Civil-Military Relations in Perspective

Strategy, Structure and Policy

Stephen J. Cimbala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317165361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Ciencia y tecnología militares

The topic of civil-military relations has high significance for academics, for policy makers, for military commanders, and for serious students of public policy in democratic and other societies. The post-Cold War and post-9-11 worlds have thrown up traditional as well as new challenges to the effective management of armed forces and defense establishments. Further, the present century has seen a rising arc in the use of armed violence on the part of non-state actors, including terrorists, to considerable political effect. Civil-military relations in the United States, and their implications for US and allied security policies, is the focus of most discussions in this volume, but other contributions emphasize the comparative and cross-national dimensions of the relationship between the use or threat of force and public policy. Authors contributing to this study examine a wide range of issues, including: the contrast between theory and practice in civil-military relations; the role perceptions of military professionals across generations; the character of civil-military relations in authoritarian or other democratically-challenged political systems; the usefulness of business models in military management; the attributes of civil-military relations during unconventional conflicts; the experience of the all-volunteer force and its meaning for US civil-military relations; and other topics. Contributors include civilian academic and policy analysts as well as military officers with considerable academic expertise and experience with the subject matter at hand.

Chapter 1
Kids These Days: Growing Military Professionalism across Generations

Isaiah Wilson III, Edward Cox, Kent W. Park and Rachel M. Sondheimer

The Army’s expert knowledge can be broadly categorized into four capacities: Military-Technical, Moral-Ethical, Political-Cultural, and Human Development. Of the four, it is the human development capacity that sets the Army apart as a profession. As officers enter, develop, lead, and eventually retire, they have a profound impact on the institution as a cohort due to generational influences on organization and leadership. This chapter examines how generational differences help and hamper the human development capacity that the Army must have to socialize, train, educate, and develop the Army officer corps to be stewards of the profession.

Three generations of current Army leaders coexist at any given moment, bringing with them different formative experiences and views on professionalism. The procession of these three groups of people will profoundly shape the operation and legacy of the institution long after their respective tenures. The manner in which each group of leaders shapes the Army will have much to do with their own formative experiences rising through the ranks. In the halls of the Pentagon today, these generations take on labels such as, “Gulf War Generals, Bosnia/Kosovo Colonels, and Iraq/Afghanistan Captains and Majors.” Each of these groups corresponds to a larger societal generational group—Gulf War Generals are predominantly Baby Boomers, Bosnia/Kosovo Colonels are members of Generation X, and Iraq/Afghanistan Captains and Majors are Millennials. A closer look at these three populations reveals much about the formidable experiences that shaped their professional view:

Boomers: Born between 1946 and 1964, this group of around 77.3 million individuals came of age during a period of significant social and political transition.1 The generation itself straddles two distinctly different periods: the 1950s, when society was still deeply-rooted in traditional values of stability and responsibility, and the 1960s and 1970s, a time of significant social and political turmoil in our society. From the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War, this generation witnessed and experienced the effects of the rebellious counterculture lashing back at authority. Within the officer corps, the Boomers make up most of the senior general officers with the youngest of this generation reaching 30 years of service by 2012. While the oldest members of this cohort were commissioned during the Vietnam era, most of Boomers’ careers as officers started in the 1980s at the beginning of the Reagan administration’s new military build-up. They experienced the post-Vietnam professionalization of the Army with large investments in new technology and equipment. As Lieutenants and Captains, they trained and prepared for the Soviet invasion through the Fulda Gap only to see their adversary collapse without a shot fired. Instead of the Soviet armored columns, this generation of officers fought in the desert against Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War as senior Captains and Majors. Their careers continued as Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels with some of the older cohorts making general officer during Somalia and Kosovo. Most who continued in active duty service were general officers when 9/11 occurred.

Generation X—Born between 1965 and 1980, this group of 46 million individuals is sometimes known as the MTV generation.2 While the Boomer generation came of age during dramatic social change, Generation X came of age during a dramatic technological change. New innovations in technology, such as faxes, copiers, and computers, fundamentally changed the way people lived and worked. Within the officer corps, Generation X currently makes up most of the field grade officers with some of the older cohorts starting to become general officers. Mostly commissioned after the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War was the first testing ground for some of the older cohorts while “Military Operations Other Than War” became the norm, somewhat reluctantly, for the younger cohorts. Unlike the Boomers and other generations, this population of officers did not share a common experience of war in the traditional sense of having a common adversary. While experiencing an increase in operational tempo, they were engaged in a variety of peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and humanitarian missions. This changed after 9/11 when this generation of officers provided the bulk of tactical leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost all had served multiple combat tours by the time they reached the rank of field grade officer.

Millennials: Also known as Echo Boomers, Generation Y, and Generation Next, this group of individuals was born between 1980 and 1994. Most are just beginning to enter the work force. At approximately 76 million, they constitute one of the largest generations since the Greatest Generation of World War II.3 Whereas the previous two generations were digital immigrants who had to learn and adapt in the information age, the Millennials are digital natives. They do not remember a time without computers, the Internet, cable TV, and cell phones. For the Millennials, multitasking is the norm and they feel perfectly comfortable simultaneously watching YouTube, reading an email, chatting on instant messenger, and updating a Facebook status, all while listening to music on an iPod. Most do not remember a world before 9/11, when people did not have to take their shoes off before boarding a plane. Most Millennials joined the Army at War and have little concept of a peace-time Army. Making up almost the entire population of Lieutenants and Captains, Millennials bore the brunt of the tactical fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. They do not understand when older generation officers talk about a “normal” rotation through the national training centers. For the Millennials, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism is the norm. Millennial officers are highly tactically competent, battle-hardened, and confident in their ability to conduct operations independently of higher headquarter command and control. Because of this, they are understandably “irreverent” to hierarchical command and control. They are tactically talented as battlers but often immature in their understanding of and appreciation for the operational and strategic-level.

One difference between the Boomers and Millennials is highlighted above—the degree of autonomy that each generation is comfortable with. Boomers grew up in an Army where the platoon/company often moved with the brigade/division as a whole. Millennials are comfortable in working autonomously even from their own battalion; they see that as the norm. This is not limited to their military experience; Millennials have been educated collaboratively even as children and are more accustomed to collaboration than hierarchy.4

One’s generational perspective profoundly influences future decision-making and leadership style. The promotion from company grade officer to field grade officer is one of the more difficult transitions one must make during an Army officer’s professional career. Some never quite make the transition and continue to operate with perspectives stuck at the tactical level. The Army’s promotion and command selection system reinforces this behavior by (over)relying on tactical performance as key indicators for strategic potential. It should not be surprising, then, that field grade officers look back and rely on their tactical experiences, consciously or subconsciously, to help them analyze new situations. It is this world view, formed early in the career progression, that provides professional perspective on different courses of action. As such, while it is difficult and, in some cases counter-productive, to label individual officers based on their generational background, understanding the formative milestones for these different populations can help us better understand aggregate behavior and interactions among the various levels of the officer corps.5

In the face of the coexistence of these three vastly different generations under the aegis of the “current Army leadership,” how do we communicate and develop a single contemporary professional ethos? As an organization, the Army must maximize the transmission of each cohort’s expertise among the other generations. For example, the senior leadership brings years of experience that it must relay in a top-down fashion to the younger cohorts while the junior leadership brings knowledge of the current fighting force that is of use to its superiors. How is this knowledge best communicated as a means of shaping the current and future Army profession?

The Importance of Teaching, Learning, and Mentorship

Dialog and discourse among the generations are the keys to shaping a cohesive professional ethos within the Army. Generally speaking, institutions must allow for generations to teach and learn from each other in formal and informal settings. Moreover, this teaching and learning must occur from the top down, the bottom up, and from peer-to-peer.

These relationships and communication styles must take on a mentorship as opposed to coaching model. Coaching involves the passing of knowledge from previous generations to the next under the assumption of a stagnant environment in which there exists a known and finite answer that can be imparted to the next generation. Such coaching is usually undertaken by those no longer in the profession. In contrast, mentorship involves the distillation of an approach to incorporating knowledge and cultivating a way of thinking as one adapts to a changing environment. Here, there is no known or finite answer, but there is a right way to think about problem-solving and the cultivation of ethics to shape behavior. Such mentorship is usually undertaken by active but senior players in the profession.

Case Studies of Interwar Periods

To emphasize the importance of mentorship and dialog across and within coexisting generation, we present short examinations of the key advances in the cultivation of Army professionalism during three interwar periods. Interwar periods allow for time for self-reflection and collection of lessons learned from the most recent conflict. Interestingly, leaders cannot obtain an adequate assessment of these lessons unless there is communication between and among the different generations of officers—fighting forces on the battlefield, mid-level officers commanding on the ground, and key leaders strategizing from a certain distance. These vignettes highlight what we can learn about the importance of teaching, mentorship, and dialog in the cultivation of the professional ethos from each of these formative periods.

Post-World War I to World War II

Budget cuts made the Army a hollow shell throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The National Defense Act of 1920 authorized a force of 18,000 officers and 280,000 men, but the actual strength of the Army was less than half this number. It was common for a rifle company to have only seven or eight men available for duty. In 1932 the chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, reported that both Belgium and Portugal had larger armies than the United States.6 Forced to do more with less, the officer corps renewed its focus on professionalism, building on the reforms of Secretary Elihu Root in the days following the Spanish-American War. Mentorship from above played a key role in officer development. Junior and mid-level officers, many of whom were veterans of the recent conflict, were encouraged to research and publish articles in military journals, which flourished during this time. In two famous examples, both George Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower were encouraged by Brigadier General Fox Conner to publish articles in the Infantry Journal in 1920.7

The War Plans Division of the General Staff undertook a review of the Army’s officer education system, based on input from Newton Baker, the Secretary of War. Reflecting on the American experience in World War I, Secretary Baker wanted officers for the General Staff who possessed a “broader knowledge, not only of their purely military duties, but also a full comprehension of all agencies, governmental as well as industrial, necessarily involved in a nation at war.”8 At every level, officers were encouraged to question basic assumptions and develop critical thinking skills through the Army’s educational institutions. During this time, at the United States Military Academy, under the leadership of Herman Beukema, Professor of Economics, Government and History, cadets began to study international relations for the first time using a comparative methodology.9 The Army War College was separated from the General Staff and two schools for junior officers were re-established at Fort Leavenworth. All three schools emphasized the need for effective staff planning to collaboratively solve a hypothetical military problem, culminating in a war game exercise. Not all officers were prepared for such a curriculum. Of the 78 officers in the Army War College class of 1920, 10 did not complete the course and did not receive credit for their attendance. Three others completed the course but were not recommended for either command or duties on the General Staff.10

During this interwar period, budget constraints and the organization of the Army’s institutions provided a space for the different generations in the officer corps to teach and learn from each other in both formal and informal settings. The mentorship approach, which is distinctly different from a coaching communication style, facilitated and reinforced bonds of camaraderie and trust that would establish a cadre of professional officers as World War II began.

Post-Vietnam through the Gulf War

The period immediately following the Vietnam War was a tumultuous time not only for the U.S. Army but the entire nation. Racial tension, rampant drug use, growing disillusionment of the political system following high profile assassinations and political scandals all served to undermine the institutional foundation of our society. It was during this turbulent and chaotic time that the Army shifted to an all-volunteer force (AVF). This began a series of reforms within the U.S. Army that significantly altered the future of the force and necessitated a reliance on mentorship and education of its ranks.

An emerging trend resulting from the end of the draft on July 1, 1973 was the increasing reliance on women to fill the ranks of the AVF.11 The initial recruits in the AVF failed to meet expectations in quality and quantity with record number of category IV recruits, the lowest category of enlistment on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Integrating women into the ranks brought in highly qualified recruits, most with high school diplomas, to make up for the shortages in qualified male recruits.12

Despite the best efforts of the Army, the 1970s became known as the lost decade. An internal report by BDM Corporation for the Pentagon stated in 1973, the Army was “close to losing its pride, heart, and soul and therefore [its] combat effectiveness.”13 In 1979, General Shy Meyer, Chief of Staff of the Army informed President Carter, “Mr. President, basically what we have is a hollow Army,” as he reported that he had neither the divisions nor the lift capability to reinforce U.S. forces in Europe with 10 divisions in case of a Soviet attack.14 Only four of the 10 active divisions in the U.S. were capable of deploying overseas in an eme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Kids These Days: Growing Military Professionalism across Generations
• 2 Searching for a More Viable Form of Civil-Military Relations: The Canadian and American Experiences
• 3 Civil-Military Relations in Contemporary Russia
• 4 Civil-Military Relations and the American Way of War
• 5 The U.S. Civil-Military Problematique and New Military Missions
• 6 The War without a Strategy: Presidents, the Pentagon, and Problems in Civil-Military Relations since the 9/11 Attacks
• 7 Who Serves? The American All-Volunteer Force
• 8 Military Theory, Strategy and Praxis: Implications for Civil-Military Relations
• 9 Business Models and Emerging U.S. Warfighting Concepts
• 10 Cyberwar and Nuclear Crisis Management: Implications for Civil-Military Relations
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index