Both sides are talking about a civil-military crisis, but the armed forces never have been a mirror of society. Nor should they be.
In recent years, conventional wisdom has suggested that the post-Cold War U.S. military has become a "broken mirror" of society. The argument goes that our military no longer reflects the ideological norms, or even the geographical and demographic makeup, of the society it lives in and exists to protect.
A debate has been taking place over this possible crisis in U.S. civil-military relations. Journalist Thomas E. Ricks has warned of "a sense of separation between this military and this society," while Captain John L. Byron has labeled "a growing, self-created gulf of isolation" as "the military issue of the day." Even John Hillen, one of a few commentators who think that this gap may not be such a bad thing, has written that "What is needed are criteria that would help the military define where it should be on a cultural spectrum when the battlefield and society pull it in different directions."
If we are indeed in a crisis, we may be seeing only the first stages in a trend that could dramatically change the relationship between the military and society in the United States. Ricks sees this as particularly worrisome: "It now appears likely that the U.S. military over the next 20 years will revert to a kind of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a separate society and subculture." The civil-military gap could represent a failure of Carl von Clausewitz's trinity (the people, military, and government) and hold significant implications for strategy and force planning. For example, Ricks and others have suggested that the Department of Defense might wish to increase the number of officer accessions from reserve officer training and other broad-based sources, in hopes of widening the demographic and ideological makeup of military leadership. Efforts could be made to open up more military bases to the public and to encourage military personnel to live in the civilian community.
The good news is that a more systematic look at this gap shows that the mirror is only cracked, not broken—and that is how it should be. What is more, a review of the history of U.S. civil-military relations shows that a gap always has existed. We should not expect, or even desire, that the military act as a mirror of society. During times of peace, it is common for the military to feel alienated. But such periods of tension actually lead to productive military planning and thought, and when a true national threat develops, the country and its military are likely to operate in sync once more.
How Is the Mirror Cracked?
In what way is the military less reflective of today's society? A geographic gap is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the post-Cold War military becoming somewhat less reflective of society. A smaller military with fewer bases and reduced presence automatically will be connected to fewer families and communities.
But Ricks and others see an especially wide gap developing in recent decades as a result of the military stationing its personnel on increasingly comfortable, but less numerous, military bases. "The base closing process is returning the military to its pre-World War 11 political and geographic remoteness, when most military posts were in the South and West," writes Ricks. He quotes one junior Marine as saying that the high quality of new military facilities is "almost make-believe" in comparison with what would be available if he lived outside the gate.
Charles J. Dunlap goes Ricks one further, describing such bases as "the ultimate Marxist paradise," where the military is becoming too comfortable and too removed from the crime, cost, and other aspects of life in the civilian community. In a widely quoted article in which he outlined the results of an "American Military Coup of 2012," he described military of the 1990s as too physically isolated and alienated from society.
Dunlap also is concerned about intellectual alienation, whether the issues be political, cultural, or moral. According to Ricks:
There has always been an element of aloofness from society in the Marines' stance, as with any elite military organization. But over the last 30 years, as American culture has grown more fragmented, individualistic, and consumerist, the Marines have become more withdrawn; they feel they simply can't afford to reflect the broader society. Today's Marines give off a strong sense of disdain for the very society they protect.
This sense of feeling apart from, and better than, civilian society was summed up by a retired Marine Corps general who wrote in Proceedings that "the social fabric of the U.S. military is showing signs of wear. This should come as no real surprise, since the society from which it springs also is showing signs of serious decay."
Most of the evidence of this social and ideological gap has come from military writings and other anecdotal reporting. Survey data recently have become available suggesting that military personnel are indeed becoming more conservative than in the past, and are feeling estranged from the political and moral views of society.
But this is not new. Historian Russell Weigley writes that the U.S. military prior to 1917 ". . . had lived in its posts inherited from the Indian wars in considerable physical and intellectual isolation from civilian America." Americans were in general suspicious of military men and military attitudes, and few civilian leaders or elites paid any more attention to military matters than was necessary.
This isolation resulted in a strong feeling of detachment from and rejection of civilian values by military officers, especially after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, many had developed a considerably more conservative outlook than civilian society, as well as a disdain for politics and even civilian society in general. Writing in professional journals of the day, military officers described civilian society as dominated by negative values: jingoism, individualism, and commercialism. Samuel Huntington writes that "Rejected by a commercial society, the military services were contemptuous of the values of such a society and sure of the superiority of their own creed." This gap was noticed outside the military as well: The New York Sun observed in 1906 that "in the United States the professional soldier has a feeling of detachment and futility."
After World War I some military officers attempted to bridge the gap by identifying more closely with society. One naval officer wrote that "the character of our Army and Navy ... must reflect the character of the American people—American ideas, ideals, and thoughts,"" and it was proposed that the military hire publicity men to explain its positions to the public. The effort failed largely because the public was tired of war and thinking about the military, and the military retreated to its professional prewar isolation.
Military writers in the years just before World War II were contemptuous of civilian morals, and especially of civilian universities, intellectuals, and liberals. Huntington quotes from several articles that sound as if they could have been written today, including one comment from 1936 that "the soldier and the civilian belong to separate classes of society. The code of the soldier can never be the same as that of a civilian; why try to mingle them?" As the civil-military gap widened again Huntington writes that "the United States was viewed as a country abandoning its moral anchor and venturing out into a chaotic sea of pragmatism and relativism." This strong feeling of conflict and alienation in U.S. civil-military relations subsided as the nation faced a national enemy in World War II, but it has reemerged following Vietnam and the Cold War.
The military also may be losing its demographic ties with society. Some have reported that the military is tending to recruit from a narrower segment of the population today than in the past, with more new entrants coming from military families and with the service academies providing a larger proportion of the officer corps. Such a reduced diversity—largely the result of ending the draft—could increase the insularity of the military and diminish its links with broader society. David J. Andre has argued that the end of the draft has caused another kind of problem: the all-volunteer force is really a type of "economic draft" with the result that "in the military of today, the sons and daughters of the poor, working class, and people of color predominate."
Such a demographic gap certainly could reduce the diversity in the military and reinforce other aspects of civil-military separation, but this gap, too, is hardly a new phenomenon and appears less serious than it was during previous periods in U.S. history. The strong separation of the military from civil society was emphasized by Huntington: ". . with the exception of their affiliations with the South, the military have had no significant ties with any group in American society. Yet it is precisely this isolation which makes them eligible to be everybody's enemy."
The gap may be widened further by the lack of knowledge and experience concerning the military on the part of the public and government elites. The apparent lack of military experience and interest among members of the Clinton administration was reported widely several years ago, and commentators have bemoaned the increasing lack of military experience among members of Congress and other governing elites. As Ricks puts it, "American political and economic elites generally don't understand the military."
But public opinion polls indicate that there has been no significant drop-off in the level of public support for the military, suggesting that this gap is not a problem in terms of the general public's perception of the military. Most data indicate that the military has remained at the top of the list of institutions in terms of popular respect since the end of the Cold War. But more research is needed in several areas. Some critics see too much popular support as potentially dangerous, as it could indicate a lack of knowledge about the military and overconfidence that could backfire through unrealistic expectations. Also, high approval ratings do not necessarily lead to enthusiasm for joining the military, as Pentagon tracking polls have shown that young males and their parents are becoming less interested in military service.
Samuel Huntington and others have written that the most significant problem in U.S. civil-military affairs today may be the increasing hostility among the elites toward the military. Huntington believes that it is not so much the military that has changed as has the new generation of civilian leaders. "In recent decades the basic outlook of the military has not changed," he wrote in 1994, but the baby boom generation is "more antagonistic to and questioning of the fundamental assumptions of the military approach than any previous generation."
The final type of civil-military separation relates to an uncertainty over the nature of the military itself—whether the proper model for the U.S. military is that of citizen soldier or professional. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman has argued that as the military has become populated with large numbers of career professionals, an important link to civil society has been lost. "Perhaps the most important dimension of civilian control is our tradition of citizen soldier," Lehman has written. But since the introduction of the all-volunteer force, "we have created a separate military caste."
Richard Kohn makes much the same point about an officer corps that has changed from the days of the draft: "I sense an ethos that is different. They talk about themselves as 'we,' separate from society. They see themselves as different, morally and culturally. It isn't the military of the fifties and sixties, which was a large semi-mobilized citizen military establishment, with a lot of younger officers who were there temporarily, and a base of enlisted draftees."
Some have argued that the increased level of professionalism may have helped make the military too powerful a force in national security decision making, and may have encouraged military officers to protect the military's interest by engaging in partisan politics. This argument has died down in recent years, especially since the retirement of General Colin Powell as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman. But more recently, several critics have observed that today's military officers appear to be more politically active and more willing than in the past to criticize their civilian leaders.
Some, such as Eliot Cohen, see this as a very dangerous trend: "When officers do not hesitate to refer to themselves as an interest group, when they willingly identify themselves by party affiliation and feel free to comment in public, and in front of their subordinates, about the faults of their civilian superiors, corrective action is needed."
Here again, the evidence of greater political activity is largely anecdotal, and it does not appear that such activism—if it exists at all—has tended to reduce civilian control over military affairs. But one area deserves further study: what will be the effect on civil-military relations of keeping such a large (even if down-sized) military into the 21st century? Cohen has described the civil-military gap as being more important today, because the U.S. military is much larger than in the past and is a much more important factor in American life—and in world affairs—than at any time before World War II.
A. J. Bacevich thinks civilian control has been eroding since the early days of the Cold War: "Indeed, today's politicized and politically adroit military is yet one more legacy of the Cold War. In ways that many Americans fail to appreciate, the imperative of keeping the nation on a perpetual, semi-mobilized footing transformed the civilmilitary equation." Even worse, Bacevich argues, the debates over new missions and threats have encouraged greater dissension within the military.
The Good Gap?
History suggests that some sort of civil-military gap may not only be the norm, but it also may be beneficial to military readiness and effectiveness. Two specific periods—the post-Civil War years, and the interwar period between the world wars—indicate that military innovation actually can flourish in times of military separation and neglect. Weigley writes that in the period following the Civil War, 20 years of military drawdown and neglect produced the flowering of professional study and discussion among military officers. Paul Bracken makes a similar argument about the period after World War 1: "During the interwar period, when support for a large military was quite low, the U.S. military was often at its most creative and innovative."
Huntington writes that it was in fact the very isolation of the military after the Civil War that allowed it to look inward and concentrate on developing the professionalism that served the nation so well in later wars. "The isolation of the military," he writes, "was a prerequisite to professionalism, and peace was a prerequisite to isolation."
There must be a point, however, at which the distance between the military and civil society grows too large—as during the Vietnam War, perhaps. Given the importance of Clausewitz's trinity, how closely should the military, the people, and the government reflect each other? How cracked can the mirror be?
Most analysts would agree that the military in any society should support the general interests and values of that society—after all, the primary purpose for the military's existence is to defend those interests. Richard Kohn writes that it is helpful to have an officer corps that to the extent possible is "representative of the diversity or homogeneity of the larger society and not just the elite." Rebecca Schiff has proposed that the military, political elites, and the citizenry should work toward "concordance," broadly agreeing on goals and ideals and specifically agreeing on several issues such as the social composition of the officer corps and the political decision-making process. But in general, political scientists as well as military analysts have written that a key aspect of any civil-military relationship is the separation of authority between civil and military leaders—and in order for this to exist there is no need for the military to be closely linked to the civilian community and government.
Lawrence J. Korb has pointed out that in order to reflect society, the military obviously does not need simply to look like a literal cross-section of that society; few would recommend that the age distribution of the military should reflect societal norms, for example. It does, however, need to be able to respond to social forces and change, as the U.S. military has in the past in relation to women and blacks. The issue of whether or not the military should reflect or be closely linked to society may be not be an issue, as long as that military is doing its job well and responding to civilian control. The history of the U.S. military suggests that civilian control remains strong despite occasional disagreements.
Rather than having closely related opinions or agreement on the issues of morality, the best relationship between the military and society may be, as Eliot Cohen termed it, educated skepticism. "Overall, healthy civil-military relations need a military with standards distinct from those of general society and a society that appreciates the need for the difference, even if it does not always approve of the military's views."
The U.S. military does appear to be an imperfect mirror of society. But the broader history of U.S. civil-military relations indicates that this is the norm, and we may be witnessing a return to normalcy rather than a crisis. The symptoms of a more conservative military, a growing lack of military experience among the public and elites, and even a disdain felt by many officers for perceived faults in civilian society, are trends we have seen before as U.S. democracy turns away from war and adjusts to a period of peace.
It should be expected—and even required—that military leaders and thinkers take this opportunity to regroup and plan for the future. This effort surely includes discussion of the nature of civil-military relations and a reconsideration of the role of military in society. The existence of that debate should be seen as a positive sign that this effort is under way. There is a natural conflict between the military way of preparing for war, and the civilian way of responding to peace. But our history demonstrates that when a serious national threat arises, the nation will be able to unite to meet it, and the military will once again successfully serve the society that it mirrors so imperfectly.
Commander Dahl, a naval intelligence officer, is assigned to the faculty of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.