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WHAT is the actual basis of civil-military relations in the United States? To what degree does that basis provide a secure foundation for genuine civilian control? To what extent are the theory and practice of present-day civil-military relations conducive to sound national security policy?
For a nation that presumes to be at one and the same time the world's leading military power and the world's model for democracy, these are questions of fundamental importance. Yet in the decades since the United States emerged as a dominant power, such questions havewith only occasional exceptions-received scant attention. Seldom during the postwar period have issues related to civilian control found a place on the nation's crowded agenda. On the contrary: like the accuracy of the vote count on election day or the essential probity of the Internal Revenue Service, a stable and effective civil-military relationship is something that the vast majority of Americans take for granted.
Thus confined to the margins of public discourse, the relationship between the U.S. military and American society remains one facet of civic life about which superficial thinking is not only permissible but sacrosanct. In the hinterlands of mid-America, the suggestion that military subordination to civilian authority is less than absolute and might on occasion be altogether problematic would likely be treated as evidence of bad manners if not of defective patriotism. To the extent that American citizens bother with the subject at all, the predominant attitude can be summarized by this simple formula: no coup? no problem. In other words, so long as a military overthrow of the government appears improbable, the basic civil-military relationship is presumed to be satisfactory-and hardly worth a second thought. Yet to persist in seeing coup probability as the inverse correlative of civilian control vastly oversimplifies a complex subject-on a par with evaluating airline performance exclusively in terms of the frequency of mid-air collisions. This oversimplification reflects poorly on the guild of military historians who manage to produce campaign histories and military biographies by the armful while consigning civil-military relations to the attention of colleagues who specialize in, say, the armies of Brazil or Nigeria. To the extent that American civil-military relations in the postwar era have attracted scholarly attention, it largely has been at the hands...