The Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations

Florina Cristiana Matei, Carolyn Halladay, Thomas C. Bruneau, Florina Cristiana Matei, Carolyn Halladay, Thomas C. Bruneau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471625
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations offers a wide-ranging, internationally focused overview of the field of civil-military relations.

The armed forces are central actors in most societies and are involved in many different roles. Amongst other activities, they engage in peace operations, support the police in fighting crime, support civilian authorities in dealing with natural disasters, and fight against terrorists and in internal conflicts. The existing literature on this subject is limited in its discussion of warfighting and thus does not do justice to the variety of roles. This second edition not only fills this important lacuna but offers an up-to-date comparative analysis and provides a conceptual framework to analyze how strategies can realistically be implemented. Amalgamating ideas from key thinkers in the field, the book is organized into three main thematic parts: Part I: Civil-Military Relations in Non-Democratic States and Illiberal Democracies; Part II: Civil-Military Relations in New Democracies; Part III: Civil-Military Relations in Established Democracies.

This handbook will be essential reading for students and practitioners in the fields of civil-military relations, defense studies, war and conflict studies, international security, and IR in general.

1Introduction

Democratic civil-military relations in the twenty-first century

Florina Cristiana Matei, Carolyn Halladay, and Thomas C. Bruneau¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003084228-1

Since we published the Routledge Handbook on Civil-Military Relations in 2012 much has happened, and much has not happened, both of which necessitate a new edition of the handbook. The theme that the co-editors of the earlier handbook, Bruneau and Matei, firmly emphasized—that the analysis of civil-military relations must include both democratic civilian control and effectiveness of the military (as well as of police forces and intelligence agencies)—has been increasingly accepted among scholars. For example, Aurel Croissant in Germany, Rafael Martínez in Spain, David Pion-Berlin in the United States, Christopher Dandeker in Great Britain, and Angel Flisfisch and Marcos Robledo in Chile are analyzing effectiveness as well as democratic civilian control in their publications.²

There remains, however, both a neglect of the importance of civil-military relations and a continuing unawareness of the framework that we propose. Sir Lawrence Freedman in his recent publication, The Future of War: A History, includes virtually no mention of the officers and soldiers who fight wars or the civilian decision makers who send them to war.³ Another recent book is How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which, in the context of analyzing the potential death of democracy in the United States, is accurate in emphasizing political parties and civil society but completely ignores the role of the military.⁴

In addition, there are explicit criticisms by published academics who have held senior decision-making positions in national security and defense in the United States. In How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks, in citing others, makes it clear that the established literature in civil-military relations was not useful in her attempt to understand US security policies in Afghanistan during the Obama administration.⁵ In Borderless Wars: Civil Military Disorder and Legal Uncertainty, Antonia Chayes focuses on civil-military relations in her book dealing with current military roles and missions and makes it clear that she finds the existing literature of little value.⁶

Accordingly, in this chapter, we reiterate and update in the conceptual framework of the handbook the emphasis on effectiveness, and two thirds of the case studies in the handbook concern effectiveness. There is also much more attention to roles and missions, as there remains a conceptual weakness in much of the literature on civil-military relations, which focuses almost exclusively on armed combat, when in fact in the vast majority of militaries and other security institutions (e.g., gendarmerie, police, intelligence organizations) are tasked with fulfilling different roles. They are not focused on defense or war but rather on combating terrorism and crime, carrying out peace, stability and reconstruction operations, civil affairs, to name a few.

There are many incredible things happening in the world that deal directly with civil-military relations, understood here to include both control and effectiveness. For example, within the realm of democratic civilian control of the military, in the United States under the Trump administration, a unique situation arose in which both the secretary of defense and the secretary of homeland security were retired four-star Marine Corps generals, and the national security advisor was an active-duty three-star Army general. This circumstance calls into question the effectiveness of democratic civilian control of the security institutions, as well as raising concerns of militarization of the executive branch. In Venezuela, the military is the main buttress of the battered government of President Nicolás Maduro, and in Egypt, following the military coup of July 3, 2013, the military rules the country under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Meanwhile, in Turkey, following a pattern of intermittent rule by the armed forces, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan now dominates all domains of politics and by purging the military has made a military coup virtually impossible. The situation of President Vladimir Putin in Russia, where he dominates an increasingly reformed and reequipped military is similar. In Chile, during the anti-government protests that occurred in the fall of 2019, President Sebastián Piñera issued a state of emergency and sent the armed forces in the streets of Chile’s capital Santiago.

In addition, many countries around the world—old and new democracies alike—have seen an increase in popular support for military coups/regimes as a means to do away with real and perceived existential threats (e.g., terrorism, crime) and sources of insecurity (e.g., corruption).⁷ Within this context, Brazil actually elected a former military officer, Jair Bolsonaro, to the presidency in 2018; Bolsonaro has vowed to run the country with an iron fist and rarely misses an opportunity to admonish his population about the benefits of having a military rule.⁸ Today, in mid-February 2021, all of those in top positions in President Bolsonaro’s office are from the military.

Within the framework of effectiveness in fulfilling roles and missions, there has been an increased tendency to rely on the military to fill non-traditional roles. For example, in the lead-up to the US congressional elections in 2018, President Donald Trump was widely believed to have played up the active-duty military at the border with Mexico to increase the chances of Republicans prevailing at the polls. In Argentina, the previous president, Mauricio Macri, issued an executive order in 2018 that allows the armed forces to conduct certain domestic roles, without specifying—or limiting—which roles. At the same time, in an attempt to boost the effectiveness of the armed forces in traditional defense roles, Macri allocated resources with some urgency for the modernization/procurement of military equipment, after an Argentine navy submarine disappeared in the ocean in the fall of 2017 (because of technical issues), which led to the death of all personnel on board. As Russia occupied Crimea in 2014 and continues to make threatening noises elsewhere, several European countries are increasing budgets to boost military effectiveness. As China claims suzerainty in the South China Sea, and as the United States under President Trump is perceived as unreliable, countries in Asia, including Japan, are also increasing their military effectiveness in fulfilling humanitarian assistance and disaster relief roles. Because peacekeeping is now done by some 123 countries (out of 193 in the United Nations [UN]), and some missions have resulted in scandals, including accusations of sexual abuse against troops in Africa and the spread of cholera, allegedly by UN peacekeepers, in Haiti, there is a tremendous emphasis today on peacekeeping being done effectively.

The same emphasis applies to fighting terrorism, which is now a global threat. In Spain, for example, the Civil Guard—the Spanish military police—has also been deployed domestically, along the police forces, to prevent terrorist attacks as well as (organized) criminal activities. In France, as well, since the successful terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, in an effort to avert future threats, President Emmanuel Macron has deployed the military domestically since November 2015. In 2020 he deployed the armed forces at home again to assist in the pandemic. Indeed, in other countries, the armed forces have been given a lead role in fighting the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic by their civilian governments. For example, the armed forces in both Poland and Germany provide support to local authorities to mitigate the pandemic by patrolling streets under lockdown, disinfecting hospitals, and safeguarding their countries’ borders.⁹ At the time of this writing, in Romania, where the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 has exceeded the numbers of deaths in any other Eastern European country—mostly because the civilian health care system, plagued by endemic corruption, poor management, and lack of equipment, has been unable to deal with the pandemic effectively—the government put the military in charge of civilian hospitals.¹⁰ In light of these developments and events, we found a need to revise and update the framework proposed in the first edition of the Routledge Handbook of Civil-military Relations to mirror these changing priorities and requirements of both democratic consolidation and contemporary security challenges, which are presented in the next section.

A revised conceptual framework of civil-military relations

Our revised conceptual framework consists of two elements: democratic civilian control of the security forces and the effectiveness of the security forces in fulfilling their assigned roles.¹¹ The present section provides an overview of each component of this framework.

Democratic civilian control of the security forces is key in achieving democratic civil-military relations. Indeed, the events and developments discussed earlier in this chapter confirm that fear of big armies (or of other government institutions that possess guns) taking over the country (or supporting a populist leader’s moves to highjack democratic institutions) remains a justified concern in contemporary democracies. Control of the intelligence apparatus—which may or may not possess guns but works in secrecy and can use information as a weapon to jeopardize democratic progress—is also justified.

We conceptualize democratic civilian control in terms of authority over the following: institutional control mechanisms, oversight, and the inculcation of professional norms (although professional norms can also contribute to effectiveness, as admittedly these institutions strive to become professional so as to fulfill their roles and missions as best as they can). Institutional control mechanisms involve providing direction and guidance for the security forces, exercised through institutions that range from organic laws and other regulations that empower the civilian leadership, to civilian-led organizations with professional staffs. Civilian-led organizations can include a ministry of defense for the armed forces, a ministry of the interior for police forces, and a civilian-led intelligence agency for the intelligence apparatus, a ministry of finance to ensure budgetary control, and a well-defined chain of authority for civilians to determine roles and missions, such as a national security council-type organization.¹²

Oversight involves legal, regular monitoring of the security sector by the civilian leadership to keep track of what the security forces do and to ensure they are in fact following the direction and guidance they have received from the civilian chain of command. These formal institutions can include one or more committees in the legislature that deal with enacting laws, devising policies, and approving budgets; judicial courts that interpret the laws and ensure that the security sector activity and personnel observe these legal boundaries; internal legal counsels and inspector generals that ensure the operations carried out by the security institutions are ethical and constitutional; and supreme audit institutions (SAI—also known as courts of audit, or courts of account) that monitor the efficiency of the security forces’ roles.¹³ In a functioning democracy, oversight is exercised not only by formal agencies within the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but also by the independent media, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and even international organizations, such as human rights courts.¹⁴ Professional norms are institutionalized through legally approved and transparent policies for recruitment, education, training, and promotion, in accordance with the goals of the democratically elected civilian leadership; thus, the security institutions internalize the previous two control mechanisms.¹⁵

Effectiveness in fulfilling roles and missions involves the preparedness and ability of the security institutions to fulfill any or all of the roles assigned to them by the civilian leaders. In our research, we found that currently the security forces can fulfill the following 14 direct or supportive roles:¹⁶

• Fighting external wars or conflicts,
• Fighting internal wars or conflicts,
• Combating terrorism,
• Fighting (transnational organized) crime,
• Conducting peace, stability, and reconstruction operations,
• Conducting emergency management and civil affairs,
• Conducting research and development,
• Ensuring the security of own government institutions on foreign soil
• Ensuring prison security,
• Ensuring the safety and security of elections,
• Ensuring environmental protection,
• Safeguarding national patrimony,
• Protecting space security,
• Conducting defense diplomacy via security cooperation and assistance.

We posit that achieving effectiveness involves fulfilling three basic requirements.¹⁷ First, a plan should exist to provide a strategic vision, or a roadmap, for the role of the security forces in the democratic society. Examples include national security strategies, national military strategies, white papers on security and defense, strategies for disaster relief, strategies on organized crime, doctrines on intelligence, counterterrorism doctrines, and the like. Second, structures and processes should exist to formulate the plans and see through the implementation of these plans. These structures and processes include ministries of defense, ministries of the interior, national security councils, or other means that facilitate jointness and/or interagency coordination, as well as international cooperation. Third, a country must commit resources, in the form of political capital, money, and personnel, to ensure it has sufficient equipment, trained forces, and other assets needed to implement the assigned roles and missions. If it lacks any one of these three components, it is difficult to imagine how any state would effectively implement any of these roles and missions.

The rest of the book

For these reasons, then, most of the chapters in this book look to these two requirements for civil-military relations in countries where these issues are particularly relevant. There are also four chapters on civil-military relations in autocracies, where the emphasis is on the different means by which autocrats control the military. Specifically, the handbook is divided in three sections. The first section (Chapters 2–7) focuses primarily on the issue of control and analyzes civil-military relations in nondemocratic states and illiberal democracies. In Chapter 2, Ihor Kovalevskyi explores civil-military relations in modern Russia. He finds that civil-military relations in Vladimir Putin’s Russia reflect the overall security policy relationship in an authoritarian regime. The armed forces, as well as the rest of the security sector, exist to serve the president’s personal and political interests. Russia’s current civil-military relations involve high military powers and prerogatives with virtually no democratic control and oversight over the military by any other body except the president. Essentially, in Russia today, the military and security serv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Democratic civil-military relations in the twenty-first century
• Part I Case studies of civil-military relations in non-democratic states and illiberal democracies: The issue of control
• Part II Case studies of civil-military relations in new democracies: The issue of effectiveness in different roles and missions
• Part III Case studies of civil-military relations in established democracies: The dynamics of change in control and effectiveness
• Bibliography
• Index