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The study of civil-military relations has suffered from too little theorizing
The recent interest in civil-military relations and questions concerning how governments control armed forces are exceptional. This renaissance in what some academics once considered a settled issue may be attributed to the emergence of post-cold war democracies in Eastern and Central Europe; to a (mostly) American quest to spread democratic norms throughout the world; to continued problems of imposing civil control over the military in many states, especially those where internal conflict seems endemic; and to a recent, but brief, interlude of American selfdoubt about the effectiveness of civil control in the United States. The main questions are: how, exactly, is the military controlled by civil authorities, what policies and structures lead to civilian control, and what kind of civil-military relations best serve the interests of democracies over the long term?
To the surprise of many westerners, the answers are not obvious. Moreover, many academics and policy makers have discovered that the theoretical foundation that might help them answer these basic questions is weak or even entirely lacking. Thus arises the call for a renewed effort to find a comprehensive theory of civil-military relations that can serve as a basis for understanding the issue, framing policy, and managing armed forces in the future.
Generally, extant and new theories on civil-military relations fail in two ways: they are too narrowly conceived and miss critical aspects of the problem, and they are too bound by the culture and national politics of their proponents.' Existing theories and studies tend to concentrate on solving or preventing the coup d'etat, something that is a dangerous but, arguably, occasional problem of civil-military relations in most states. "No coup? No problem, and so no further discussion is required."2 The weakness is not that theories address the interventions of the military in politics, but that they tend to overlook the other, perhaps more common, civil-military problems confronting societies and their armed forces.
Scholars in the United States and elsewhere propose several different approaches aimed at gaining the military's cooperation. They include, for example, a mission model advanced on the supposition that a military facing external threats will be more compliant then one facing internal threats.3 A second suggestion, an institutional model,...