Content area
Full Text
It is tempting to blame the alleged crisis in American civil-military relations simply on personalities.1 The peccadillos and personal endowments of key individuals loom large: President Clinton's avoidance of the draft, the late-Secretary Aspin's rumpled management style, General Powell's extraordinary popular appeal, and so on. On the other hand, the coincidence of the collapse of the Cold War order also seems very suspicious. Surely it is no accident that concerns about the stability of civilian control in the United States accompanied the strategic confusion caused by the inability to discern clearly the exigencies of the new security environment?
I do not deny that these factors are important. I argue, however, that the alleged crisis is best explained by grounding it in a general theory of civil-military relations rather than in an ad hoc exegesis of recent events.2 Such a theory should provide the micro-foundational logic to explain the causal mechanisms whereby factors like the end of the Cold War or the popularity of the president produce changes in the civil-military relationship. In this article I give such an explanation based on a game-theoretic approach to agency and civil-military relations.3 According to my theory, the current friction in American civil-military relations reflects the kind of conflict one would expect from a certain combination of civilian choices and military responses. Civil-military relations are best understood as a game of strategic interaction. The civilian decides how to monitor the military, based on expectations of how the military might respond in the presence or absence of intrusive monitoring. Given the monitoring environment, the military decides whether to "work" or "shirk" based on its expectation that its behavior might be punished. Conflict results when civilians have incentives to monitor intrusively and the military has incentives to shirk.
The article proceeds by outlining briefly the general claims of the theory, identifying the equilibrium conditions associated with different patterns of civil-military interaction. I then apply the model to recent events, identifying the values for key parameters in the post-Cold War setting. The article argues that the factors most discussed in the crisis literature-the changes in civilian and military elites, President Clinton's personal history, General Powell's popularity, and so on-have had a profound effect on the quality of civil-military relations, but in a...