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Before responding to the essays written by James Burk and Andrew Bacevich in Volume 24, No. 3 of this journal, it would be helpful to explain more clearly the terms of reference we adopted for the symposium. We took for granted that the audience would be familiar with the sizable literature discussing what has been called a "crisis" in recent American civil-military relations. While we did not stipulate that civilian control in fact was in jeopardy, we took the general furor as prima facie proof that something interesting was happening. Others had explored in a descriptive way post-Cold War civil-military relations. As far as we knew, however, no one had linked the recent newsworthiness of the topic (to use the most theory-neutral description I can think of) to a general theory explaining how civilians and the military interact.
Coincidentally, each of the symposium authors was developing just such a general theoretical framework of civil-military relations. We therefore proposed a contest of sorts: each would offer a theoretically informed interpretation of the current "crisis" and then ask other scholars to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the alternative frameworks. Our charge was not to prove that something was happening in American civil-military relations, but rather to use different theoretical frameworks to explain what was happening and why. We asked not what ought to be, nor even what the policy implications of the phenomenon were. Ours was a tightly focused exercise in theory building and testing.
As I read their essays, Burk hewed closer to the spirit of this exercise than did Bacevich, and as a result I think Bacevich's criticisms miss the mark. But I have some quibbles with Burk's essay as well and will use them to make a larger point about the role of simplifications in social scientific analysis. A common disciplinary theme is interwoven through both essays, more evident in Bacevich than in Burk; both found fault with some of the analytical techniques common in political science but perhaps less widely considered legitimate in other disciplines, especially history. Neither Burk nor Bacevich persuade me that the alleged faults are serious nor that the faults preclude such political science models from making a meaningful contribution to our understanding of post-Cold War civil-military relations.
Absent...