Civil—Military Relations in the United States and Russia

James Burk , "Theories of Democratic Civil-Military Relations," Armed Forces & Society 29, 1 (Fall 2002): 7.

Zoltan Barany , Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7.

One can, of course, point to the actions of Douglas MacArthur in openly defying the orders of his commander in chief-President Harry S. Truman-but that was a rare exception to the rule in both of the countries discussed here. See Dale Herspring, The Pentagon and the Presidency: Civil-Military Relations from FDR to George W. Bush (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 77-78, 81. Some have seen parallels between MacArthur and Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov, but as Timothy Colton argued in his major work on the Soviet Main Political Administration, the clash between these two men was more of personality conflict that a civil-military dispute. See Timothy Colton, Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesman and Cold War Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 5; Richard Kohn, "The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today," Naval War College Review 55 (Summer 2002):8-59.

For an essay arguing the critical importance of "influence," see Kobi Michael, "The Dilemma behind the Classical Dilemma of Civil-Military Relations," Armed Forces & Society 33, 4 (2007): 518-46.

Christopher P. Gibson and Don M. Snider, "Civil-Military Relations and the Potential to Influence: A Look at the National Security Decision-making Process," Armed Forces & Society 25, 2 (1999): 195. A similar argument is contained in Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 1, in which she argues that "when divergence over security and corporate interests are not entrenched and profound, importance obstacles to strategic assessment are absent." Ibid., 5. Obviously, if the lines between the military and civilians are entrenched, then a constructive relationship is very unlikely.

Deborah Avant , "Conflicting Indicators of `Crisis' in American Civil-Military Relations," Armed Forces & Society 24, 3 (1998): 383.

Sam C. Sarkesian and Robert J. Connor , Jr. , The US Military Profession into the Twenty-first Century; War, Peace and Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006 ), 19.

Zbiniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington , Political Power: USA/USSR ( Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982).

Jonathan R. Adelman , Revolution, Armies and War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1985).

E.g., J. Samuel Fitch, ed., The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Constantine Danopoulos and Cynthia Watson, eds., The Political Role of the Military (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996); Jonathan R. Adelman, ed., Communist Armies in Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1982); Constantine Danopoulos and Daniel Zirker, eds., The Military and Society in the Former Eastern Bloc (Boulder, CO: Westview, 199); Andrew Cottey, Timothy Edmunds, and Anthony Forster, Democratic Control for the Military in Post-communist Europe; Guarding the Generals (London: Palgrave, 2002); Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, eds., Civil-Military Relations and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands of single-country studies. For example, Alfred Stepan's Rethinking Military Politics, Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) has had a major impact on scholars of civil-military relations all over the world.

Michael Desch, Civilian Control of the Military (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), see esp. 39-66 and compare his analysis with this writer's The Kremlin and the High Command (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). In the end, the Russian military was far less of a threat to political control than Desch assumed. In fact, it was in a state bordering on chaos given Yeltsin's lack of leadership and respect for the military.

David Pion-Berlin , Civil-Military Relations in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 1-35.

Ibid., 17

Peter D. Feaver , Armed Servants; Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Walter F. Ulmer, Joseph J. Collins, and T. O. Jacobs, American Military Culture in the Twenty-first Century (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies Press, 2000), 3. Also see Edgar Schein, "Organizational Culture," American Psychologist 45, 2 (1990): 110.

Nick Jans with David Schmidtchen , The Real C-Cubed: Culture, Careers, and Climate and How They Affect Military Capability (Canberra: Australian National Defense University, Strategic and National Studies Centre , 2002), 39.

One may argue that paramilitary forces such as the police also require the individual to put his or her life on the line in carrying out his or her duties. That is true, of course, and that is why some of the military's cultural characteristics are shared by police forces. However, the military is more removed from civilian society and is trained to use more complex forms of violence. For a discussion of civilian military culture, see Thomas Langston, "The Civilian Side of Military Culture," Parameters (Autumn 2000): 21

For a more detailed discussion of military culture, see Williamson Murray, "Does Military Culture Matter?" Orbis (Winter 1999): 27; John Hillen, "Must US Military Culture Reform?" Orbis (Winter 1999): 43; and Williamson Murray, "Military Culture Does Matter," FPRI Wire 7 (January 1999): 2, http://www.fpri.org.

The following statement of the main characteristics of U.S. military culture is based on a variety of sources, including many discussions with military officers as well as the author's thirty-three-year association with the U.S. Navy and a variety of academic studies. See, for example, Jans with Schmidtchen, The Real C-Cubed, 42-53; A. J. Bacevich, "Tradition Abandoned: America's Military in a New Era," National Interest 58 (Summer 1997): 3; John Allen Williams, "The Military and Modern Society," The World and I 14 (September 1999): 311; Edgar R. Puryear, American Generalship: Character is Everything: The Art of Command (Novato, CA: Presidio, 2002), 1-43; Peter Maslowski, "Army Values and American Values," Military Review 70, 4 (April 1990): 10-23; Betts, Soldiers, Statesman and Cold War Crisis, 157-58; Richard H. Kohn, "How Democracies Control the Military," Journal of Democracy 4, 8 (1997): 140; Thomas E. Ricks, "The Widening Gap between the Military and Society," Atlantic Monthly 280, 1 (July 1997): 66-77; "Cultural Demolition in the Military," Washington Times, November 20, 1998; Peter Feaver, "The Gap, Soldiers, Civilians and Their Mutual Misunderstanding," National Interest 61 (Fall 2000): 29-37; Gregory D. Foster, "Failed Expectations: The Crisis of Civil-Military Relations in America," Brookings Review 15 (Fall 1997): 46-48; and Elliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002). Also see articles in Peter Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

For comments on Russian military culture, the author has relied on his own extensive contact with Russian military officers as well as a variety of academic studies. See, e.g., Herspring, The Kremlin and the High Command; Pavel K. Baev, "The Challenge of Small Wars for the Russian Military," in Russian Military Reform, 1992-2000, ed. Anne C. Aldis and Roger N. McCermott (New York: Frank Cass, 2003), 189-202; Alexandr Golts, "The Social and Political Condition of the Russian Military," in The Russian Military Power and Policy, ed. Steven F. Miller and Dmitri Trenin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 80; Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: The Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), citing General Vrobyev, 293; Christopher C. Losksley, "Concept, Algorithm, Indecision: Why Military Reform Has Failed in Russia Since 1992," Slavic Military Studies 14, 1 (March 2001): 1-26; Michael Orr, Manpower Problems in the Russian Armed Forces, 1992-1993, no. D62 (Camberley, UK: Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Conflict Studies Research Centre, February 2002), 8; Michael Orr, "Reform and the Russian Ground Forces, 1992- 2002," in Russian Military Reform, 1992-2000, ed. Anne C. Aldis and Roger N. McCermott (New York: Frank Cass, 2003), 136; Brian Taylor, "The Russian Military Outside Politics: A Historical Perspective," PONARS Policy Memo, 2 (October 1997); Robert Barylski, The Soldier in Russian Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing, 1998), 9-12, 57-58.

Richard Neustadt , Presidential Power and the Modern Presidency: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990), 11.

It is important to note that the Russians, either civilians or military, have had little to say about military culture or civil-military relations. As one Russian writer put it, "Russian authors mainly stress the problem of civilian control of the military. Civilian control is defined not only in the narrow sense, as a control of the government over the military and this understanding implies an elected civilian head of the military. So civil-military relations are mainly understood as an interaction between the government and the military, while in foreign studies this term has a broader meaning, for example, the interaction between the whole society and the military." Or as she put it elsewhere in her article, "Russian authors tend to view the military as a closed system separated from the rest of society." Olga Filippova, "Civil-Military Relations: The Comparative Analysis of Russian and Foreign Approaches to the Issue," Post-Soviet Armies Newsletter 5, 2 (2006). Nevertheless, a reading of Russian materials or discussions with Russian officers makes it very clear that they expect civilian authorities to respect their organizational culture. The critical question is, how similar or different is the process in both countries? Are there certain commonalities that are critical to creating symbiotic civil-military relations? If so, what are they and what is their impact in more than one polity?

Cited in Michael J. Orr , Rodionov and Reform, no. C92 ( Camberley, UK: Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Conflict Studies Research Centre, January 1999), 3.

For the Yeltsin period, this writer relied on "Russian Military Budget," Global Security.org, as cited in Steven Miller , "Moscow's Military Power: Russia's Search for Security in an Age of Transition," in The Russian Military Power and Policy, ed. Steven E. Miller and Dmitri Trenin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1-42.

Robert V. Barylski , The Soldier in Russian Politics, 478.

Brian D. Taylor, Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 308.

Herspring , The Kremlin and the High Command, 74.

Olga Oliker , Russia's Chechen Wars, 1994-2000 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 9-10.

Moscow Times, April 18, 1996.

As quoted in Lieven, Chechnya, 111.

Herspring , The Kremlin and the High Command, 127-29.

Gregory J. Celestan , Wounded Bear: The Ongoing Russian Military Operation in Chechnya ( Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Foreign Military Studies Office , August 1996), 11.

This section covers up to March 2007, when Ivanov was replaced by Anatoliy Serdyukov, who continued to serve under newly elected president Dmitri Medvedev.

"Putin and the Chechen War: Together Forever," Moscow Times, February, 11, 2004.

C. W. Blandy, "Moscow's Failure to Comprehend," in The Second Chechen War, ed. Anne Aldis, Strategic and Combat Studies Institute Occasional Paper 40 (London: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute: September 2000), 17. His approach to making changes in the military was gradualistic. He gradually forced the defense minister out, and a short time latter forced the Chief of the General Staff to retire. He also changed the relationship between the defense minister and the Chief of the General Staff so that the latter was not only clearly subordinate to the former but also forbidden to interfere in operational matters.

As cited in Herspring, The Kremlin and the High Command, 174.

Paul Murphy , The Wolves of Islam (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2004), 101.

C.W. Blandy , The Storm, Part I-The "Invasion of Avaristan," no. P30 ( Camberley, UK: Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Conflict Studies Research Centre, March 2000), 41.

"Hope Glimmers for Reform," Moscow Times, March 29, 2001, via Johnson's Russia List, March 29, 2001.

Steven J. Main , The Strategic Rocket Forces, 1991-2002, no. D66 (Camberley, UK: Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Conflict Studies Research Centre, July 9, 2003), 26.

"Federalnyi zakon `Ob oborone," April 24, 1996 . http//www.mil.ru/articles/articles3863.shtml.

The primary focus is on Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as Secretary of Defense. While Robert Gates adopted a very different approach-much as Minister of Defense Dmitri Serdyukov has in Russia-events are too current to permit the kind of conclusions needed for a study of this type.

Fred I. Greenstein , "The Changing Leadership of George W. Bush: A Pre and Post 9/11 Comparison," in The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy, ed., Eugene R. Wittkopf and James McCormick , 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 359.

Bing West , The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq ( New York: Random House, 2008), 362.

Shinseki would later testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. When asked by Senator Levin (D-MI) how many troops were needed for an invasion of Iraq, he responded, "Something on the order of a hundred thousand." Rumsfeld was furious, and Wolfowitz undercut him by stating that his views were "wildly off the mark." Dale R. Herspring, Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 124-25. There has been a debate on the appropriateness of Shinseki's testimony in Armed Forces & Society: see discussions by Damon Coletta, "Courage in the Service of Virtue: The Case of General Shinseki's Testimony before the Iraq War," Armed Forces & Society 34, 1 (October 2007): 109-21; and Paul Camacho and William Hauser, "Civil-Military Relations-Who Are the Real Principals? A Response to `Courage in the Service of Virtue: The Case of General Shinseki's Testimony before the Iraq War,'" Armed Forces & Society 34, 1 (October 2007): 122-37.

James Fallows , "Blind into Baghdad," Atlantic Monthly 293, 1 (January-February 2004): 15.

Herspring , Rumsfeld's Wars , 13.

Colin Powell , My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 425.

Ibid.

As has been stressed previously, I am not trying to quantify the relationship, nor to show correlations. Rather, this is a notional charge, based on the preceding material.

This term is almost impossible to accurately translate. Technically it means "inner leadership," but in practice it is tied to the German effort to civilianize military culture to the maximum degree possible.