
Cold War. After the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the size of the active-duty force had, by 1999, dropped to just under 1.4 million personnel. As of February 28, 2009, a total of 1,398,378 men and women remain on active duty in the U.S. armed forces. The size of the U.S. military in the latter half of the twentieth century, unprecedented in peacetime, caused concern in some circles, primarily as to the potential effect of maintaining such a large force in a democratic society. Some predicted disaster and were concerned with the growing militarization of American society. These writers were quite sure that a distinctly military culture was inherently dangerous to a non-militaristic liberal society. Others warned that the ascendancy of the military establishment would fundamentally change American foreign policy and would weaken the intellectual fabric of the country. However, most of the arguments were less apocalyptic and settled along two tracks. The two tracks are highlighted, respectively, by Samuel P. Huntington's
Soldier and the State and Morris Janowitz's
The Professional Soldier. The debate focused primarily on the nature of the relationship between the civilian and military worlds. There was widespread agreement that there were two distinct worlds and that they were fundamentally different from one another. The argument was over how best to ensure that the two could coexist without endangering
liberal democracy.
Institutional theory In his seminal 1957 book on civil–military relations,
The Soldier and the State, Each world consisted of a separate institution with its own operative rules and norms. The military's function was furthermore inherently different from that of the civilian world. Given a more conservative military world which was illiberal in many aspects, it was necessary to find a method of ensuring that the liberal civilian world would be able to maintain its dominance over the military world. Huntington's answer to this problem was "military professionalism." Risa Brooks argues that the health of civil–military relations is best judged by whether there is a (i) preference divergence between military and political leaders, and (ii) whether there is a power imbalance. She argues that the healthiest arrangement of civil–military relations is when the preferences between military and political leaders is low, and political leaders have a dominant power advantage. She argues that the worst kind of civil–military relations is when there is high preference divergence, and military leaders dominate the power balance. According to Dan Slater, Lucan A. Way, Jean Lachapelle, and Adam E. Casey, variations in military supremacy in authoritarian states can be explained by the nature in which the military was established in the first place: "Where authoritarian mass parties created militaries from scratch, the armed forces have generally remained subservient. Where militaries emerged separately from authoritarian parties, they enjoyed the autonomy necessary to achieve and maintain military supremacy. The core lesson is simple: Unless an autocratic regime created the military, it will struggle to control the military."
Convergence theory The other principal thread within the civil–military theoretical debate was that generated in 1960 by
Morris Janowitz in
The Professional Soldier. However, despite this convergence, Janowitz insisted that the military world would retain certain essential differences from the civilian and that it would remain recognizably military in nature.
Institutional/occupational hypothesis Charles Moskos developed the institutional/occupational (I/O) hypothesis as a means to promote comparative historical studies of military organization and military change. This hypothesis evolved into the Postmodern Military Model, which helped predict the course of civil–military relations after the end of the
Cold War. The I/O hypothesis argued that the military was moving away from an institutional model towards one that was more occupational in nature. An institutional model presents the military as an organization highly divergent from civilian society while an occupational model presents the military more convergent with civilian structures. While Moskos did not propose that the military was ever "entirely separate or entirely coterminous with civilian society", the use of a scale helped better to highlight the changing interface between the armed forces and society.
Agency theory The
Vietnam War opened deep arguments about civil–military relations that continue to exert powerful influences today. One centered on a contention within military circles that the United States lost the war because of unnecessary civilian meddling in military matters. It was argued that the civilian leadership failed to understand how to use military force and improperly restrained the use of force in achieving victory. Among the first to analyze the war critically was
Harry Summers, who used
Clausewitz as his theoretical basis. He argued that the principal reason for the loss of the
Vietnam War was a failure on the part of the political leadership to understand the goal, which was victory. The Army, always successful on the battlefield, ultimately did not achieve victory because it was misused and misunderstood. Summers argued that the conduct of the war violated many classical principals as described by Clausewitz, observed that it was easier for officers in the
Gulf War to connect national policy to the actual fighting than was the case during Vietnam. He concluded that the Vietnam War had actually been lost in Washington, D.C., before any fighting occurred, due to a fundamental failure on the part of the civilian and military actors involved to argue the issues adequately. McMaster, who urged a more direct debate between civilians and the military on defense policy and actions, and Summers, who argued for a clear separation between civilians and the military, both pointed out controversies over the proper roles of civilian and military leaders. Despite those controversies and the apparent lessons learned from the Vietnam War, some theorists recognized a significant problem with Huntington's theory insofar as it appears to question the notion of a separate, apolitical professional military. While there is little argument that separate civilian and military worlds exist, there is significant debate about the proper interaction between the two. As discussed above, Huntington proposed that the ideal arrangement was one whereby civilian political leaders provided objective control to the military leadership and then stepped back to permit the experts in violence to do what was most effective. He further stated that the most dangerous arrangement was one whereby civilian leaders intruded extensively in the military world, creating a situation whereby the military leadership was not politically neutral and security of the nation was thus threatened both by an ineffective military and by provoking the military to avoid taking orders. laid out an agency theory of civil–military relations, which he argued should replace Huntington's institutional theory. Taking a rationalist approach, he used a
principal-agent framework, drawn from
microeconomics, to explore how actors in a superior position influence those in a subordinate role. He used the concepts of "working" and "shirking" to explain the actions of the subordinate. In his construct, the principal is the civilian leadership that has the responsibility of establishing policy. The agent is the military that will work – carry out the designated task – or shirk – evading the principal's wishes and carrying out actions that further the military's own interests. Shirking at its worst may be disobedience, but Feaver includes such things as "foot-dragging" and leaks to the press. The problem for the principal is how to ensure that the agent is doing what the principal wants done. Agency theory predicts that if the costs of monitoring the agent are low, the principal will use intrusive methods of control. Intrusive methods include, for the executive branch, such things as inspections, reports, reviews of military plans, and detailed control of the budget, and for Congress, committee oversight hearings and requiring routine reports. For the military agent, if the likelihood that shirking will be detected by the civilian principal is high or if the perceived costs of being punished are too high, the likelihood of shirking is low. Feaver argued that his theory was different from other theories or models in that it was purely deductive, based on
democratic theory rather than on anecdotal evidence, and better enabled analysis of day-to-day decisions and actions on the part of the civilian and military leadership. It operated at the intersection of Huntington's institutional approach and Janowitz's sociological point of view. Huntington concentrated on the relationship between civilian leadership and the military qua institution while Janowitz focused on the relationship of the military qua individuals to American society. Agency theory provided a link between the two enabling an explanation of how civil–military relations work on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, agency theory would predict that the result of a regime of intrusive monitoring by the civilian leadership combined with shirking on the part of the military would result in the highest levels of civil–military conflict. Feaver One of the key questions in Civil–Military Relations (CMR) theory has always been to determine under what conditions the military will intervene in the domestic politics of the nation. Most scholars agree with the theory of objective civilian control of the military (Huntington), which focuses on the separation of civil and military institutions. Such a view concentrates and relies heavily on the U.S. case, from an institutional perspective, and especially during the
Cold War period. Schiff provides an alternative theory, from both institutional and cultural perspectives, that explains the U.S. case as well as several non-U.S. civil–military relations case studies. While concordance theory does not preclude a separation between the civilian and military worlds, it does not require such a state to exist. She argues that three societal institutions—(1) the
military, (2)
political elites, and (3) the
citizenry must aim for a cooperative arrangement and some agreement on four primary indicators: • Social composition of the
officer corps. • The political decision-making process. • The method of recruiting military personnel. • The style of the military. If agreement occurs among the three partners with respect to the four indicators, domestic military intervention is less likely to occur. In her book,
The Military and Domestic Politics, she applied her theory to six international historical cases studies: U.S., post–Second World War period; American Post-Revolutionary Period (1790–1800); Israel (1980–90); Argentina (1945–55); India post-Independence and 1980s; Pakistan (1958–69). Concordance theory has been applied to emerging democracies, which have more immediate threat of coups. ==Civil–military relations in Afghanistan==