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Is there a crisis today in civil-military relations in the United States? Speaking from the perspective of a scholar in Argumentation Studies, I would say yes, but would characterize and conceptualize that crisis somewhat differently than a social scientist would. Initially, my goal is not to generate theory that can be used to explain the intricacies of civil-military relations across the board, but to use argument as a way of explaining one particular, historically grounded, and unique case-that is, post-Desert Storm America. More specifically, I would root this crisis not in any feature intrinsic to American political structures, but in what I see as a shift over the last few years in the way arguments about the possible use of force are evaluated. In brief, my argument is that civil-military relations are in a state of crisis today because the military has won the fight over whose argument standards trump whose.
Civil-Military Relationships as Argumentation
I will first back up and trace the path taken to reach this conclusion. While there is benefit to studying normative standards for argument (what counts as good evidence, for example), that is not the most pertinent aspect of the study of argumentation. It is at least as important to study the way in which real world arguers employ argument in order to further their agendas and claims, as the building blocks that underlie persuasive strategies. Argument is always, unavoidably, a vital tool in policy-making. It has to be, because, by definition, in policy-making empirical certainty will be impossible. That is the case for all the reasons decision theory would lay out: there are always finite time, limited resources, incomplete information, and so forth. But more fundamentally, if all those constraints were bracketed, policy-making boils down to answering the question, "what should we do?" Policy choices always rest on value choices. They always speak to what would be best. So even if we had perfect information regarding how to most efficiently accomplish a given goal, such an approach begs the question of whether we have the right goal in mind. Since such issues can never be settled either definitively or empirically, since consensus is as good as it gets, certainty is impossible.
Where certainty is impossible, we need a tool...