Notes:

[1] Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, (Berkeley; University of California Press, 2005), 252.

[2] “Super Bowl Ratings History (1967-present)” Sports Media Watch, accessed December 3, 2023,  https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/super-bowl-ratings-historical-viewership-chart-cbs-nbc-fox-abc/.

[3] Variety Staff, “CNN Reigns in Desert Storm,” Variety January 20, 1991, accessed December 3, 2023, https://variety.com/1991/more/news/cnn-reigns-in-desert-storm-99128411/.

[4] Jonathan Vespa, “Those Who Served: From World War II to the War on Terror”, Report ACS-43, US Census Bureau, June 2, 2020, accessed December 3, 2023, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/acs-43.html.

[5] Vespa.

[6] “Base realignment and Closure (BRAC) Sites by State,” Environmental Protection Agency, accessed December 3, 2023, https://www.epa.gov/fedfac/base-realignment-and-closure-brac-sites-state

[7] Ralph Vartabedian, “Decades Later, Closed Military Bases Remain a Toxic Menace,” New York Times October 2, 2023,  accessed December 3, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/us/military-base-closure-cleanup.html.

[8] “State of Competition with the Defense Industrial Base,” Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, February 2022, accessed December 3, 2023, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STATE-OF-COMPETITION-WITHIN-THE-DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE.PDF.

[9] “Confidence in Institutions,” Gallup, accessed December 3, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx.

[10] “Reagan National Defense Survey” Ronald Reagan Institute, November 2022, accessed December 3, 2023, https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/359970/2022-survey-summary.pdf.

[11] Benjamin Griffin, Reagan’s War Stories: A Cold War Presidency, (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2022), 172.

[12] Daniel M Peat and Jaclyn Perrmann-Graham, “Where Do I Belong? Conflicted Identities and the Paradox of Simultaneous Stigma and Social Aggrandizement of Military Veterans in Organizations” in The International Journal of Human Resource Management, VOL 34, NO 17, (September 2022): 3410.

[13] Jonathan Ahl, “Most Military recruits Come From Families of People Who Served. Experts Say That’s Not Sustainable,” The American Homefront Project, June 2, 2022, accessed December 3, 2023, https://americanhomefront.wunc.org/news/2022-06-02/most-military-recruits-have-family-members-who-served-experts-say-thats-not-sustainable.

[14] Ben Kesling, “The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Families to Join,” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2023, accessed December 3, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-recruiting-crisis-veterans-dont-want-their-children-to-join-510e1a25.

[15] John Lemza, The Big Picture: The Cold War on the Small Screen, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2021), 36. Many of the episodes of The Big Picture are available online through the National Archives.

[16] Lemza, 31.

[17] Lemza, 137, 90.

[18] Lemza 137.

[19] Lemza, 263.

U.S. military use of machine learning in intelligence products enjoins the military, the state, and its citizens in a sprawling public-private sector digital ecosystem, including the digital data supply chains relied on for model training. Arguments for and against the applicability of machine learning in these products are dominated by technical, legal, ethical, and organisational issues, which often obscure a fifth obstacle that trumps them all. The obstacle is institutional. It involves the transgression of the normative element of what the military does—its primary purposeful activity—via the changes we are witnessing in how it does it. Digital supply chains that fuel model building include nominally deidentified data collected via the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens’ everyday activities by private companies. These surveillance activities establish behavioural baselines derived from neutral activities, which previously represented little or no value to security communities, but from which now a variety of derivatives can be produced. These data derivatives include behavioural anomaly detection for target identification. This shift manifests an overlooked institutional fault-line in civil-military relations of profound implications. The normativity of state-sanctioned killing is at stake.

New Tech, New Enterprise, and a New Institution

In a 1999 RAND monograph on the American military enterprise in the digital information age, Carl H. Builder identifies a point of tension in civil-military relations that has deepened since that publication and remains unresolved. His central point was that the transformative nature of the digital information age means the U.S. military enterprise will not simply be applying new tools and methods to existing roles and missions. Rather, it will become a new enterprise with new roles and missions.[1] The new enterprise will enjoin a new relationship with the society from which its resources and mandate are drawn. The recent development of machine learning models by private companies, which are trained on large data sets made possible by mass surveillance of everyday civilian interactions, means observers, scholars, and practitioners can now begin to make sense of that new relationship and assess its implications for the military, society, and the state.

The Normativity of Killing

As John Keegan writes in his 2011 A History of Warfare, warrior culture follows society, but at a distance.[2] Trends in economics and society make their way in and out of military affairs, but the transfer is never total, nor are the effects uniformly distributed across sectors. But the cultural gap between the military and society is most stark when considered at an institutional level. Disrupting business models and social norms in entertainment, commerce, social life, and epistemology is categorically distinct from disrupting the business of killing. The military enterprise remains institutionally alienated from society, because its primary purposeful activity is the sanctioned killing of human beings. The modern state has traditionally been the institutional custodian of these foundational normative relations.[3]

The military’s resources and mandate are both drawn from, and negotiated with, society in formal and informal ways. In the U.S., society’s formal stake is negotiated via the legal restrictions it imposes on the military, and the political control of its roles and missions in peace and war by executive government, as well as congressional control over budgets. The normative stake is manifest informally. At an intimate level, the families, loved ones, and communities from which military personnel are drawn and put in harm’s way care about the meaning of what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. Society at large is like this but scaled up. The act of killing is considered justifiable and legitimate in democratic, rule-of-law societies such as the U.S. when the values and norms attached to its unique form of political community are expressed institutionally.

Militaries also seek normative grounding, among other considerations, for their roles and missions in the character of the society they swear to defend. Anecdotally, the serving members of no other U.S. institution express greater normative investment in the flag on the shoulder of their combat fatigues and the declared values it represents. Rule-of-law, the inalienable rights of the individual, freedom from coercive oppression, the democratic right to speak truth to power—these are meaningful connections to the character of political community felt by the military personnel from the U.S. and Australia with whom I have met and interacted. The professional and cultural sanction against the targeting of civilians is another prominent feature of military cultural identity.

The normativity of killing as a profession is deeply woven into the institutions of the military and society. As such, the profound implications for civilian-military-state relations are not captured by the discourse on technical, legal, ethical, and organisational issues presented by military use of machine learning in intelligence products. Matters of the how and why of sanctioned killing go beyond these discourses, which notoriously tend to obscure more than they clarify, particularly in matters of ethics and technology.[4] Which brings us to the normative implications of machine learning.

Machine Learning and Military Judgement

The state has eschewed its custodial responsibilities in this regard, preferring to cheer-lead based on a host of shaky assumptions.[5] The related role of the large consulting firms in the neoliberal era is receiving renewed attention in turn.[6] While scholars such as Weiss and Mazzucato have shown the U.S. government’s role in cultivating digital technologies has not been passive, the disruptive power of digital technology has meant the capacity to control its trajectory has been highly protean.[7] The commercial machine learning industry, perhaps for obvious parochial reasons, has preferred not to address the hard question of institutional unravelling, favouring instead those discourses that surface technological and legal puzzles which, while problematic, have yet to succeed in derailing industry practices, aims, and investment streams.

The U.S. military enterprise has found itself drawn along here to some degree. The misappropriation of various insights imported across scientific disciplines has been highly influential on military discourse, effectively creating a muddle of tactical acumen and strategic aims.[8] Builder notes the more mundane reality of service parochialism and funding imperatives. On the options available to the enterprise as it adapts to the digital age, he writes, “Whether the choice is real or not may be less pertinent than the fact that there are factions within the American military that are willing to make the choice seem real to those in and out of uniform who must decide how the military should be organized and funded.”[9]

The imperative of sound military judgement cannot tolerate a long discursive based on what seems real.[10] Machine learning application to intelligence production is often sold as the enhancement of decision-making. The military is daily implored by private sector consultants and vendors to embrace a “data culture” lest they be rendered the Luddites of the digital era.[11] The allure of faster tactical-level decision-making is not, however, synonymous with better judgement, and when judgement is considered at the strategic level, the tables can turn. Data-driven strategic blindness looms for a military enterprise not alert to the hard case of institutional unravelling. Again, Builder noted as much over two decades ago: “The balancing act is how to embrace the information technologies without being institutionally undone by them.”[12]

Shoulder to Shoulder With Private Citizens

Machine learning applied to intelligence production for the military involves the training of models. The expectation is the model, after training, will ingest new data and provide enhanced insight via statistical inference. These insights can then be included in intelligence assessments if they are procured by the military user. Large data sets for training allow the models to be fine-tuned. The tuning is merely the adjustment of a host of statistical parameters internal to the model via a process called backpropagation, whereby a known outcome is fit to the training data being input. The model will often end up either over-fit or over-generalised. In the former, the model tends to treat new data it hasn’t been trained on as extraneous. In the latter, the model tends to treat new data it hasn’t been trained on as intrinsic. Either way, models are problematic when they encounter non-training data and need to be treated with scepticism. This is the bias problem and the black-box problem wrapped up together. It is typically treated as a technical obstacle.

When the entire digital ecosystem is interrogated, however, the normativity problem comes into view. Mass surveillance of neutral human behaviour has ridden alongside the digital revolution under commercial terms. Without this commercial ushering in, large data sets for model training simply would not exist. Behind extensive discourses on the privacy, ethical, and legality issues presented by the commercial turn of the digital age lurks the normative question of the citizen’s right to obscurity in a free and open society.[13] The right to obscurity had not been formalised into legal frameworks prior to the digital age because prior to the advent of ubiquitous mobile computing, it was the default condition of every citizen, whose neutral behaviour was of no commercial value. The state presided over the citizen’s default obscurity, under which specific circumstances had to be met for it to be violated. We have left this world behind.

Civilian affairs offer the military some cues on what this could mean. Viljoen theorized “horizontal data relations,” addressing how the “datafication” of everyday life at the individual level expresses effects which must be understood at the population level: “Individualist data subject rights cannot represent, let alone address, these population-level effects.”[14] The implications for civilian-military relations of this analysis have been under-represented.[15] For our purposes, let us state the problem clearly. The surveyed condition of everyday citizens is inextricably connected via horizontal data relations to the generation of statistical inference, which may lead to the end user of an intelligence product prosecuting its military mission. In other words, connecting citizens directly to killing in ways they have not been connected before. Military technical innovation does not float freely. Human institutions, as deeply woven as those enjoining the state, the military, and the citizen, should attract an even higher level of voluntary scrutiny than those adjoining civilian affairs when technological innovation is considered. So far the inverse has been true. The problem is that scrutiny will come to the military and the state, voluntarily or not.

Conclusion

International relations and security studies scholars can feel bamboozled by techno-centric discourse which tends to dominate the mainstream. This is a shame. Any sufficiently transformative technology regime will impact most consequentially at the institutional level, and when military affairs are enjoined, we are pressed to consider the normativity of killing as the foundation of the modern state and its mandate to govern free people. Further, when society asks of the military that which, in order to deliver, the latter must transform itself, what the military comes to ask of society will be commensurate. Technology which masquerades as a free pass is not free. Nowhere is this collision more urgently in need of better understanding than in the area of machine learning and its applicability in matters of military judgement.

Notes:

[1] Huntington, Samuel P., The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

[2] Morse, Yonatan L. “From single-party to electoral authoritarian regimes: The institutional origins of competitiveness in post-Cold War Africa.” Comparative Politics 48, no. 1 (2015): 126-151; Bratton, Michael, and Nicolas Van de Walle. “Neopatrimonial regimes and political transitions in Africa.” World Politics 46, no. 4 (1994): 453-489.

[3] Kandil, Hazem. “Military, Security, and Politics in Regime Change: Explaining the Power Triangle” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2021.

[4] Hunter, Lance Y, Josh Rutland, and Zachary King, “Leaving the Barracks: Military Coups in Developing Democracies,” Politics & Policy, Volume 48, Issue 6, 2020, pp. 1080.

[5] Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies, foreword by Francis Fukuyama, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996

[6] Perlmutter, Amos. “The Praetorian State and the Praetorian Army: Toward a Taxonomy of Civil-Military Relations in Developing Polities.” Comparative Politics 1, No. 3, 1969, pp. 382–404.

[7] Bratton, Michael, and Nicholas van de Walle. Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997

[8] Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007

[9] Huntington, Samuel P., The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1967, pp. 84

[10] Ibid.

[11] Gerits, Frank, “La France en Afrique: pourquoi les politiques de Macron ont accru la méfiance et la colère,” The Conversation, 7 September 2023, url: https://theconversation.com/la-france-en-afrique-pourquoi-les-politiques-de-macron-ont-accru-la-mefiance-et-la-colere-212988

[12] “Niger : le régime militaire « célèbre une nouvelle étape vers la souveraineté »” Le Point, 25 September 2023, url: https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/niger-le-regime-militaire-celebre-une-nouvelle-etape-vers-la-souverainete-25-09-2023-2536722_24.php#11

[13] ‘“A slave who cannot assume his own revolt does not deserve to be pitied,” says Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso,’ Peoples Dispatch, 2 August 2023, url: https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/08/02/a-slave-who-cannot-assume-his-own-revolt-does-not-deserve-to-be-pitied-says-ibrahim-traore-of-burkina-faso/

[14]  J. Patrice Mcsherry, “The Emergence of “Guardian Democracy”,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 32:3, pp. 16-24, 1998

[15] Olafsson, Nadine, “When Military Coups d’état Become Acts of Social Justice,” E-International Relations, 17 January 2020, url: https://www.e-ir.info/2020/01/17/when-military-coups-detat-become-acts-of-social-justice/

[16] “Journée nationale de la souveraineté retrouvée,” Secrétariat Géneral du Gouvernement, 2023, url: https://sgg-mali.ml/fr/actualites/90/journe-nationale-de-la-souverainet-retrouve.html,

[17] “Niger’s General Abdourahamane Tiani declares himself leader after coup,” France 24, 28 July 2023, url: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230728-niger-s-general-abdourahamane-tchiani-declared-new-leader-following-coup-state-tv

[18] Welch, Claude E., “Praetorianism in Commonwealth West Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (July 1972), pp. 207

[19] Habtom, Naman Karl-Thomas, “The Potential Consequences for Africa of an FTO Designation of the Wagner Group,” Lawfare, 6 March 2023, url: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/potential-consequences-africa-fto-designation-wagner-group

[20] Lechner, John, Are Russian mercenaries bad for the Central African Republic? Responsible Statecraft, 11 April 2023, url: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/04/11/are-russian-mercenaries-bad-for-the-central-african-republic/

[21] Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LXXVII.

Furthermore, only large-scale programs—defined as those valued at more than €100M—require parliamentary approval, but even when parliament is required to weigh in, the Ministry of National Defense decides what they see. I was told at least once that the military prefers to be less than forthcoming about systems’ total expected life-cycle costs, to avoid spooking politicians with an even larger up-front price tag.[8] And for programs valued at less than €100M, there is no explicit need to secure parliamentary approval at all.[9]

Finally, Romania suffers from limited expertise on defense issues in the non-military government bureaucracy, and especially in formats that are independent of the military. The government’s main defense think tank, Institutul pentru Studii Politice de Apărare și Istorie Militară (ISPAIM), is subordinated to the Ministry of National Defense. And while the defense college is ostensibly there to train civilian government staff so they can conduct effective oversight, the reality is that the military ends up training the civilians to think like they do.[10]

The Ministry of National Defense also has a direct presence throughout key elements of the Romanian state bureaucracy. One former senior Air Force officer indicated that the defense ministry has its own coordination offices embedded in key national security ministries, e.g. foreign affairs, finance, and economy. If he needed something from the Ministry of Finance, he could call and be sure to reach another military officer.[11]

Some of this is inevitable. The line between “expert who knows how things work on the inside” and “insider with major conflicts of interest” is blurry in the best circumstances, and liaison offices to smooth cooperation across areas of different functional expertise make sense. But even assuming no ill-intent, it is easy to see how the end result is a defense establishment that is essentially being asked to self-regulate.

Ultimately, the cross-party consensus on defense issues, the military’s ability to exploit the institutional arrangements that govern defense policymaking, and the lack of technical civilian defense expertise in non-military organizations have created an environment in which military decision makers are able to design, execute, and implement defense programs in relative isolation, without political input or robust public debate.[12] These programs are then presented to parliament for up-down votes in which the strength of the cross-party consensus on defense issues, and politicians’ reluctance to be seen as denying the military necessary resources, means they are essentially always approved. The result is that American-style defense politics (like legislative committee hearings, politicians writing letters to demand answers from service chiefs, Congress forcing the Air Force to keep the A-10 in service or the Navy to buy more F/A-18s) are essentially non-existent.

Implications for Research & Policy

The Romanian experience holds lessons for researchers and policymakers. They need to pursue more detailed cross-national case studies. By traditional metrics, Romania does not raise civil-military red flags, and it sits in a blind spot for typical academic approaches to the subject. Still, there is ample evidence that its defense acquisition policy lacks robust civilian oversight. But to identify this kind of shortcoming, researchers must look under the hood and trace actual policy processes, map out granular institutional structures, and evaluate how civilian control is exercised on a day-to-day basis, even when questions about the use of force or high-level political stability are not in play. At the policy level, it suggests that American policymakers should not understand supporting defense reform in NATO allies as a purely military-to-military exercise. Rather, the U.S. needs to engage NATO allies in Eastern Europe, like Romania, in the political and social aspects of policymaking, to help foster a new generation of staffers and bureaucrats with the technical expertise necessary to effectively manage defense acquisitions.

To address this, U.S. policymakers could consider a range of options, all of which would be designed to build human capital outside of military institutions, to strengthen civilian and political oversight capabilities. In-country advisory missions could embed technical advisors within allied ministries of defense and focus on training civilian and political staff. It may also be valuable to expand pathways for promising defense and foreign policy professionals abroad to study at American professional military education institutions. By focusing on non-military students, these programs could help cultivate a community of expertise in allies overseas that is better-positioned to execute an oversight function. Finally, the U.S. could consider developing opportunities for foreign non-military staff to embed with Department of Defense or Congressional structures to gain firsthand experience with acquisition planning and political oversight. These opportunities could be modeled on existing congressional fellowship programs which fund opportunities for staff from non-profits and other outside organizations to work directly on Capitol Hill in a policy capacity. Direct legislature-to-legislature working groups, designed to build capacity in defense oversight could also  achieve some of the same goals.

Notes:

[1] Michael P. Colaresi, Democracy Declassified: The Secrecy Dilemma in National Security (Oxford University Press, 2014).

[2] Linda L. Fowler, Watchdogs On The Hill: The Decline of Congressional Oversight of US Foreign Relations (Princeton University Press, 2015).

[3] To be clear, Tuberville is using this power to push the Biden administration to change its policies regarding abortion, not because he is seeking to correct military misbehavior that he learned via oversight. All the same, he has a power that most legislators around the world do not, as few legislatures have any role in the promotion of senior officers. See Erin B. Logan, “Tommy Tuberville’s Blockade On Military Promotions, Explained,” Los Angeles Times, September 6th, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2023-09-06/tuberville-military-promotion-block-abortion-biden-essential-politics.

[4] For coding, see our article David Auerswald, Philippe Lagassé, and Stephen M Saideman, “Some Assembly Required: Explaining Variations in Legislative Oversight over the Armed Forces,” Foreign Policy Analysis 19, no. 1 (2023).

[5] David Samuels and Matthew Soberg Shugart, Presidents, Parties, And Prime Ministers : How The Separation Of Powers Affects Party Organization And Behavior (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Matthew Soberg Shugart and John M. Carey, Presidents And Assemblies : Constitutional Design And Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/cam025/91045043.html. Gary W Cox and Scott Morgenstern, “Latin America’s reactive assemblies and proactive presidents,” Comparative Politics  (2001); and  Marcelo Alegre and Nahuel Maisley, ‘Presidentialism and Hyper-Presidentialism in Latin America’, in Conrado Hübner Mendes, Roberto Gargarella, and Sebastián Guidi (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Latin America (2022; online edn, Oxford Academic, 13 Jan. 2022),.

[6] Linda L Fowler, Watchdogs On The Hill: The Decline Of Congressional Oversight Of US Foreign Relations (Princeton University Press, 2015).

As such, The Strategy Bridge wanted to explore the state of civil-military relations in the United States and beyond for the final quarterly series of 2023. This quarterly’s articles take new perspectives on issues both familiar and unexpected.

In our first piece, provocatively entitled “Legislative Oversight Over the Armed Forces Is Overrated,” Stephen M. Saideman and Philippe Lagassé leave the U.S. behind to take a more global look at civil-military relations. They argue that U.S. legislative oversight over its military is a model that is fruitless to seek around the world, where countless national legislatures lack the same infrastructure, even within democracies. The authors provide practical solutions as to how nations can take small steps to provide more oversight.

Eoin Lazaridis Power then turns our attention to the specific case of Romania, pointing to how it can be problematic to assume civil-military relations are healthy in nations. Romania appears to be a “consolidated democracy” not meriting special attention. But, reiterating a point made by Saideman and Lagassé, serious oversight is lacking that could lead to a myriad of problems. Power proposes that the U.S. expand its security assistance program to provide stronger civilian oversight of the military. 

Our focus then shifts to the continent of Africa to explore a recent string of coups in a specific context. In “Guardianship and Resentment in Precarious Civil-Military Relations,” Naman Habtom-Desta and Julian Waller explore the strong scorn many African militaries have increasingly cast upon their civilian governments, resulting in a rise of coups, especially in former French colonies. These coups have been  partially enabled by the changing context that is the West’s seeming floundering with the simultaneous rise of competing, non-Western models from peer competitors.

From a traditional focus on coups but in a new context, we pivot to how new technology may fundamentally reshape civil-military relations. In “The Normativity of State-Sanctioned Killing: Why the Hard Case against Machine Learning in Military Intelligence Production is Institutional,” Zac Rogers describes the potential results of a “sprawling public-private sector digital ecosystem.” The military’s use of vast amounts of seemingly innocuous information collected on its citizens through machine learning potentially disrupts the foundation of civilian interaction with the military. Where a citizen’s right to obscurity had been assumed before the arrival of the digital age, it now has to be reexamined and secured. Rogers contends that we must engage thoughtfully with this new realm of civil-military relations because it connects each civilian more deeply with the act of killing than has been the case before because of the changing context of a new kind of  digital total war.

The Strategy Bridge then returns to the more traditional realm of civil-military relations, although once again focused on the specific context of today in exploring the relationship of U.S. society to its military. In “Finding a New Big Picture,” Ben Griffin explores the U.S. Army’s past attempts to connect with its civilian stakeholders and suggests how it and the U.S. military as a whole can work to minimize an increasing gap between a professional military and a society increasingly unfamiliar with that professional military. He does that by exploring one of the longest-running television shows in U.S. history, The Big Picture, produced by the Army beginning in 1951.

Also focused on changing dynamics of civil-military relationships in the U.S., in “What We Get Wrong on Military Politicization,” Michael Robinson explores the ramifications of a diminishing domestic political consensus regarding the military that may require a more tailored solution to gauging the health of that relationship than focusing on the military’s so-called “ideological equidistance as a measure of ‘non-partisanship.’” Among many analytical points, he suggests widening the traditional aperture on the “military” to include not only current active-duty and reservist servicemembers but veterans as well, as they also shape norms of what is considered acceptable in terms of politicization.

The next article continues in a similar vein although flipping the script. Thomas Crosbie and Anders Klitmøller, both instructors of professional military education, discuss not what servicemembers should not say but what they should say. ”Beyond the Neutral Card: From Civil-Military Relations to Military Politics.” Pointing out the long shadow of Samuel Huntington’s flawed  insistence on apolitical officers, they argue that there is no shared understanding of what “constitutes appropriate and effective political influence by officers.” They embrace the notion of military-political agency, which relies on the assumption that the military fully operates within domestic politics whether it wants to or not. A more active approach, counterintuitively, may result in healthier civil-military relations than simply seeking to be apolitical at all costs.

Finally, Davis Ellison concludes the series by applying civil-military relations to the specific context of coalition operations in Afghanistan to identify the gap in the literature on  relationships between the civilian and military authorities within multinational organizations. In particular, Ellison argues that General Stanley McChrystal undermined civil-military relations when he discarded NATO’s strategic guidance.

Taken together, the articles in this quarterly series guide the reader through three continents to offer multiple perspectives on civil-military relations. They do so while touching on multiple intersections of Clausewitz’s trinity of the government, military, and society, an arguably more useful and timeless perspective than Samuel Huntington’s increasingly dated ideas. We hope this provides a historically-informed and analytically insightful set of accounts of civil-military relations.

Declinism looks and feels very different depending on who is deploying its rhetoric. A potent rhetoric that bears some relation to—but is not fully coextensive with—the structural and material conditions of decline, its rhetoric is exercised by people who occupy a wide variety of places on the political spectrum. Broadly speaking, Esty sees two groups employing declinism: “the technocratic center left” and adherents of a “center right pragmatism.”[3]

What interests him far more, however, than this taxonomy is their overlap—he is committed to taking seriously “the wonkish center” that practices “mainstream declinism.” Because it is here that declinism reaches its fullest expression: that America is not in decline but can perch for as long as it wants to at the apex of the global order. Declinism promises that decline can be slowed, halted, and even reversed. Just before his stark assessment of America’s standing in the world, McAvoy says that “[t]he first step in solving any problem is recognizing that there is one.”[4]

A feature of declinism, then, is that it is about talking about talking about the problem of decline and greatness. It is not about the problem itself. Esty’s attention to rhetoric across domains as varied as politics, economics, and culture is a powerful reminder of his expertise in fiction and culture. The facts of decline, its features, causes, and effects, take a backseat to the prevalence of simply talking about an American downward trajectory in the same breath as talking about American greatness.

The contradiction at the very heart of declinism—that American greatness remains and that it has already passed—animates some of the best parts of Esty’s book. Instead of spending his considerable gifts only dissecting the nature of declinism and the forms it takes, he turns his attention to its latent possibilities. An America actually in decline, that can acknowledge itself as such, in Esty’s telling, may be a more just, equitable, and peaceable America than an America characterized by declinism. Esty conjures a vibrant, vital, and globally relevant America on the backside of decline; it is rich with care for those who need it most—children, to be sure, but not only children, and dotted with the new construction of revitalized infrastructure.

Most of all Esty sketches a future free from the anxious push and pull of declinism. Released from that burden, America might transcend the anxiety at the center of and produced by the declinism’s inherent dialectical tension and move into the possibility of creating and fostering new narratives in relationship to its people, and itself in relationship to the world. Esty presents his 10 Theses in a supremely compelling chapter, “After Supremacy.” He holds that:

1. American decline is neither catastrophic nor avoidable.

2. The fate of American capitalism is not the fate of global capitalism.

3. Global success leads to cultural and political stagnation for apex nations.

4. Declinism projects scarcity and austerity, but even on the downslope elite nations and elites within nations retain wealth for generations.

5. Hegemony describes an intranational and international set of relations.

6. Belief in national superiority is part of the moral infrastructure of white supremacy.

7. Rise-and-fall rhetoric reframes the expansion of empire as a masculine adventure.

8. Epic tales of imperial rise-and-fall distort the narrative of national decline.

9. The historical experience of the UK establishes the contours of decline culture, but American patterns will be different.

10. Narratives about decline are more powerful than metrics and statistics.[5]

Declinism is pernicious precisely because it is imbricated in existing structures of racial, economic, gender, national and international inequity, and exploitation of people’s labor and of the planet’s natural resources. Decline, by contrast, opens possibilities of remedy and redress. New forms of sociality within a country and relations between countries are not inevitable on the other side of decline, but they are certainly easier to imagine and realize than under the current conditions of declinism.

Notes:

[1] Ben Hall, ‘’Military Briefing: Ukraine’s Battlefield Agility Pays Off’’, Financial Times, May 26, 2022; ‘’What Is Mission Command? Democracy and Freedom Can Play a Role in Military Effectiveness’’, The Economist, July 25, 2022; Mick Ryan, ‘’A Tale of Three Generals — How the Ukrainian Military Turned the Tide’’, Engelsberg Ideas, October 14, 2022.

[2] Karl Mavrikievitch Woide, Die Selbständigkeit der Unterführer im Kriege (Berlin: R. Eisenschmidt, 1895).

[3] Charles De Woyde, De l’Initiative des chefs en sous-ordre à la guerre (Paris: L. Baudoin, 1895).

[4] Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars 1912-1913: Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000), 83-5.

[5] Ibid, 121-22.

[6] Woide, Die Ursachen der Siege und Niederlagen im Kriege 1870 (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1894-1896) and in French, De Woyde, Causes des Succès et des Revers dans la Guerre de 1870 (Paris: L. Baudoin, 1899-1900).

[7] Woide, Die Ursachen, Ι, 5.

[8] Woide, Die Ursachen, ΙΙ, 428.

[9] Robert Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 308-10.

[10] Voide, Die Selbständigkeit, 5.

[11] David Barno and Nora Bensahel, ‘’Three Things the Army Chief of Staff Wants You to Know’’, War on the Rocks, May 23, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/05/three-things-the-army-chief-of-staff-wants-you-to-know/.

[12] Voide, Die Selbständigkeit, 122.

[13] Stephan Leistenschneider, Auftragstaktik im preußisch-deutschen Heer 1871 bis 1914 (Hamburg: Mittler & Sohn, 2002).

[14] Marco Sigg, Der Unterführer als Feldherr im Taschenformat: Theorie und Praxis der Auftragstaktik im deutschen Heer 1869 bis 1945, (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2014), 220-21.

[15] Olaf Rose, Carl von Clausewitz: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes in Rußland und der Sowjetunion 1836-1991 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 61.

[16] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 124. See also Christian E.O. Millotat, ‘’Die Schlacht von Tannenberg im Spiegel des literarischen Meisterwerks von Alexander I. Solschenizyn – August 1914, Das Rote Rad, Erster Knoten,’’ Military Power Revue der Schweizer Armee, no. 2 (December 2014): 38-48.

[17] For example Michael Eisenstadt and Kenneth M. Pollack “Armies of Snow and Armies of Sand: The Impact of Soviet Military Doctrine on Arab Militaries,” in The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas, ed. Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C. Eliason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 68-70.

[18] David Barno and Nora Bensahel, Adaptation under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 265-68.

[19] North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Allied Joint Publication-3 (AJP-3), Allied Joint Doctrine for the Conduct of Operations (NATO Standardization Office, 2019).

[20] Robert Leonhard, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare Theory and Airland Battle (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1994), 52-8.

[21] Citino, The German Way of War, 310.

[22] Martin van Creveld, ‘’On Learning from the Wehrmacht and Other Things’’, Military Review, Vol. 68, no 1 (January 1988): 70-1; Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2011), 76-82.

[23] Eitan Shamir, Transforming Command: The Pursuit of Mission Command in the U.S., British and Israeli Armies, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 6-7.

[24] Conrad Crane, ‘’Mission Command and Multi-Domain Battle Don’t Mix’’, War on the Rocks, August 23, 2017. https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/mission-command-and-multi-domain-battle-dont-mix/; Amos C. Fox, ‘’Cutting Our Feet to Fit the Shoes: An Analysis of Mission Command in the U.S. Army’’, Military Review, Vol. 97, no 1 (January-February 2017): 49-57.

[25] Martin Samuels, “Understanding Command Approaches”, The Journal of Military Operations, Vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 25-29.

Notes:

[1] J.D. Work “The Retreat of Cyber Forces after Offensive Operations,” in Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 401.

[2] An argument could be made for an Army University Press cyber warfare series based on J.D. Work’s chapter alone.

[3] The lesser-known examples are a tribute to the editors and chapter authors who remind us of the richness of the military history field.

[4] Tyler D. Wentzell, “Shattered: The XVth Brigade against Franco’s 1938 Aragon Offensive,” in Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences (ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 67, and Marcin Wilczek, “Polish Horsemen in the Chaotic Withdrawal of 1939,” in Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 91.

[5] Jonathan H. Warner, “Fly by Night: Plataean Evacuation and Night-Fighting in the Peloponnesian War,” in Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences (ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 99, and Eric Allan Sibul, “The Railroad Saved our Neck: United Nations Command Retreat in Korea, Winter 1950-51,” Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 241.

[6] Eric Allan Sibul, “The Railroad Saved our Neck: United Nations Command Retreat in Korea, Winter 1950-51,” Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 264-265.

[7] Walker D. Mills, “Conclusion,” in Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences (ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 427.

[8] Catherine V. Bateson, “‘We Did Retreat but Were Not Beat: The Irish-American Experience at Bull-Run as Told Through Civil War Songs,” in Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023), 327, 338.

[9] Alexander S. Burns, “Hülsen’s Retreat: The Campaign in Saxony, August-October 1760,” and Frank A. Blazich Jr., “Airmen into Infantry: The Provisional Air Corps Regiment at Bataan, January-April 1942” in Armies in ed. Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023)

[10] C.S. Forster, The General (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1936), 230. It is a concise novel with lessons for moral and ethical decisions stemming from WWI combat.  For a non-fiction example, see Paik-Sun Yuip, From Pusan to Panmunjon: Wartime Memoirs of the Republic of Korea’s First Four-Star General (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books, 1992).

[11] US Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2022), 6-21—6-25.

Part of the University of North Carolina Press’ Civil War America “Landmark Series,” edited by Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, the book contributes to broader scholarship examining how the Civil War transformed the national government and its relationship with the American people. Divided into two sections, A Republic in the Ranks explores how enlisted men debated the meaning of partisan loyalty in the early stages of the war and understood the significance of their political voice and how junior officers in particular directed the political engagement of the ranks. In addition to enlistment and voting records, Fry sifted through mid-to-late war newspaper accounts to reveal soldiers’ participation in both local and national politics. His reliance on a wide range of sources allows this book to trace the evolution of the army’s collective political consciousness throughout the war.

Soldiers simultaneously embraced the independence of military manhood and sought to replicate the comforts of home. Charged with electing their own junior officers, volunteer companies immediately engaged in partisan political processes. A Republic in the Ranks frames the relationship between junior officers and enlisted men as both fraternal and patriarchal. The organization of Union troops contributed to the emerging Republican consensus. Elected officers both directed the military service of their regiment and modeled moral virtue and professionalism for inexperienced soldiers. Loyalty to the Union flag and popular military figures like General McClellan initially fostered unity among men who were otherwise divided by education, ethnicity, and class. As confidence in Union leadership waned, regiments relied upon internal leadership to give voice to mutual complaints. Fry highlights the political awareness of enlisted men who filtered their war-time experiences and trauma through  partisan perspectives.

The year 1863 served as a critical military turning point during the Civil War, and political engagement increased leading up to the 1864 presidential election. After months of exhausting service, soldiers not only confronted the terror of the battlefield and the reality of slavery in the South, but forged deep bonds within individual regiments. Concern about peace-at-any-price measures, pro-Confederate secret societies, and disloyalty in the ranks prompted sixty-one regiments to issue political manifestos in support of the Lincoln administration and Republican policies in 1863. Fry demonstrates the power and impact of these political resolutions, consciously crafted to demonstrate the collective voice of the armed forces. Significantly, nine resolutions with broad regional representation explicitly addressed slavery. Sentiments included endorsements of the Emancipation Proclamation, support for the enlistment of Black soldiers, and declarations that situated the abolition of slavery at the center of the war effort. These political manifestos reflected the ideological unification of enlisted men, and the emergence of the Army of the Potomac as a social and political institution neatly aligned with Republican initiatives.

Fry’s A Republic in the Ranks also explores political campaigning within the Union Army, first through surrogate ballots and later through active engagement in public discourse. Lengthy furloughs allowed soldiers to speak in public meetings, take part in local elections, and encourage support of absentee voting among the armed forces. Debates over whether enlisted men should or could cast ballots in the 1864 presidential election led to sophisticated political campaigning among soldiers and veterans. Fry identifies the formation of veteran’s clubs as an extension of the army apparatus. Pressure from these organizations and enlisted men themselves led to Edwin M. Stanton’s General Order No. 265, which outlined procedures for wartime absentee voting. Through highlighting this process, the book situates the transformation from civilian to soldier at the heart of the political transformations of the Civil War era.