The fulcrum of democratic civilian control: Re-imagining the role of defence ministries

ABSTRACT

In this introduction we present the justification and the analytical frame of our special issue. More specifically, this issue examines the institutional role of defence ministries in fortifying civilian control and military effectiveness. As we argue, scholarship on this subject is sparse, despite the ministry’s importance in enforcing civilian control, enhancing military effectiveness, and conducting the day-to-day affairs of national defense. If defence ministries are to fulfill these obligations, they must be properly positioned, financially and bureaucratically endowed, as well as staffed with knowledgeable civilians with sufficient authority. Not all ministries are up to these standards. To highlight these aspects, our special issue examines the defense ministries of four countries, two of which are older democracies (France and India) and two more recently established ones (Argentina and South Korea). These case studies pay particular attention to organizational design of the ministries, the roles assigned to civilian and military personnel, how much defense expertise civilians and officers can claim, and whether there are mechanisms that allow ministry personnel to convert resources into military strength. We underscore our contribution to the literature and suggest avenues for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil-Military Relations
• Defence Ministry
• Civilian Control
• Military Effectiveness

In his seminal book on civil-military relations, Samuel Huntington summarized a core consideration for subsequent theorists – how to enhance military effectiveness while simultaneously consolidating civilian control.¹ Generations of scholars since have grappled with aspects of this dilemma.² Scholars have used a variety of approaches, but a common, unifying theme seems to be what has recently been called the ‘civilian control and military effectiveness nexus’.³ To that end, the central concern for this special issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies is the function of the Ministry of Defence in this nexus. More specifically, this special issue examines the institutional role of defence ministries in fortifying civilian control and military effectiveness. What follows is a justification for this special issue, including the analytical framework, summaries of the contributing articles, and our collective contribution to the literature.

In a democracy, the Ministry of Defence is the fulcrum for defence policy under civilian authority. To be sure, other agencies also play a role, such as parliamentary oversight committees, audit institutions and national security or defence councils, in countries that have them. However, for the most part, day-to-day civil-military relations are conducted by the ministry. It is in this institution that civilians and the military most closely interact on a sustained basis to deliberate upon almost all matters pertaining to national defence and military organization. The ministry is not just the locus of civil-military activity but is the organizational means through which civilian control is achieved and enforced. Depending upon how it is designed and who is at the helm, a defence ministry can either structure relations of power to permit democratic governments to effectively command their armed forces, or it can inhibit those efforts and instead facilitate military autonomy. ⁴ It does so by assigning positions of authority, directing information flows, prioritising assignments, and determining who is in or out of the loop when it comes to making vital decisions. Institutions tend to persist, and thus how defence ministries are designed can have a lasting impact on civil-military relations.

Apart from providing organizational links between the government and the military, defence ministries are supposed to translate the policy preference of elected officials into military commands. As such, they serve as a buffer, standing between the chief executive and the armed forces, preventing commanders from occupying positions too close to the president or prime minister whereby they may exert undue influence or crowd out civilian points of view. But governments must also benefit from informed military input to craft intelligent defence policies. That means designing defence ministries that permit uniformed personnel access and roles where they can interact with civilian staff to maximize informational exchanges and dialogue—all within an organizational hierarchy that enables civilian control. In short, if defence ministries operate effectively, they open up avenues of military communication and do not focus merely on political domination.⁵

Interestingly, within the formal organization of the state, ministries of defence are also of a relatively recent origin, gaining importance only after the Second World War. Even in older democracies, ministries of defence were established relatively later: the United States and India in 1947, France in 1948, and 1964 in the case of the United Kingdom. In the rest of the democratic world, ministries of defence were formed much more recently: Spain in 1977, 1999 in Brazil and 2000 in the case of Colombia.⁶ Despite its importance, scholarship on ministries of defence is surprisingly sparse.⁷ This special issue aims to fill this scholarly gap by analysing the composition, capabilities, and functions of the Ministry of Defence in democratic countries.

From the perspective of civilian control, there are two categories of democracies – older and recently established. We have deliberately excluded hybrid and authoritarian regimes as their challenges and characteristics are unique. To be sure, the word ‘older’ is subjective, and what we are referring to are ‘mature democracies’, defined elsewhere as one ‘where civilian control has historically been strong and military establishments have focused on external defense’.⁸ In these democracies, the ‘first order problem’ of civil-military relations is usually not an issue, as formal civilian control over the military appears to be a settled fact. Instead, the primary concerns centre around civilian prerogatives to shape policies, and the twin concepts of military effectiveness and efficiency.

We have deliberately eschewed using the terms established and emerging democracies, as is more popularly used in the literature, as we feel that these terms can be misleading. According to Freedom House scores, to raise an example, some of the more recently established democracies (Argentina) have better track scores on political rights and civil liberties than do the older ones (India). So, the word established democracy may be misleading.

As the term suggests, recently established democracies are those which are recovering from either authoritarian or military rule. In these nations, civilian control is generally less assured as the country is recovering from years of military or authoritarian rule. Civil-military relations are therefore more delicate and prior historical baggage shapes current attitudes towards each other. It is moreover critical to institutionalize civilian control, ideally by empowering the ministry of defence, as a failure to do so destabilizes the polity, and has inadvertent consequences on military performance. For instance, after the end of the Cold War, Russia’s failure to institutionalize civilian control, through its ministry of defence, fostered institutional decay and prevented defence reforms.⁹ Generally, the Russian military holds an upper hand in terms of the balance of power vis-à-vis civilians and retains considerable institutional autonomy. Nonetheless, there are also instances where civilians have pushed the boundaries to assert greater control. For instance, in Spain, the civilian leadership played a crucial role in re-asserting institutional control in its transition to democracy.¹⁰

Conversely, ‘older democracies’ are not necessarily immune to the pathologies of harmful civil-military relations.¹¹ To take but one example, the Trump presidency witnessed tumultuous civil-military relations as the military dealt with an unconventional president and his senior political advisers.¹² According to some, this was not just a problem with this particular president, but reflected a pattern of a ‘hollowing out of the processes of civilian control within the Department of Defense’.¹³ Such arguments resonate in other established democracies.¹⁴ Thus, whether they are older or more recently established, we argue that there are surprisingly common problems across both types of systems, arising from well-known issues of information asymmetry, expertise, and processes resulting in varying levels of friction between civilians and the military.

Analytical frame: the ministry of defence and civilian control

Analysing the working of the ministry of defence provides a snapshot of the larger phenomenon of civil-military relations. The ministry is the main forum where politicians, civilian officials, and military officers meet regularly to deliberate and arrive at important policy decisions. An institutional analysis of the defence ministry, therefore, is a useful measure for understanding the pattern of civilian control. Moreover, civil-military relations are not just about civilian control, but also about military effectiveness. Indeed, countries that privilege strict civilian control over effectiveness, through coup-proofing measures, for instance, risk military performance failures.¹⁵ Academics are divided on the issue of the proper balance between control and effectiveness; however, most agree that such discussions occur mainly within the defence ministry. To better understand the functioning of the ministry of defence, our special issue focuses on its bureaucratic attributes, civil-military composition and roles, and military and civilian expertise.

If defence ministries are to fulfil their assigned duties to manage defence affairs and maintain control over the armed forces, they must be properly positioned and financially and bureaucratically endowed. The ministry and minister should be inserted within the operational chain of command just below the president or Prime Minister, making it clear that it has the authority to design and manage the government’s defence and security policies. Its hierarchical position also reduces the vertical authority of the armed forces, creating space between senior commanders and the chief executive. The ministry therefore must have in place an organizational design and procedures needed to manage defence, exert control, and achieve effectiveness. Countries have evolved their systems, involving a combination of legislation, administrative rules, and office procedures to equip ministries with the ability to oversee defence policy, direct the armed forces, and delineate responsibilities between civilians and the military. These features will tell us whether defence ministries have the organizational wherewithal to enhance civilian control and military effectiveness. Strong defence ministries will display an abundance of bureaucratic layers and departments intended to expand the ministry’s responsibilities which were previously handled by military personnel within the separate service branches. This is key to achieving a uniform, cohesive defence system that serves the foreign policy objectives of a democratic government while overcoming the narrow ‘servicism’ that once plagued many countries. Those ministerial offices open up positions of authority across an array of defence subjects that civilians can conceivably fill all to the benefit of civilian control. At the same time, bureaucracies are organizational shells that are only as effective as the personnel that inhabit them, and the decision-making procedures that are set up. They can be filled by qualified civilian staffers who can direct the crafting of defence policies, or they can just as easily be filled by military staff. They can set up decision-making procedures such as planning cycles that are guided by civilians with military input, or they can be placed in the hands of officers who may or may not consult with civilians. Hence, knowing what roles civilians and officers play within ministries is another important component of the analysis.

Second, our special issue focuses on the composition of the defence ministry. This is not to merely focus on its civil-military composition but more specifically on the roles assigned, and assumed, by bureaucracies within the ministry. Distinctions, therefore, have to be drawn between personnel and power. As will be made clear in a couple of our case studies, some ministries can have an abundance of civilian personnel, fostering the impression that those bureaucracies are also civilian dominated. But ministries that at first glance may appear to be well-governed and populated by civilian figures can still be heavily influenced by uniformed personnel who, while outnumbered by civilians, still head up and staff powerful ministerial departments responsible for everything from defence strategizing, military education to internal military affairs. This is not to say that those ministries are necessarily military-dominant, but it does caution against reaching the conclusion that a greater civilian presence itself constitutes civilian ministerial control. It requires analysts to probe more deeply into personnel occupational status and position: how high up the bureaucratic ladder are MOD staffers, what specific substantive areas are they in charge of, and how vital are those? Only then can we ascertain who has real power.

Third, we examine the role of civilian and military expertise. When they are skilled and knowledgeable, civilians can effectively ‘intervene’ in the affairs of the military. As is widely acknowledged, civilian officials play an important role in managing the ‘expert problem’ in civil-military relations.¹⁶ The ‘expert problem’ refers to the following dilemma: ‘how are ministers (and higher ups) to control the armed forces when they (usually) lack the necessary knowledge and experience to do this effectively?’¹⁷ Moreover, indicative of the ‘information asymmetry’ inherent in civil-military relations, how can civilians exercise control when they are dependent upon the military for information and advice?¹⁸ In practice, politicians try to overcome this dilemma by relying on civilian bureaucrats who emerge as advisors to the Defence Minister and in turn ‘assist’ the military in implementing defence policy. Theoretically, they can be a crucial pivot for both politicians and the military.¹⁹ But it all depends on how well-qualified and knowledgeable civilians are to undertake this role.

While civilians in many countries are at a decided disadvantage vis-a-vis their military counterparts when it comes to defence understandings, they need not achieve a perfect parity with the armed forces. Civilians must command a sufficient level of expertise and job security that enables them to hold their own with military staffers as they collaborate to discuss and design defence policies.²⁰ And they must know enough about the military’s side of the defence ledger to ensure that the government’s policy preferences are faithfully fulfilled and that the military respects their authority. Civilians who lack defence wisdom tend to defer to the military, and also forfeit a fruitful dialogue between the two sides.

The military too must demonstrate knowledge, one that goes beyond their narrow expertise in fighting wars. If they are to serve and advise democratic governments, they need to develop a broader mindset, one that is supportive of democratic rule, foreign policy, and civilian control. For this they could profit from a full range of subjects, both in the humanities and social sciences, especially politics and economics. Indeed, their military academies should ideally be integrated with the civilian university systems and, at the minimum, invite civilian faculty to foster much-needed cross-fertilization of ideas.

Nested within all these three elements is a larger quest – examining the degree to which civilians contribute to enhancing military effectiveness. For civilians to do so, there need to be mechanisms that, legally and bureaucratically, enable them to influence a range of military activities. Effectiveness, as many scholars agree, is about converting resources into military strength.²¹ This conversion process entails qualitative and quantitative dimensions and includes improving officer skills, securing upgraded weaponry, integrating the forces to operate in unison, and assuring that defence aligns with state objectives.²² Towards those ends, our contributors examine one or more of the following specific areas: promotion of senior officers, officer education, weapons procurement, jointness, and formulation of defence strategies. In each of these areas, some assessment is made as to who has more authority: civilians or military officers?

All that having been said, institutionally, the ministry of defence is not the sole determinant of civil-military relations. It, as we argue, may well be the fulcrum for defence policies enabling regular interactions between civilians and the military but it answers to a higher power. That is the realm of politics. Simply put, in democracies, politicians and politics can change the whole tenor and significantly re-arrange the pattern of civilian control. To take one example, despite not much structural change in the U.S. Department of Defence, civil-military relations in the country have been affected in recent years by domestic political factors including ‘deference to the military’, amongst others.²³ These types of nuances, and, at certain times, the primacy of politics emerge clearly from the articles in this special issue.

Case study justification

Despite having broadly similar functions, in the democratic world, no two ministries of defence are the same in terms of their structure, composition, functioning, office procedures and processes. This means that our approach of an institutional study of the ministry can be applied to any democratic state. We would encourage other scholars to do so, but as an initial study, we have necessarily narrowed the scope for this special issue. Accordingly, we have chosen to study four different countries under the categories of older and more recently established democracies. Older, or more consolidated, democracies are often presumed to have more stable civil-military relations, which feature strong defence ministries. Those democracies have had longer gestation periods with which to build up viable defence institutions. That may or may not be true, and it is worth exploring as we do, defence ministries in France and India. France represents an interesting instance of a ministry with a growing role for civilians, but one also characterized by civil-military competition and tension. India, on the other hand, represents a case of a developing country with a civilianized ministry but paradoxically one with considerable military autonomy.

As opposed to older democracies, more recently established democracies may still be struggling to reduce military power, and construct civilian-led ministries. We gauge the development of civil-military relations within defence ministries in Argentina and South Korea. After its exit from praetorian rule, Argentina is an interesting case study of a transition from a military to a civilian dominant institution and one that encourages military inputs. In South Korea, the ministry is well-populated with civilians, but officers have controlling influence over key policy-making bureaus. As such all four of these cases shed new and different light on our understanding of the role of the ministry of defence.

Contributions to this special issue

Older democracies

France

France, according to Antoine Maire and Olivier Schmitt, has a civil-military ministerial model subject to change marked by shifts in presidential preferences over time. What was once a defence system where the president dealt with his military commanders directly – bypassing the defence ministry while delegating enormous powers to the generals – has in recent years ceded authority over some key functions to civilians within the MOD. They have control over human resources, communication, international relations, and strategy, with the military retaining control over operational planning and implementation. This division of labour fosters some cooperation and fruitful exchanges between the two sides but has also compartmentalized functions in a way that induces competition, tension, and instability. The source of the problem is the military’s unease over the division of labour and its belief that it should have greater influence over a wider range of functions critical to defence, especially in the realm of overarching strategy and diplomacy. The great irony here is that the armed forces hold onto a professional educational system that continues to prioritise operational training over strategy and combat experience over analytical thinking. This focus lays bare the contradiction between the military’s narrow educational program and methods for selecting and promoting its top officers on the one hand, and its desire to define more broadly, its legitimate competencies within the MOD on the other.

India

Judging by the goal of civilian control, India’s defence ministry is a success story. Civilians have had a firm grip on all leadership positions and staffing within the Ministry for many decades. But this has come at the expense of civil-military dialogue, civilian expertise in defence matters and military effectiveness, argues Anit Mukherjee. India adheres closely to the Huntingtonian line when it comes to the division of labour. The armed forces have total autonomy over operational matters, not to mention education and defence planning, while civilians hold bureaucratic and financial powers. This model impedes fruitful interaction between officers and civilians and hinders jointness within the services. The military, says Mukherjee, has been ‘under strong, but uninformed bureaucratic control’. Rather than educate the civilian bureaucrats in defence, and foster civil-military interaction, India’s solution was to create a new Department of Military Affairs within the ministry, staffed entirely by officers with authority over a range of military issues. Thus, the model preserves, in a new form, separate, ministerial civil and military domains which may not be conducive to interaction or to improving effectiveness.

Recently established democracies

Argentina

Jorge Battaglino and David Pion-Berlin argue that Argentina’s MOD has evolved from a military to a civilian controlled institution and one that features routines and procedures that encourage civil-military interaction. Through laws, regulations, and organizational expansion featuring the creation of new civilian-led secretariats, undersecretariats and directorates, the ministry has been able to fulfil its principal purpose which is to act as the organizational link between the democratic government and the military, translating policy preferences of elected politicians into military commands. While it safeguards the democratic government from military obstruction or veto, it at the same time encourages a high level of positive, civil-military exchange – both formal and informal – which enables policymakers to benefit from the perspective of officers with considerable defence knowledge. This article examines civil-military relations within five key policy areas covered by the MOD: foreign relations, strategy, promotions, procurement, and education. Interviews with senior military commanders indicate support for decision-making processes generally but also frustration that political criteria are sometimes prioritised over technical criteria in procuring weapons and in authorizing or cancelling training missions, as well as disappointment over the steady decline in defence spending over long periods of time. The authors conclude that the ministry has achieved a high degree of control, but compromises on defence preparedness, and must be remedied through larger defence budgets redirected toward operations, training, and equipment.

South Korea

The South Korean case proves that appearances can be deceiving. On the surface, that country’s MOD is civilianized. More than 70% of its directors and employees are civilians. However, when it comes to actual decision making in five key policy areas, those powers are delegated to military-dominated bureaus, as shown by Insoo Kim and David Kuehn. Defence Strategy and Joint Coordination are in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while officer education and military promotion are handled by service headquarters, and weapons procurement is run by an independent agency thoroughly controlled by military personnel. The whole defence reform process is under the authority of military personnel, while civilian-dominated bureaus tend to handle issues more marginal to military core institutional interests. So, while de jure control may be civilianized, the South Korean defence ministry is de facto military dominant. This is true even though the nation has developed a stable, consolidated democracy. In analysing South Korea, the authors use a variety of unique databases, including telephone directories, to provide an original and in-depth examination of the composition and functioning of the defence ministry.

What is our contribution?

The authors in this special issue contribute in several key areas to our understanding of civil-military relations. First, all of them shed light on chains of command, structures, and procedures that either enable or weaken a defence ministry’s ability to exercise civilian control and improve military effectiveness. The ministry is the key institutional vehicle by which governments either succeed or fail to reduce the political power of the military, while at the same time enhancing its professional ability to provide for the common defence. However, the literature on ministries of defence is largely underdeveloped. All the articles in this special issue illuminate the functioning of the ministry across different cases.

The second contribution has to do with policy spheres of influence. Who is in charge of what? The mere numerical superiority of civilians inside a ministry, it turns out, is insufficient to ensure an adequate degree of control. These studies analyse the hierarchical position of civilians vis-à-vis military officers within the various ministries, as well as the scope of their authority. Indeed, as the articles on India and South Korea argue, despite significant civilian presence in the ministry, the military retains considerable prerogative by obtaining agenda setting powers. Civilians, we discover, must not only be situated high up on the organizational ladder, but must also have jurisdiction over critical defence issues such as planning and strategy, and not be relegated to administrative tasks. The academic literature on this is clear: ‘the majority of researchers who have addressed the relationship between control and effectiveness confirm … the positive effect of active involvement and strict civilian control in defence and military issues on military effectiveness’.²⁴

However, it is also essential for civilians to be adequately prepared to take on this task, while officers must be properly educated in ways that are supportive of democratic rule, foreign policy, and civilian control. Hence, the third contribution is to examine whether civilians come to the job adequately schooled and prepared in defence policy and whether military academies are integrated with or segregated from civilian academic institutions. Nearly all the country studies in this volume reveal serious deficiencies in civilian defence expertise. This is an issue of contemporary concern in other countries too – including the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, India, and many others.²⁵ This suggests a potential future line of comparative studies linking civilian expertise with military effectiveness. In the absence of such expertise, governments are often tempted to delegate authority to more knowledgeable military officers over critical defence issues.

Finally, our authors bring considerable analytical focus to each of their case studies. The literature on defence ministries in many of these countries is sparse. Their painstaking efforts add considerable empirical value to the study of civil-military relations in these countries for sure, but also our understanding of civilian control. We hope that such an approach is replicated in other democracies, both older and more recently established so that the ministries of defence get their proper attention as the fulcrum of civilian control.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and The State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (NY: Vintage Books 1957).

² There is exhaustive literature on this topic, for some relatively recent publications see Risa Brooks, ‘Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-military Relations in the United States’, International Security 44/4 (2020); Donald Travis, ‘Pursuing Civilian Control Over the Military’, Armed Forces & Society 45/3 (2019), 546–60, Suzanne C. Nielsen and Don M. Snider, eds., American Civil-Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002) and Peter D. Feaver, ‘Civil-Military Relations’, Annual Review of Political Science 2 (June 1999), 211–41.

³ Thomas C. Bruneau and Aurel Croissant, ‘Civil-military Relations: Why Control is not Enough’, in Thomas C. Bruneau and Aurel Croissant (eds.), Civil-Military Relations: Control and Effectiveness across Regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019), 2. For recent scholarship on aspects of this see David Pion-Berlin and Rafael Martínez, Soldiers, Politicians, and Civilians: Reforming Civil-Military Relations in Democratic Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Anit Mukherjee, The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Military in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), Suzanne C. Nielsen, ‘Civil-military Relations Theory and Military Effectiveness’, Public Administration and Management 10/2 (2005), 61–84 and Zoltan Barany, Armies of Arabia: Military Politics and Effectiveness in the Gulf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

⁴ Thomas C. Bruneau and Richard B. Goetze Jr., ‘Ministries of Defense and Democratic Control’, in Thomas C. Bruneau and Scott Tollefson (eds.), Who Guards the Guardians and How: Democratic Civil – Military Relations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 78.

⁵ Pion-Berlin and Martínez, Soldiers, Politicians and Civilians, 2017, 167–170.

⁶ Bruneau and Goetze Jr., ‘Ministries of Defense and Democratic Control’, 2006, 75–77.

⁷ For some notable exceptions see Douglas Bland, ‘Managing the ‘Expert Problem’ in Civil-Military Relations’, European Security 8/3 (Autumn 1999) and Bruneau and Goetze Jr., ‘Ministries of Defense and Democratic Control’, 2006.

⁸ Richard Kohn, ‘How Democracies Control the Military’, Journal of Democracy, 8/4 (1997), 141. For a similar assumption and conceptual approach see Douglas Bland, ‘Patterns in Liberal Democratic Civil-Military Relations’, Armed Forces and Society 27/4 (2001), 525–40.

⁹ Zoltan Barany, Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), 143–79 and Brian D. Taylor, State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 40–41.

¹⁰ Narcís Serra (translated by Peter Bush), The Military Transition: Democratic Reform of the Armed Forces (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

¹¹ Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 64–97 and Janine Davidson, ‘Civil – Military Friction and Presidential Decision Making: Explaining the Broken Dialogue’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 43/1 (2013), 129–45.

¹² Jonathan C. Binkley, ’Civil – Military Relations During the Trump Administration: Rejection of Military Professionalism and the Deterioration of Civil – Military Relations’, Armed Forces & Society (July 2022). doi:10.1177/0095327X221106783; for a journalistic account see Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, ‘Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals’, The New Yorker, (August 08, 2022), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/inside-the-war-between-trump-and-his-generals.

¹³ Risa Brooks, Jim Golby and Heidi Urben, ‘Crisis of Command: America’s Broken Civil-Military Relationship Imperils National Security’, Foreign Affairs 100/3 (May/June 2021), 70. Also see response essay Kori Schake, Peter D. Feaver, Risa Brooks, Jim Golby, and Heidi Urben, ‘Masters and Commanders: Are Civil-Military Relations in Crisis?’ Foreign Affairs 100/5 (September/October 2021), 230–8.

¹⁴ For instance, for problematic civil-military relations in other established democracies see Andrew M. Dorman, ’The United Kingdom: Increasingly fractious civil – military relations’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, August 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1862 and Stephen M. Saideman, ‘Canadian Civil-Military Relations in Comparative Perspective: It Could Be Worse?’ in Thomas Juneau, Philippe Lagassé and Srdjan Vucetic (eds.), Canadian Defence Policy in Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 119-34.

¹⁵ Dan Reiter, ‘Avoiding the Coup-Proofing Dilemma: Consolidating Political Control While Maximizing Military Power’, Foreign Policy Analysis 16 (2020), 314–20. Also see Caitlin Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), Ulrich Pilster and Tobias Böhmelt, ‘Coup-Proofing and Military Effectiveness in Interstate Wars, 1967–99’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 28/4, (2011), 331–50, Risa Brooks, Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes, The Adelphi Papers 38/324 (1998) and James T. Quinlivan, ‘Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East’, International Security 24/2 (1999), 131–65.

¹⁶ This problem was first described in Huntington, The Soldier and The State, 1957, 20.

¹⁷ Douglas Bland, ‘A Unified Theory of Civil-Military Relations’, Armed Forces & Society 26/1 (1999), 13.

¹⁸ For more on this see Peter Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 68–72.

¹⁹ For a discussion of the role of civilian bureaucrats see Douglas Bland, ‘Managing the ‘Expert Problem’ in Civil-Military Relations’, European Security 8/3 (Autumn 1999), 25–43.

²⁰ 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 (Winter 1999), 193–218. The authors suggest there must be a rough parity in professional preparation among civilians and officers.

²¹ Allan R. Millet, Williamson Murray and Kenneth H. Watman, ‘The Effectiveness of Military Organizations’, International Security 11/1 (1986), 37–71, Mukherjee, The Absent Dialogue, 2019, 23–26 and Bruneau and Matei, ‘Towards a New Conceptualization of Democratization and Civil-Military Relations’, 915–925.

²² Risa A. Brooks, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Culture, Society, Institutions, and International Forces on Military Effectiveness’, in Risa A. Brooks and Elizabeth A. Stanley (eds.), Creating Military Power: Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-26.

²³ Polina Beliakova, ‘Erosion by Deference: Civilian Control and the Military in Policymaking’, Texas National Security Review, 4/3 (Summer 2021), 55–75. Also see Jim Golby, ‘Uncivil-Military Relations: Politicization of the Military in the Trump Era’, Strategic Studies Quarterly 15/2 (Summer 2021), 149–74.

²⁴ Aurel Croissant and David Kuehn, ‘Introduction’, in Aurel Croissant and David Kuehn (eds.), Reforming Civil – Military Relations in New Democracies: Democratic Control and Military Effectiveness in Comparative Perspectives (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2017), 9.

²⁵ For concerns about expertise amongst civilian officials in the United States, United Kingdom, Russia and India respectively see the following: Brooks, Golby and Urben, ‘Crisis of Command’, 2021; House of Commons, HC 682: Decision-Making in Defence Policy, Eleventh Report of Session 2014–15, 26 March 2015, 37, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmdfence/682/682.pdf; Barany, Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military, 2007, 121, 177 and Anit Mukherjee, ‘In the Midst of a Transformation: Reforming Defence for Increased Military Effectiveness’, in Bibek Debroy, C. Raja Mohan, and. Ashley Tellis (eds.), Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power (New Delhi: Penguin India, forthcoming).