18 December 2008

U.S. Military Implements Policies Set by Civilian Leaders

Scholars discuss civilian, military roles in meeting foreign policy goals

Professor John Hutson explains how the U.S. armed forces execute foreign policy set by the U.S. civilian leadership.

By Eric Green
Special Correspondent

Washington — In the U.S. democratic system, the military’s proper role is to execute the missions set by the country’s civilian leadership. Several scholars on the subject recently talked with America.gov about how that principle is applied.

Peter Feaver, professor of political science and public policy at Duke University in North Carolina, said the military plays an essential role in advising civilian leadership on the military aspects of policy.

Civilian leaders must weigh the “pros, cons and risks” of how the options offered by the military best advance the U.S. national interest, said Feaver, who served on the National Security Council staffs of Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

“Civilians have a right to opt for courses of action that run counter to what the military prefers,” even if the military is right and civilians are wrong. In other words, “civilians have a right to be wrong,” said Feaver, author of a book on civilian-military relations called Armed Servants.

Military subordination to civilian authority is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, he said, specifically Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution. It establishes civilian power over the military by stipulating that the president (a civilian) “shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy.”

The Constitution imposes a system of checks and balances to distribute power among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government and prevent abuse of power by any individual branch.

Article 2, Section 2 gives the president (the executive branch) the power to wage war, and the president is the civilian commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces. But Article 1 of the Constitution reserves exclusively to the U.S. Congress (the legislative branch) the power of the purse, which gives Congress the responsibility to provide the resources for the nation's defense and the authority to conduct oversight of the executive branch. Congress also has the sole power to declare war.

Because civilian authority supersedes that of the military, American generals are not heads of state, but they may serve as president after retiring from the military. That post cannot be achieved by military force, but only by the will of the America people as expressed through the ballot box. A dozen formerly high-ranking military officers have been elected president, including George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

THE MILITARY-CIVILIAN DYNAMIC

“Only rarely,” Feaver said, do the preferences of the military “trump the preferences of civilians.” There are cases, he said, in which questions should be raised when civilians defer to military expertise.

Duke University professor Peter Feaver says the U.S. armed forces advise civilian leaders on military strategy.

He said the most common criticism in this area — that “civilian policymakers rush to employ military violence when other nonviolent/nonmilitary tools would be preferable” — is “grossly overstated.” Feaver said that “people who make this charge ignore the many examples of the U.S. eschewing military options and sticking with other options that aren’t working and won’t work.”

Some of these critics cite U.S. action in Iraq to support their position. Even though debates about Iraq policy are legitimate, Feaver said, they “are a poor basis for establishing a complaint that the United States” always depends too much on the military.

He said a complaint that has more legitimacy involves whether U.S. civilian departments are so resource poor that the “government ends up asking the military to do tasks that civilian agencies should be doing.”

The military has “resources and a can-do/command culture,” Feaver said. “When options are being weighed, the civilian leadership understands that if you give the job to the military, it will be done,” but leaders may lack the same confidence in some civilian agencies. It is this problem that Feaver said “must be fixed.”

MILITARY ROLE IN FOREIGN POLICY

American armed forces are an instrument in the execution of U.S. foreign policy, “but the armed forces can never be responsible or should they be responsible for actually setting that policy,” said John Hutson, judge advocate general for the U.S. Navy from 1997 to 2000 and now the president and dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire.

Hutson, whose military job involved providing legal advice to the secretary of the Navy, said the armed forces should not set policy because “military solutions are never the real solution” to a foreign crisis. The military’s job, he said, is to “provide the time and space necessary” for finding the real solutions to economic, political, social and religious problems.

The military’s expertise lies in carrying out civilian orders in fighting a foreign enemy, said Hutson, not in the peacekeeping or nation building that follows after a war.

A U.S. law called the Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, prohibits use of the military to enforce laws against American citizens, Hutson said.

That model “has served us well,” said Hutson, and it is one American policymakers should be conscious of if they are called on to make decisions involving civilians caught in foreign war zones.

Additional information about the Posse Comitatus Act is available on the Web site of the U.S. Department of the Navy.

See also “Civilian Control of the Military” and the text of the U.S. Constitution.