Content area
Full Text
One of the leading questions today in the scholarly civil-military literature is whether the U.S. military is too influential at higher levels of U.S. political-military decision-making, particularly since the beginning of the first Clinton Administration in 1993 (and if so, to what degree).l This is not, however, the foremost issue in the media and popular literature, which have tended to focus on the more headline-grabbing issues of women's roles in the combat arms of each service, the Army's discovery of widespread sexual harassment and concurrent breakdown of command responsibilities, and the sexual travails of selected individual officers, both junior and senior, all somewhat subsumed within the general rubric of a "military culture under attack."2 Of course these two different foci tend to merge on some issues, as they did during the resignation of the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Ronald Fogleman.3 But in this decade, for the most part, these two sets of issues have tended to be treated separately, with few credible connections made between them.
In the rush to move beyond Huntington and Janowitz, it is important to point out that there are still aspects of their work that are relevant today. In particular, Huntington argued that the debate over U.S. civilmilitary relations took place on two levels, including discussions of "power" and "ideology."4 As explained by Huntington, "power" refers to the influence, both formal and informal, of the military relative to other groups within the society, particularly those civilian groups responsible for the "control of the military."5 However, as Huntington also points out, since under constitutional democracies it is common for such responsibilities to be divided among the institutions of government, "control" often becomes an instrumental slogan for use by one civilian group vying for influence over another civilian group, as is the case today with the Republican Congress and Democratic White House. "Ideology," on the other hand, refers to the set of values preferred by the various civilian groups within society. The crux of the issue has been, and remains, the compatibility of that ideology with the ethic of the professional military, an ethic derived functionally from its purpose as the society's warfighters and that has remained relatively unchanged during the Cold War.
In this sense, within the current debates...